Truth Be Told | Cut your hair, lengthen your lifespan

When I was little, my parents offered me a dollar if I could survive my first visit to the barbershop without crying. As a stranger scraped my scalp, I grimaced and wondered what possible benefit there would ever be to coming back. But if I had gone to a certain barbershop here in West Philadelphia, the Cut Hypertension program would have made sure that living a longer, healthier life would be that benefit.

The Cut Hypertension program began last year by Penn’s chapter of the Student National Medical Association, which partners with local West Philadelphia barbershops to screen patrons for high blood pressure.

High blood pressure, according to an article in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, is not an equal-opportunity offender. It affects African Americans at a disproportionately higher rate relative to the rest of the population.

But luckily, so do barbershops.

Long a staple of the black community, barbershops aren’t just a place for haircuts. Not unlike the salons of 18th-century France, they serve as a forum for conversation on a wide range of subjects, and banter flows freely between patrons and barbers.

The goal of the Cut Hypertension program is education about healthy blood pressures, which is all too often just an afterthought — nothing more than the subtext in health-food commercials. That is, until the condition rears one of its uglier heads and hits close to home.

“My father passed away three years ago from a heart attack,” said Kenji Taylor, first-year medical student and coordinator of the program. His father was hypertensive but didn’t have insurance, so he never went to see a doctor. “Had there been a similar program in a barbershop in my town, he would have had his blood pressure taken.”

Taylor’s story highlights the unique potential of this program not just to offer health awareness advice, but also to deliver it in a place where people would be more open to receiving it.

But sadly, health isn’t exactly a trending topic in barbershop conversation. Why should the Cut Hypertension program descend upon these hapless places like a black cloud, spoiling all their fun with talk of heart disease and stroke?

As it turns out, that’s not quite how the story unfolds.

When I accompanied Taylor and a few other members of the SNMA to Philly Cuts Unisex Salon on 44th and Chestnut streets, it was apparent that blood pressure measurements were a novelty but not an unwelcome one. In between readings, it was easy to fall into the swing of conversation about the patrons’ own lives.

One patron — whom we met by sheer, unadulterated luck — was Edmondo Robinson, the former national vice president of the SNMA and 2002 Wharton Masters in Business Administration graduate. He stressed the importance of community hypertension programs. “We need a better public health approach,” he said. “A more holistic approach to treat hypertension, which includes going to the people and educating in a different setting where their comfort level is higher.”

Robinson’s sentiments are especially salient for the African American community, which has had a tumultuous history with the healthcare system in this nation. Gaining the support of the barbers themselves goes a long way towards encouraging patrons to get checked. A recently released report in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that, although additional research is warranted, programs like this one were found to be more effective when barbers were empowered to spread knowledge themselves.

That was Penn’s cue to enter stage left.

The Cut Hypertension program is more than your run-of-the-mill public health PSA. Its unique position to engage an at-risk population right here in our backyard — and its short but promising track record in other places — means it can grow to other barbershops, schools and cities. It can touch hearts, physically and otherwise.

Mark Attiah is a first-year medical student from Dallas, Texas. His e-mail address is attiah@theDP.com. Truth Be Told appears every other Thursday.

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