Cancer Effort Enlists Barbers

Prostate Awareness Program Focuses on African American Men

Longtime barbers such as James Coleman, 75, have their clients' trust and can broach sensitive issues such as prostate cancer. (Warren Skalski For The Washington Post)

CHICAGO -- Prostate cancer is Ricardo Arnold's "scariest fear," he says, something that worries him constantly. The North Side barber has seen several family members develop the disease, and as a 46-year-old African American man, he is in a high-risk group. So he gets a screening every year and urges his customers to do the same.

"You want to catch it early so you can treat it," he tells a customer at the Shear Norris barbershop, who is skeptical about the risk because he considers prostate cancer a punishment for infidelity meted out by a higher power.

Arnold is one of more than 800 barbers nationwide enlisted by the grass-roots group Prostate Net, an organization founded in 1996 by Virgil Simons, who had surgery for prostate cancer at age 48. After writing a book about using the Internet to find health information and establishing a Web site (www.prostate-online.org), Simons last year began to reach out to African American men in the place he says they feel most comfortable discussing personal issues.

"The barbers I grew up with were strong personalities who carried a lot of weight in the community," said Simons, a Chicago native. "If they said something, you believed them."

Launched with the assistance of MGM Studios in connection with last year's release of the movie "Barbershop 2," the Barbershop Initiative enlisted doctors at 57 medical centers across the country to train the barbers in advising their customers about the disease. Prostate Net is funded by private donations and grants from corporations and foundations.

Along with educating clients about the disease, the barbers hand out information about local medical centers that offer low-cost screenings.

African American men are the highest-risk group for prostate cancer, dying of the disease at approximately twice the rate of other American men. High-fat diets are probably one reason. Another is the fact that African American men are generally reluctant to visit doctors.

Prostate cancer often has no symptoms for seven to 10 years, and by that time, it can be hard to cure. But if diagnosed in its early stages, it is highly curable.

On a visit to Shear Norris, Joe Harrington, project director for the Department of Preventive Medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, described the need for both prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood tests and digital rectal exams.

"It takes three to five minutes. It's uncomfortable but not painful," he said of the exams.

"It's not bad at all," chimed in Sam Adebayo, 60, who had brought his kids to the shop for trims. "I get one every year. If more people knew about it, the death rate would be a lot lower."

Harrington dispelled myths that prostate cancer directly affects or is caused by sexual practices or that it can be cured by hormone shots. He described treatment options at various stages of the disease and explained that surgery can cause undesirable side effects such as incontinence.

"But at least you're alive," he said.

Harrington and others involved with the program see it as a way not only of detecting prostate cancer but also of encouraging African American men to be more proactive about taking care of their health.

"This opens the door to talking about all-around preventive health care," he said. "We talk about what factors you can change. You can't change your race or your age, but you can change your lifestyle. Once we get people to a doctor, then they can also get screened for high cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes."

All barbers are trained in identifying some health problems through the condition of clients' hair, skin and nails, Simons said.

"They can see melanomas in the skin, changes in texture in the hair," Simons said. "So they're predisposed to look at their clients from a health standpoint. The barbers can see that their clients are getting sick, that there are changes in their physiologies."

At James Coleman's barber shop on Chicago's South Side, customer and night club promoter Clif Pierce, 54, says he hasn't seen a doctor in more than 40 years. "It's the fear factor," he said. "You're afraid if you go, they'll find all these things wrong with you. But people are living longer. We need to learn how to take care of ourselves."

Another customer promises to go to the doctor with Pierce so he can't lie to his friends about getting a check-up, as he admits he has done before.

"We need to have the buddy system," he said. "When you turn 50, your best buddy should take the day off work to go to the doctor with you."

Simons said there are legitimate reasons for African American men to feel leery about doctors, but it is in their own best interest to overcome this sentiment.

"There are the historical facts of the Tuskegee experiment, a whole host of situations where minority communities didn't receive the same standards of care as white communities," he said. "But you have to participate in the system not only for yourself but for your wife and kids."

Coleman, 75, has been running his shop for 40 years. He is the longtime barber for Terry Mason, a Chicago urologist well known in the African American community for his radio and TV appearances. He got Coleman interested in the Prostate Net program.

Coleman cited a customer who was screened at his behest and found "something up with my prostate."

Romando Williams, 44, who has been visiting Coleman's shop since he was 10 years old, vowed to get screened for prostate cancer after hearing of the initiative.

"If I have any trace of that, I want to know," Williams said.

Williams and Pierce agreed that men are more likely to take medical advice from their barbers than from most doctors. "Barbers suck in the info and spread it around," said Williams, who visits the shop every week or two. "We've been seeing these guys for 30, 40 years. People trust them."