LA Barbers To Start Testing Blood Pressure

Jeff Robinson, AP

(NPR)- Barbershops are a traditional gathering place for African-American men — a place to talk politics, sports and gossip. Now, some doctors in Los Angeles are hoping to make the barbershop a place for combating high blood pressure among black men.


Death rates from hypertension are three times higher in African-American men than in white men of the same age, says Dr. Ronald Victor, the director of Cedars-Sinai Center for Hypertension in Los Angeles.

"Hypertension is one of the biggest reasons why the life expectancy of African-American men is only 69 years," Victor says. "That's a full decade less than white men in this country."

This week, he received an $8.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund a study testing whether barbershop intervention could significantly lessen hypertension in African-American men.

The study will involve getting barbers around the city trained to take their patients' blood pressure. Victor is working with Dr. Anthony Reid, a cardiologist in nearby Inglewood, on the project.

Reid says most of his patients are African-American. "My patients like me, but they love the barber, and they'd much rather go to see the barber than the doctor, typically," Reid says.

"The idea is, instead of starting out by asking patients, as usual, to come in to the hallowed halls of medicine, we're bringing medicine to the people who need it," Victor says.
Listen to the interview: here