Speaking this morning as this year’s Chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, state Sen. Curren D. Price Jr. (D-Culver City) was surrounded by his latest promotional success:
An all-day black-centric forum at the California Science Center, adjacent to USC, especially for minority community members to alert and arouse their neighbors about the gaping disparity in health awareness and health care.
Many Americans would be shocked by the dropoff in the quality of health repair for white patients and for black patients.
Todayy’s Healthy Lifestyles Initiative Conference, Sen. Price explained, is one of a series of forums being presented around the state to fulfill the Black Caucus’s mandate:
“To inform, to inspire and to encourage.”
Dwelling on health disparities in the black community, a classy roster of medical experts — from Charles Drew University, Kaiser Permanente, the Rand Corp., the state Dept. of Public Health and the Releford Ankle and Foot Institute — spent hours, uninterrupted by a lunch break, delivering riveting, little known data to an attentive audience seated at smallish round tables spread across the Loker Conference Room at the Science Center.
Nothing New
Significantly, Dr. Keith Norris of Drew University said that there is nothing new about the present disparities, no matter how extreme they seem. They have been acknowledged and intensely studied as long ago as the beginning of the last century.
He did not precisely venture into discussing why many contemporary health problems and situations have the feel of not having been effectively addressed in the meanwhile.
“These are not new problems, and there are no new solutions, per se,” Dr. Norris said.
Hypertension, diabetes and premature deaths received unusual attention, abnormally high stress being commonly found in black communities.
Seventy percent of premature deaths are related to personal behavior patterns and genetic makeup, said Dr. David Martins of Drew University, a Nigerian native.
What Good Does It Do?
“We are so busy chasing the American Dream,” he said, “that we don’t survive long enough to live in them.”
He said the transitory nature of his patients and their discouraging extensive lack of even fundamental medical awareness creates extra, potentially dangerous and seemingly needless problems for health professionals.
Granting that knowing when to see a doctor can be complicated for poor persons whose lives are packed with distracting hourly emergencies, Dr. Martins added: “My patients’ telephone numbers are good for about 30 days.”
Alluding to the randomness, almost absentmindedness, of deprived but needy persons consulting a doctor, he said:
“Many of my patients don’t know enough to ask, ‘Are you board certified?’ Guess who dies if the doctor makes a mistake?”
In a scarcely informed environment, Dr. Martins said, a widely believed myth is that “black peoples’ genes are not conducive to long lives. That is so not true.”
And then he came to one of the forum’s major talking points, the ubiquity of salt in diets, which leads many blacks down a road to failing and fatal health.
There was no salt in their diets when they lived in Africa, Dr. Martins said, “and our genes were conditioned for life on that continent.”
When white men, whom he described merely as “visitors,” came to Africa in search of gold, they brought with them salt that soon was introduced into diets, and you know how swiftly addicting salt can be.
“Salt changed everything for us,” Dr. Martins said — except the most important element. “Genes will not change. They don’t know what they should reject.”
The dangerous popularity of salt in diets accelerated when blacks were as slaves to this country, and the black health threat has been expanding ever since.
The result has been hundreds of years of life-shrinking health problems.
Eating on the go, a common lifestyle habit among needy persons scrambling for a living, is a dreadful daily pattern, Dr. Martins said. “If you are eating from boxes, cans or bags, you are getting way too much salt, and you need to be aware of that.”
