Ren's Ramblings & Writings

Contemplations on things tangible and intangible

Saturday, January 29, 2022

I believe, I hope, that this will change the medical community. 

I remember being in lab school and learning how to draw blood from donors and patients-the only training we received on different skin tones was on our classmates, since we practiced on each other. I don't recall learning how skin conditions and even typical skin quirks like a pimple, wart, mole, or anything, would appear on different skin colors, and those early years were challenging- OJT kind of thing.

We've long known that people of different heritages, with lineages of various regions may be more prone to, or more resistant to some things, or have significant side affects based on Race-specific differences in sensitivity, such as the primaquine sensitivity discovered in some service members in the 20s- this caused a type of anemia, and to the point of what I'd mentioned about drawing blood on patients, reactions to primaquine can include skin rashes, so this affects patient care from before the person even walks in the door-if the medical person doesn't understand what he/she is looking at on the skin, important medical information can be missed. And since most medical research has historically been done on white males of European descent, and we now know that these studies don't always tell the true picture of what is happening for anyone who is not a white male of European heritage. That academic medical communities are still so far behind in merely using pictures of non-whites in medical texts and other teaching tools is a painful example of systemic racism that, however unintended, causes some groups to not receive the total medical care we all deserve.



other sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3382019/
https://www.jwatch.org/na54198/2021/10/12/racial-disparities-clinical-medicine

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