Medical Illustrations Working Toward Health Equity

By Gina Michiko Craig

Does my body look normal? What does a dark-skinned baby with jaundice look like? Does skin cancer look different on dark skin? These are some of the questions answered by new medical illustrations reflecting the diversity of women’s ethnicities, body types, and ages. Here’s a look at a medical illustration and perception issues and solutions working toward diverse representation for all.

Medical Illustration and Perception Issues

Illustrations in medical textbooks are woefully unrepresentative of dark-skinned people – with statistics of only 5 percent of images showing dark skin. And even among the dark-skinned images that are published, 75 percent of the dark-skinned images are on the lighter-skinned end of the dark skin spectrum. These statistics may not strike some as problematic, but what are some things that can result from this deficit in medical illustrations? This issue of underrepresentation can lead to both delayed and missed medical diagnoses – some that can be time-critical situations like missed melanoma that can result in death if not caught early enough.

Another part of medical education that has been impacted is human sexuality. Human sexuality textbooks at the college level were revealed to be even more highly lacking in dark skin tones in images. A study specifically on human sexuality images showed that a mere 1 percent represented dark skin. The issues with underrepresentation do not end with skin color either.

Looking specifically at body type perceptions, dismissing patients due to their body type can not only be hurtful but also can seriously endanger their health. Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patient Sasha Tanori shared her experience, “They kept giving me misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis, and especially with being a plus-sized Mexican American, they were just like, ‘Oh, if you lose a couple of pounds, you’ll be fine.’” In Sasha’s case, her correct diagnosis ended up as a blood cancer, acute myeloid leukemia – an acute leukemia that progresses rapidly and if left untreated can frequently end in life-ending results.

With more patient support websites and others looking for illustrations for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) representation and those spanning various body types, ages, and multiple genders, many people working toward health equity have been searching for solutions. They want solutions to the lack of diversity in medical illustrations.

Medical Illustration Solutions

Fortunately, a new royalty-free collection called Reframing Revolution sought to help reduce these startling disparities of underrepresentation to include a variety of body types, skin tones, and ages – as well as transgender and non-binary people. The resulting collaboration between Peanut, a women's community app and Biotic Artlab studio, depict illustrations for puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, and other conditions.

After viewing images from the collection, many women reported feeling shocked that they had never seen images like them before. Some illustrations even include details like stretch marks, which many women have, of course. People come in a wide range of skin tones, body types, and ages. This image collection shows through example that there is no “normal” at all – but that people can be unique in their own ways. 

Here are some actions to take to reduce health inequities:

• Educate yourself about diversity in medical illustrations at Reframing Revolution

• Include diverse medical illustrations in educational content

• Inform others who may need medical illustrations

As people are exposed to a wide variety of skin colors, body types, ages, and underrepresented characteristics in medical illustrations, their perceptions and knowledge will naturally start to change and increase over time. Indeed, medical illustrations and images are another piece of the health equity puzzle that needs addressing. The new collection of medical illustrations are a model tool in working toward reducing inequities in healthcare. There is no “normal,” and people are all beautiful in their own distinctive ways. Diversity is indeed a thing of beauty that can bring more fairness to the world when diversity is truly appreciated.

If you have an experience to share of when you experienced a health disparity, contact us at DHH. We collect experiences to expose and hopefully prevent them from happening in the future, and to create a space of healing for the individual.

Source

Deb Gordon. Health Equity Comes to Medical Illustrations With Launch of New Image Library. Forbes website. Accessed June 6, 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/debgordon/2022/05/11/health-equity-comes-to-medical-illustrations-with-launch-of-new-image-library/?sh=7b2d1b52102e

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