Skin in the Game
What Your Body's Largest Organ Is Trying to Tell You
In 2008, Grammy-winning singer Toni Braxton collapsed while performing. Then years later, it happened again. Different stage. Different city. Between those two collapses, she had visited at least six doctors, all of whom struggled to agree on what was happening inside her body. She felt generally unwell. She had pain throughout her body. Her chest felt tight. She was eventually airlifted to Los Angeles, where a rheumatologist finally named what had been happening all along. It was systemic lupus erythematosus.
“Lupus doesn’t have a look to it,” Braxton said on a 2024 episode of the SHE MD Podcast. “I felt like a hypochondriac. Like I’m just telling people, ‘I don’t feel well,’ and no one’s listening.” What took nearly a decade to name is a condition that, in many people, announces itself first through the skin — the butterfly-shaped rash across the cheeks and nose thatPubMed Central article, Clinical aspects of cutaneous lupus erythematosus, identifies as one of the most recognizable early signs of systemic lupus. The skin was trying to say something. The people around her did not know how to read it.
We all have skin in the game when it comes to our health. The question is whether we are paying attention to what the game is showing us.
