A Decolonial Re-Imagination of Patient Rights (Beyond Western Biomedical Logic)
This decolonial patients’ bill of rights follows the enlightening article “Patient Rights are Human Rights—Why a Decolonial Approach Is Necessary for All in Europe,” which deals with European patient rights. It aims to re-imagine patient rights in the context of Western medical science.
This is not “what patients are allowed to ask for.”
This is what human bodies and communities are owed.
1. The Right to Be Recognized as a Knowing Being
(Before diagnosis, before data, before compliance)
Western medicine treats patients as objects of measurement.
Decolonial care recognizes patients as carriers of lived intelligence.
We have the right:
- To have our pain believed
- To have our history count as evidence
- To have ancestral, spiritual, and embodied knowledge respected
Our body is not an error to be corrected.
It is an archive.
2. The Right to Safety From Institutional Harm
(Not only from disease)
European patient rights protect against clinical mistakes.
They do not protect against:
- Gaslighting
- Racialized dismissal
- Psychiatric coercion
- Colonial epistemic violence
Decolonial care recognizes:
Harm does not only come from illness.
It also comes from how systems treat you.
We have the right to:
- Be protected from humiliation
- Be protected from being pathologized for resisting harm
- Be protected from being reduced to a file, code, or diagnosis
3. The Right to Refuse Without Being Punished
“Informed consent” in Europe—and the West that it has culturally influenced—assumes free choice.
But patients historically marginalized by Western science— racialized groups, migrants, people living with Western-labeled disabilities, Indigenous peoples (such as the Sámi), people living in poverty, and other minoritized communities—know refusal often leads to:
- Being labeled “difficult”
- Being denied care
- Being psychologically discredited
Decolonial care affirms:
Saying no is not non-compliance.
It is self-sovereignty.
We have the right to pause, to hesitate, to withdraw, to walk away —
without losing dignity or care.
4. The Right to Be Treated in Cultural Time
Western systems worship speed, efficiency, throughput.
Trauma, grief, and healing, especially from historical and current medical abuse, do not follow schedules.
We have the right:
- To speak slowly
- To need and ask for repetition
- To require relational trust before disclosure
Our nervous system sets the tempo — not the institution.
5. The Right to Ancestral Continuity in Healing
Western healthcare isolates the individual body.
Decolonial healing understands bodies as relational —
connected to ancestors, land, community, and spirit.
We have the right:
- To bring our cosmology into care, not just accepting insight from dehumanized data
- To name meaning, not just symptoms
- To seek healing beyond pharmaceuticals and protocols when they dehumanize us
Our health is not owned by Western science. It belongs to us.
6. The Right to Not Be Studied While Being Neglected
Western science has a long history of:
- Extracting data from racialized bodies
- Ignoring their suffering
- Profiting from their pain
Decolonial care says:
We are not raw material for innovation.
We have the right to:
- Benefit from research that uses our body or data
- Refuse extraction
- Demand reciprocity when the healthcare professionals have courageously decolonized their perception
- Build new tables when the healthcare system cannot
- Be defined by ourselves, not by the healthcare professionals’ and the system’s limitations.
7. The Right to Exist Beyond Repair
Western medicine frames deviation as pathology.
Decolonial frameworks recognize difference as sacred variation.
We have the right:
- To be diagnosed by Western medicine as disabled, neurodivergent, traumatized, or chronically ill
- Without being treated as broken, burdensome, defective, or any other eugenic mischaracterization.
We do not owe the system normality.
8. The Right to Leave With Our Story Intact
Western institutions often:
- Rewrite patient narratives
- Reduce them to codes
- Erase what does not fit biomedical logic
- All of that to generate statistical and clinical significance
Decolonial care reaffirms:
Our story belongs to us.
We have the right to:
- Our records
- Our voice
- Our version of what happened
- Our human significance
More importantly, we have the right to be and feel human.
Reappearance 