When Ellen Buchanan Weiss’ son was about a year old, he broke out in a rash — little bumps that appeared to be hives. So Buchanan Weiss did what a lot of new parents do: She turned to the Internet to find images that matched the rash she was seeing on her little boy.
“I’m trying to figure out — would I be paranoid if I went to the doctor at this point? Is that a reasonable thing to do? So I started googling it,” says Buchanan Weiss, who lives with her family in Raleigh, N.C.
But her son has brown skin, and as she scrolled through the photos that came up, she couldn’t find any images of rashes that matched her little boy’s — there were none on people of color. Even when she looked at the usually reliable webpages of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, or the Mayo Clinic’s, she faced the same problem.
“It became immediately clear to me,” she says, “that the vast majority of even common skin conditions are on white skin. You have to scroll down like 80 pictures to find a single one on brown skin.”
Lynn McKinley-Grant, a dermatology professor at Howard University and president of the Skin of Color Society, says that’s not just a problem with websites aimed at patients.
“Often in medical schools,” she says, “they have limited pictures of diseases in skin of people of color.” That means health professionals trained with these resources aren’t seeing the full picture, McKinley-Grant says. The diversity gap is embedded in medical training, and that should concern us all.
Medical school classes rely on a lot of pattern recognition — especially when it comes to dermatology, explains Art Papier, an associate professor of dermatology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in New York. “You see picture after picture, to encode them into your brain,” he says.
