When a person suffering from an illness visits an OPD clinic or someone who has met an accident is brought into the Emergency Room, his hopes are pinned on the doctors and medical staff to carry out their duties with their best capabilities and knowledge.
As a rule of thumb, those associated with the medical profession do not leave any stone unturned while treating their patients, applying their skills, expertise and knowledge. There are, however, remote incidents in the careers of almost all medical professionals where the required treatment or issues at hand completely defy the norms set by the textbook knowledge provided to them in their study years.
On such rare occasions where confusion and doubts might prevail, the insights and opinions of peers, seniors and seasoned consultants of the same discipline are preferred and adopted after due discussion while evaluating the pros and cons. Experience, in some instances, may thus be given preference over textbook knowledge. This confusion or grey area in the medical profession is not limited to a few incidents only. With gradual removal of the stigma associated with such psychiatric illnesses as anxiety and depression, we have seen rapid changes in the criteria to diagnose an individual with mental health concerns.
A few years or a decade back, these guidelines and criteria would be different to what is being considered the norm today. In a more recent case, we witnessed how the World Health Organization (W.H.O.), faced the music when they dismissed the probability of an asymptomatic carrier patient of COVID-19 spreading the disease.
Recently, the medical community globally was pleasantly surprised by the launch of a resource handbook called āMind the Gap: A Handbook of Clinical Signs in Black and Brown Skinā by a second year medical student at St. Georgeās, University of London. The student Malone Mukwendeās broadened vision can be gauged by the fact that his contribution, at relatively such a tender age, acknowledges diversity and promotes equality in society, especially with respect to the medical fraternity while addressing life-threatening symptoms and diseases in coloured people.
Mukwende chose one a neglected community, when it came to empirical studies, yet an important subset of the population and proved to his readers how they may actually be blind, to certain genuine complaints! His book is centered on the fact that the visually presenting signs, especially with respect to the changes in skin colour, would be different in brown and black people as compared to what has been well-researched and documented in medical textbooks.
The Mukwende book provides different signs that may appear differently on a black or brown patient. For instance, the redness of a rash on skin, or the lips turning blue might pertain to a pathological condition when it comes to a patient with fair skin tone. But when to the patient is black or brown, these very symptoms would be less obvious and would be present in rather different shades that may be missed by those healthcare professionals who would have not come across patients from other races and are not taught how to look for these findings in coloured people.
The book is co-written by lecturer in clinical skills Peter Tamony and Margot Turner who is a senior lecturer in diversity and medical education.
The book by the 20-year old Zimbabwe-born Mukwende is very helpful as it also provides for the complementing images of different complaints in patients alongside the text, for those in the medical profession so that they may fully understand the difference in the same symptoms in darker skin patients, which would eventually help them with the diagnosis. The conditions that are covered in the book include some very common symptoms and conditions like meningitis, jaundice, pallor, cyanosis, psoriasis, eczema and other skin-related conditions.
Medicine, with all its limitations and yet all its veracity, is a highly evolving field. There is always space for improvement and to look at things from a totally different angle and even a totally different perspective. Many people religiously believe that the work of a doctor is a repetitive job and consider them as skilled workers doing the same surgery and prescribing the same medicines while treating more or less the same symptoms. However, just like no two human beings can be an exact replica of each other, other than monozygotic twins maybe, similarly no two patients can be treated in exactly the same way.
Leave a Reply