What doctors are never trained to see in black patients
For years, I thought I was just difficult to draw blood from. Every appointment, the same ritual. One nurse, then another, sometimes a third. Multiple attempts, each one leaving a bruise. I apologised. I drank more water today. I looked away and braced myself. That was just how it was for me, or so I thought. Then one day, a Black doctor walked in and found it immediately. No second attempt, no calling for backup. And something shifted in me because I realised the problem had never been my veins. The problem was that nobody had been trained to look for them properly.
This is what it looks like when medicine is built around one kind of body. Doctors are trained on textbooks in which studies show between 4% and 18% of images depict dark skin. The rest is white skin, across the board. Inflammation on white skin appears red or pink, and that is what clinicians learn to recognise. On Black or brown skin, the same inflammation often appears brown or purple. When a doctor has never been shown the difference, they miss it. The consequences go far beyond drawing blood. Lupus, which causes a distinctive rash across the cheeks, presents differently on darker skin and is missed at rates three times higher in Black women than in white women.
Life-threatening drug reactions have gone undetected because the early signs simply did not match what the attending doctor had ever been trained to look for. You can feel this gap even when searching for your own symptoms at home. Type “eczema” into Google and every image shows white skin. Type “eczema black skin” and results appear, but you have to know to add those words. In Luxembourg our hospitals reflect multiculturalism, but our medical textbooks do not. Teaching medicine on a single skin tone is not a neutral default. It is a choice, and Black patients live with the consequences of it, often spending years blaming themselves for something that was never their fault to begin with.
This blog post is part of the ARM project. The ARM project is an international project designed to explore the complex layers of racial and gender discrimination through the power of storytelling, art, and narrative research. Our goal is to create practical tools that support the mental health and empowerment of racialised and LGBTIQ youth.
At its core, the project looks beyond individual incidents of racism or discrimination. Instead, we’re interested in the hidden, often unspoken emotional impact these experiences leave behind — how they shape a young person’s sense of self, confidence, and well‑being.
Across Europe, race and gender still strongly influence who feels safe, heard, and valued. Yet the mental health effects of racism, gender discrimination, and internalised racism are rarely discussed, even though they deeply affect racialised and LGBTIQ young people. ARM aims to change that by creating spaces where youth can share their lived experiences and see their stories reflected, respected, and understood.
