Barbershop Interventions Improving Health Outcomes
A safe haven. A country club. A place where people can be themselves. That is how patrons and shop owners describe US barbershops in Black neighborhoods. “The barber–client relationship is a very special one,” Herman Muhammad, owner of Supreme Style Barbershop in Denver, Colorado, told The Nation’s Health. “The guys sitting in your chair usually have done so for years. There is a sense of trust there.”
Although e-scooters are readily available in many cities and are easy to rent, many riders are unaware of their safety risks.
Photo by Aaron Warnick, The Nation’s Health.
For decades, health professionals have used this relationship to bring care to a hard-to-reach demographic: Black men. With barbers as advocates, health workers visit shops to educate and perform screenings, usually for high blood pressure. Women’s hair salons have also been included in intervention programs.
Intervention is critical because Blacks, especially Black men, are less likely to get regular health checkups than are Whites. And high blood pressure disproportionately affects Black people, who are also more likely to develop complications of stroke and heart conditions than are other races and ethnicities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among men, 43% of Blacks have high blood pressure, compared with 34% of Whites and 28% of Hispanics.
Barbershop interventions have plenty of advocates, but evidence-based studies have lagged. That changed last year when the New England Journal of Medicine published a study showing that barbershop interventions improved the health of participants. More than 300 customers at 52 Los Angeles, California, Black barbershops took part in a randomized study. About one third of them with high blood pressure were assigned to an intervention group that prescribed a drug therapy by a pharmacist at a shop. More than 60% of participants lowered their blood pressure to healthy levels and sustained them for a year.
Then in August, HIV education in barbershops got a boost. The American Public Health Association’s (APHA’s) American Journal of Public Health shared results of an HIV program at dozens of Black barbershops in Brooklyn, New York. The program improved responsible sexual behavior among low-income Black men, a demographic at heightened risk for HIV. Sixty-four percent of more than 350 men in the intervention group reported no sex without a condom.
“This represents a new way to think about certain diseases and conditions, which, perhaps because of stigma and fears, have not been addressed in this way before,” APHA member Tracey Wilson, PhD, a professor at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center School of Public Health and lead author of the Brooklyn study, told The Nation’s Health. “It shows it can be done effectively.”
—Mark Barna
Read the full article in The Nation’s Health at http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/49/7/1.2.
Shareable Scooters Offer Risks, Benefits for Transportation
Electric scooters (e-scooters) have zipped their way into major metro areas across the United States and the world, bringing both praise and safety concerns with them. Shared e-scooters, which allow riders to rent the devices in one place and leave them in another, are available from multiple companies in dozens of US cities and on college campuses. According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials, nearly 40 million trips were taken on shared e-scooters in 2018.
E-scooters have been hailed as an easy, environmentally friendly way to get around. But their spread has not come without growing pains—or actual physical pain in the form of injuries. Since fall 2017, at least 1500 injuries and 8 deaths in the United States have been linked to the devices, according to Consumer Reports.
At the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers tracked e-scooter–related emergency department visits from September 2017 through August 2018, documenting 249 cases. Published in February in JAMA Network Open, their research found that broken bones and head injuries made up most scooter injuries, accounting for more than 70% of emergency department visits. The study found that, by and large, injured riders were not wearing helmets and that other regulations, such as restrictions on rider age, were not followed.
Similar results were found in a study released in April that examined hundreds of e-scooter injuries that were sustained in Austin, Texas. Researchers from Austin Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collaborated on the study, finding that there were at least 20 injuries per 100 000 rides.
— Aaron Warnick
Read the full article in The Nation’s Health at http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/49/7/1.3.