There is a figure being widely shared in global health conversations. The World Economic Forum (WEF) estimates that closing the women’s health gap could unlock up to $1 trillion in economic value.
It sounds like progress. It reads like opportunity. What it does not answer is a far more important question.
“Where do Black women fit in that future?”
In every movement, there is a moment when the story changes. When awareness gives way to architecture. When silence is no longer survivable. For Black and minority ethnic women, that moment is now and it’s not just personal, it is neurological.
Let is begin with a fact from neuroscience. Trauma does not just happen to us it rewires us.
The amygdala, the brain’s fear centre, goes into overdrive. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for decision-making, begins to dim. Memory becomes fragmented. Logic short-circuits.
This is not a metaphor. This is what happens when you have endured narcissistic abuse, survived financial control or lived in systems that gaslight your very existence at home, online or in the workplace.
Imagine this. On a humid Tuesday morning in Atlanta, a marketing executive noticed a strange fizzing sensation in her toes, like soda bubbles under the skin. She shrugged it off as a pinched nerve from a long run.
Weeks later the fizz had turned into nightly sparks of pain and her balance felt unreliable in the boardroom’s high-heeled shoes. She did not know it yet, but her story was part of a much larger one.
That electric buzz beneath the skin is the earliest whisper of peripheral neuropathy, a disorder in which the nerves outside the brain and spinal cord begin to misfire.
There’s a quiet epidemic hiding in plain sight. Not because we haven’t named it, but because we’ve oversimplified it.
This visual guide comparing Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes is clear, colourful and helpful. But like most charts, it tells what happens, while missing the deeper why that every HealthTalk member should be asking.
Let’s unpack this together.
Proud Sista!
Proud Sista!
Proud Sista!
Proud Sista!
