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For years, I thought I was just difficult to draw blood from. Every appointment, the same ritual. One nurse, then another, sometimes a third. I looked away and braced myself. Multiple attempts, each one leaving a bruise. No one could find my vein. So, I apologised. That was just how it was for me, or so I thought. Then one day, a Black doctor walked in and found it immediately. No second attempt, no calling for backup. And something shifted in me because I realised that the problem had never been my veins. The problem was those nurses had never been trained to look for them properly in different kinds of bodies.
And this is what it looks like when medicine is built around one kind of body. Doctors are trained using textbooks in which studies show between 4 and 18% of images depict dark skin. The rest is white skin! Inflammation on white skin appears red or pink, and that is what clinicians learn to recognise. On Black or brown skin, the same inflammation often appears brown or purple. When a doctor has never been shown the difference, they miss it or misdiagnose it. And the consequences go far beyond drawing blood. Lupus, which causes a distinctive rash across the cheeks, appears differently on a darker skin and is missed at rates three times higher in Black women than in white women.
Life-threatening drug reactions have gone undetected because the early signs simply did not match what the attending doctor had ever been trained to look for. You can feel this gap even when searching for your own symptoms at home. Type “eczema” into Google and every image shows white skin. Type “eczema black skin” and results appear, but you have to know to add those words. In Europe, hospitals reflect multiculturalism, but medicine textbooks do not. Teaching medicine around a single skin tone is not a neutral default. It is a choice, and Black patients live with the consequences of it; spending years blaming themselves for something that was never their fault to begin with. |
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Published on 21.08.2026 at 13:01 
