A year ago, Elsevier released Complete Anatomy: The World’s Most Advanced Complete Female 3D Model for Medical Teaching. It was intended to tackle male bias in medical teaching, but the team behind its creation knew that there was still much more to be done to correct racial bias. Now, Complete Anatomy 2023 hopes to offer diverse skin tones and facial features as the world’s first 3D anatomy teaching platform.
Much of our understanding of the human body comes from an incomplete picture of anatomy. In the past, men – often executed criminals, whites and Europeans – were dissected to create a body plan for Homo sapiens, and while most would be happy to exclude that particular chapter in medical history, The lasting impact is the more modern anatomy teaching is based on male bodies.
Complete Anatomy began to move away from the Elsevier model of female anatomy by creating a greater representation of the way humans naturally differ from each other.
“I think this is a huge step forward and means that as an educator we can work with medical students and health students from the very first day of training,” Prof Claire Smith, of Brighton and Sussex Medical School Head of Anatomy Prof. UK and contributor to the model told iFLScience in an interview at the time of its release.
“Having a fully female version is an amazing step forward and I would really challenge the creators of this full anatomy to work on the racial differences within the bodies that exist.”
Now, a year later, they’ve done exactly that with Elsevier’s Complete Anatomy 2023, the world’s first 3D anatomy learning platform to offer diverse facial features and skin tones.
Light-skinned bodies have dominated medical education for hundreds of years, with less than 5 percent of illustrations in general medical texts featuring darker skin. The need for better representation was demonstrated when medical illustrator, student, and aspiring neurosurgeon Chidibere Ibe went viral for his medical illustrations depicting black bodies, leading many people to realize they had never seen such images.
“The absence of different skin tones and different physical characteristics in the medical field is finally getting attention from some universities and health educators of all kinds,” Dr. Fatima Jackson, professor of biological anatomy at Howard University, said in a statement. “For so long, students and faculty of color have had to learn and teach in ways in an unfamiliar setting.”
“This is an important step taken by 3D4Medical from Elsevier to address the prevailing bias in the healthcare sector. It is a step that will hopefully move us towards creating a more representative and inclusive environment for all those Those who dedicate themselves to the health and service of others.
Representation in medical education is improved in clinical care, as some conditions may appear differently on darker skin than on lighter skin. Therefore, the physician-in-training can only form a true picture of disease presentation by studying a diverse range of body, facial anatomy and skin tones.
“The urgent need to actively introduce wider representation into learning resources for future healthcare professionals is well documented,” said Irene Walsh, director of product, content and design at 3D4Medical, Elsevier.
“As a global product, Whole Anatomy is invested in ways to offer diverse content to students, teachers and practitioners to help them create an inclusive approach to their learning and teaching.”
Source – iflscience