The SoliMar Center for Melanin Health

Where medicine meets the unique considerations of melanin-rich skin and diverse lived experiences.

The SoliMar Center for Melanin Health exists to address areas where conventional healthcare has historically failed to account for the ways health, disease, and treatment can intersect with melanin-rich skin and diverse lived experiences.

We recognize that the same condition can present differently, carry different risks, or require a different approach depending on a patient's skin pigmentation, physiology, genetics, environment, nutrition, and lived experience. Our goal is to bring greater awareness and clinical nuance to those differences—while remaining firmly grounded in evidence-based medicine.

Areas of Focus

Our work encompasses many aspects of health, including:

• Metabolic and cardiovascular health

• Vitamin D and other nutritional considerations

• Culturally responsive nutrition and lifestyle care

• Aesthetic medicine for melanin-rich skin

• Dermatologic conditions in skin of color

• Other conditions in which differences in presentation, risk, diagnosis, or treatment may be clinically meaningful

Culturally Responsive Care

There are clinically meaningful differences in how certain conditions present, how risks manifest, and how treatments affect people with different skin pigmentation, ancestry, physiology, and lived experiences—and medicine doesn't always account for these differences adequately.

We believe excellent care requires both clinical knowledge and genuine curiosity about the person sitting in front of us. We take the time to understand the experiences, perspectives, cultural context, and individual priorities that may shape a patient's health and their experience within the healthcare system.

The patient's lived experience matters to good medicine, because understanding the patient is part of understanding the medicine.