Enhancing Diversity in Medical Education Representation of Cutaneous Disease: VisualDx Skin-of-Color Atlas

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has recently brought to light the gross underrepresentation of cutaneous pathology in SoC. In early 2020, dermatologists created an international registry to compile cases of dermatological manifestaions of COVID-19, to gather clues to the disease and aid diagnosis. Out of the 700 submissions to the registry, there were only 34 Hispanic patients and 13 black patients represented (5). Despite the pandemic starting in March, it took until July of 2020 for the first pictures of "Covid toes" in nonwhite patients to be published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. This prompted Adelekun et al. to launch an investigation on how severely underrepresented SoC truly is. According to their study published in April 2020, only 4.5% of images in general medicine textbooks illustrate dermatologic diseases in dark skin (6). It is clear that the underrepresentation of SoC in medicine is not a new issue, and physicians worldwide are starting to notice the injustice.