A couple of weeks ago, I had what is likely my final visit with my dermatologist.
I was there for a periodic skin check, but the doctor found nothing to be worried about. On the one hand, I have very fair skin and skin cancer hits us pale faces more often than it does those with darker skin tones . On the other, although I did suffer a couple of hurty-hurt sunburns when I was a young fool, I've never been much of a sunworshipper. And there's no immediate family history of squamous cell carcinoma (vs. "good" skin cancer, which is basal cell) or melanoma. Plus I'm old. So unless I spot some worrying skin lesion, there's no need to come back. Ever.
I do have vitiligo, an autoimmune condition that causes white patches to appear on my body. Mine are on my legs, arms, and armpits (of all things), but because I'm so light-skinned those white blotches just blend right in and aren't noticeable unless you're looking. And trust me, ain't nobody looking. Except Dr. Angel - my dermatologist's real name - and she has to look to find it.
Vitiligo can, of course, be awful, especially if it appears on your face. And especially if you have dark skin. For some vitiligo sufferers, it's obvious and disfiguring.
Anyway, skin tone matters for a lot of reasons, and some of them - like the likelihood of cancer and the impact of vitiligo - are medical. And it's not just in medically obvious ways. Skin tone is used to help "diagnose low blood oxygen, neonatal jaundice, and hospital-acquired pressure injuries [i.e., bedsores]." And most of the diagnostic tools that look at skin tone have been oriented towards white people.
There was a standard for measuring skin tone, used from the mid-1970's on, that covered a six point spectrum. But four points on the scale were for those with light-colored skin, with two additional points for brown and Black skin. But those two points didn't incorporate the full spectrum of possibililties.
Enter the Monk Skin Tone (MST) scale which was developed by Ellis Monk - a Harvard sociology professor - in 2019. Some
of Monk's academic work had focused on colorism (prejudice, often intra-race, towards those with darker skin). Encouraged by colleagues and his wife (because behind every great man...), Monk began working on a more expansive way of evaluating skin color.
The sociologist ended up developing a 10-tone, open-source scale aimed at improving inclusivity in skin tone classification across technological and clinical domains...Its original form, with colored spheres, reflected a much wider range of skin tones. But Monk settled on a 10-point scale for pragmatic reasons. “Ten points are pretty much the breaking point for having people be able to consistently use it as a subjective scale,” he said. (Source: Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences)
The MST is being used beyond medical applications, and is improving search engine, driverless car, and facial recognition technologies. Facial recognition tecnology in particular is notoriously less effective in differentiating one Black person from the next - which has resulted in many innocent people being accused of crimes they had nothing to do with. Etc.
But the MST is now being adopted by the medical industry. And this cost-effective device is saving lives.
Among the life-saving applications are pulse oximeters - you know, the little finger thingies we all bought for ourselves during COVID - which:
...measure blood oxygen by analyzing light as it passes through the skin via a small finger clamp. However, darker skin absorbs light differently than lighter skin. Because pulse oximeters originally used white skin as the standard, people with darker skin would get inaccurate readings. And because these inaccurate readings skewed higher, many people with dangerously low blood oxygen ended up with too-high readings, meaning they would appear to have normal blood oxygen.
Then there are bedsores.
The[se] injuries are traditionally under-diagnosed in darker-skinned people, but a laminated badge displaying the MST scale, along with 15 minutes of training, is helping nurses recognize more incidents of HAPIs. A 2026 study finds the badge, which costs approximately $2, reducing these injuries by 94 percent at a 900-bed Level I trauma hospital in Los Angeles.
Because of his work, Monk has been "awarded the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. Monk was the first sociologist to win this $2.5 million grant." Unfortunately, the grant was canceled in 2025, presumably by DOGE know-nothings. Presumably because Monk's work is about color. And we can't have that. So what if a bunch of old Black folks get bedsores? Solving that problem is so patently unfair to whites.
Despite termination of his NIH grant, Monk intends to continue this work, having seen applications for common medical tests such as EKGs and EEGs, which also take measurements through the skin.
“People have been operating blind to color,” he said. “You can’t do that, because the skin is your interface with the technological world.”
Good for Professor Ellis Monk. And good news for those among us who aren't, like me, a whiter shade of pale.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Image Source: Research Gate
For the record, although some days I feel as pallid as an A, I'm pretty sure I'm a B on the scale.
No comments:
Post a Comment