Clipping Away at Illness

Barbers and Salons Catering to Blacks Add Health Checks to List of Services

In the annals of beauty, the pompadour, the beehive and the Afro all had their day. Now comes the lifesaving haircut.

From the padded swivel chairs in his Southeast Washington barbershop, Clarence "Chile" Brace dispatched two freshly trimmed customers with hypertension straight to the emergency room.

Around the corner, at the Divine Transformation Beauty Salon, beautician Arnica Ford cajoled a 300-plus-pound patron into trying a fiber-rich diet.

And in Northeast, Marquita Wise opened her rose-garlanded hair salon, Fresh Cut II All About You, on a Sunday night to check the blood pressure of a client who had nearly fainted after learning that her daughter had died in a car crash.

Brace, Ford and Wise are among African American barbers and beauticians in five D.C. shops with blood pressure machines and digital scales tucked between hair-drying bonnets and bottles of shampoo. They have been enlisted in a program underwritten by insurers CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield and the MedStar Research Institute to combat coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death among black Americans.

Modeled after a Baltimore program coordinated by the University of Maryland's Department of Medicine, the D.C. program trains stylists how to screen clients for obesity and high blood pressure and when to urge them to follow up with a doctor. The plan is to be implemented in 12 shops by year's end.

"Everyone wants to be beautiful, whether they go to a hairstylist or barber or whether they go to a doctor," Ford said. "Now we're working with inner beauty as well."

Launched last month, the Hair Heart and Health program joins a groundswell of similar efforts across the country. All expand on the unique cultural role that barbershops and hair salons play in the African American community to raise awareness about health issues, particularly those that disproportionately affect black Americans.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the death rate from heart disease among black Americans in 2002 was 30 percent higher than that for whites. American Stroke Association data show that African Americans have almost twice the risk of strokes as whites and higher death rates.

Other studies show that African American women are more likely to die of breast cancer than white women, and African American men have the world's highest incidence of prostate cancer, in part because the disease tends to be discovered at advanced stages.

Some see the phenomenon as a powerful indictment of the health care system. Many African Americans have not been encouraged enough to seek preventive care, said Stephen B. Thomas, director of the Center for Minority Health at the University of Pittsburgh. He also said the Tuskegee syphilis study -- in which federal health officials deliberately withheld treatment from nearly 400 black men with syphilis from 1932 to 1972 -- left a legacy of mistrust.

Health professionals say hairdressers can help ease the lingering wariness.