Re-humanize
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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… Continue reading
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Patient Rights are Human Rights—Why a Decolonial Approach Is Necessary for All in Europe
Patient Rights in Europe European patient rights emerged from a historical reckoning over human wrongs. After centuries in which medicine was entangled with eugenics, war, institutionalization, and biomedical abuse, Europe sought to constrain medical power through law. Frameworks such as… Continue reading
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World Cancer Day @Black History Month 2026 – How patient-expert collaboration at the margins has been the benefit of all.
Today, we stand at the intersection of World Cancer Day and Black History Month in the USA. In this moment, I want to honor the patient–expert co-creation that has been unfolding at the margins of Western science for decades. A… Continue reading
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2026 Word of the Year: Wisdom
Two decades ago, I explained to my father that the burden of disease measures the total impact of illnesses, injuries, and disabilities on a population. It quantifies the gap between ideal health—long life in full health—and current reality by combining… Continue reading
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What If Communities Living With Rare Conditions held the Key to a More Humane Medicine? Report from the World Orphan Drug Congress 2025, Amsterdam.
The next scientific revolution will be led by patients’ wisdom and human dignity, and it won’t be televised. Last week, at the World Orphan Drug Congress in Amsterdam, I had a profound experience. As I moved between conversations—wearing my different… Continue reading
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Magical Thinking Won’t Save Modern Western Science. Dignity Will.
Trigger warning: The following text contains the overlooked, invaluable lived experiences of countless humans with modern Western science’s hegemony over patients and humanity, its inherent dehumanization, and its often disregarded systemic limits. Proceeding further is left at the reader’s discretion.… Continue reading
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🌿 Summer of Unlearning: A Reading Series for Reimagining Healthcare – Week 4 – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice – Where access is love, not compliance
What is the Summer of Unlearning?This series was born from conversations with artist-researchers and survivor-patients—those creating radical wisdom from the margins of medicine.Each week, we engage a book that reveals the gaps in Western medical thought—and lifts up new paths… Continue reading
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🌿 Summer of Unlearning Series: A Reading Series for Reimagining Healthcare – Week 3 Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals—Where Silence Becomes Strength
Why This Book? When Audre Lorde faced breast cancer as a racialized Black lesbian poet in 1977, she refused Western medicine’s scripts of shame. The Cancer Journals (1980) is a manifesto against systems that erase marginalized bodies. Lorde exposes how Western medicine: “Prosthesis… Continue reading
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The Myth of Scientific Neutrality: Institutional Amnesia and the Scheveningen Eugenic Conference of 1936 – Why does it resonate today?
Introduction: Eugenics as Colonial Violence—Why Its Legacy Demands Our Vigilance Now Eugenics—forged in the crucible of European colonialism by Francis Galton—was never neutral science. It was a weapon. Galton’s theories, born from observing racial hierarchies in British-occupied South Africa, weaponized… Continue reading
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🌿 Summer of Unlearning Series: A Reading Series for Reimagining Healthcare – Week 2 – Ed Cohen’s A Body Worth Defending – What if our bodies aren’t battlefields?
Every Friday until summer vacation, I’ll share a book that cracks open the foundations of medical science—so you can build a liberatory reading list for the break. This series honors the artist-researchers with whom I collaborate as a science decolonization… Continue reading
Reappearance 