Greetings,

First of all, I'm going to get called out on using only male emojis in my thumbnail, and rightfully so. The genetic factors in medicine also includes differences in gender. Since I'm a man though, I've picked male emojis. Sue me, lol.

Anyway, as a person of African descent living in Europe, there are many genetic adaptation issues that manifest themselves, including in medicine. One huge one is the inability to absorb/produce adequate Vitamin D at this latitude. It's to do with the intensity and availability of sunlight.

I got my blood work back from the lab and my doctor commented that my Haemoglobin count is slightly low, but "nothing to be worried about". They asked if I am "African or Caribbean descent", and I answered in the affirmative. It does turn out that it may be a genetic variation, i.e., "normal", to be slightly lower since the standard is from a general European population.

My doctor, and hopefully most doctors, is aware of the variations in results due to ethnic origin and as such hasn't tried to medicate me for something that's perfectly normal. I can imagine other people have been put on meds for the same reason. We operate a one-size-fits-all in a lot of our medical practices in modern times. The recent pando is a great example of that. There are regions of the world that have nearly zero incidents of "annual flu". These areas were (we now know) nearly as exempt from the spiky virus from hell. Yet, they were required (or at least strongly advised under the threat of sanctions) to implement draconian directives that their countries couldn't sustain. Terrible!

I have fallen victim for this lack of knowledge on the part of some medical practitioners in the past. I was given a deep muscle injection of something I already had antibodies to, causing a very large immune response resulting in a very swollen upper arm. It was so bad that I couldn't move my arm for nearly a week. The scars are still there till today, two decades later. There is a test to see if I had antibodies before the injection, but my result was interpreted as "negative" because I didn't develop "pink rashes" as stated in the manual. I did develop clear rashes but they were, of course, brown, not pink. This may sound dumb to you reading this now, but you'd be surprised how some of these medical diagnoses are made.

I was glad to see the UK government starting to at least acknowledge, or begin to investigate the biomedical effects of, Vitamin D deficiency across different ethnic groups. Political correctness sometimes means we don't want to talk about these things that are sometimes glaringly obvious. Ethnicity is such a touchy subject here, even though it shouldn't really be. There's a historical context for that, of course, but talking more about it, not less, is what we probably need.

Peace & Love,

Adé