DONOR SPOTLIGHT
TAKING A BETTER LOOK AT DARK SKIN BY ELAINE GUREGIAN
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hen the Black Lives Matter movement picked up steam, it resonated with students in the Dermatology Interest Group at NEOMED. “We thought the Black Lives Matter movement was very relevant, obviously, to all societal issues and health care as a whole, but we thought it was especially relevant to dermatology. A lot of conditions are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed on skin of color because medical students aren’t trained to see those images,” says Sarah Eley, a second-year College of Medicine student. Equity in health care is a huge social justice issue, one that needs to be better addressed in training, says Eley. She and her classmate Rachel Krevh realized that physicians don’t always have enough information or training to diagnose conditions on darker skin, due to a lack of representation in textbooks and other resources.
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“It doesn’t make sense to me how we just deny people access to health care for different reasons, like economic status or skin color. I think being able to receive health care is a basic human right, and being misdiagnosed or undiagnosed due to a physician’s not knowing what conditions look like on skin of color is just unacceptable.” Eley went to the interest group’s co-faculty advisor, Eliot Mostow, M.D., a dermatologist and professor of internal medicine. When she told him that she didn’t see many images of people of color on the PowerPoints for a class she was taking, Infection and Immunology, he asked her to do some research. Challenge accepted! Once Eley tallied up a list, she and her classmates went to see Simon Robins, a reference librarian in the NEOMED Library. Did he know of more resources that could be added to the curriculum? She had come to the right place. Robins had more than an
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Photo: Chris Smanto
