Featuring guests Paulah Wheeler from @blkhlth , Dr. Warren Jones, and NYS Assembly Speaker @Carl E. Heastie. Take care of your heart ❤️ this #MinorityHealthMonth and visit whatismyldl.com for information on getting a free LDL cholesterol test. 🫶🏽 ✨Be sure to talk to your doctor about your results! Terms and conditions apply.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
What's up its way up at Angela Yee.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm Angela Yee, and we have a very special Wealth
Wednesday today. And wealth is not only about finances. It's
all about health too, right, because what do we say,
we say health is wealth and it is also.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Minority Health Month.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
That's the time to talk about health disparities and how
we can improve our health and the health.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Of our communities.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Now we'll be specific to New York City today because
we do have health disparities here in heart disease all right,
cardiovascular disease, which includes heart attack and stroke. It's a
leading cause of death in New York and stroke prevalence
is higher among Black adults in the state than all
other racial groups. So I have a great panel of
people here today and I'll introduce you one by one.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
But I'll start with you.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Paula Wheeler is the co founder of Black Health in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
But you're from the d.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, I'm from Detroit.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
You're from Detroit but now in Atlanta, and you went
to college in Atlanta, and so I want to talk
about how well what Black Health is and how you
founded that.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Absolutely. So Black Health is a nonprofit organization. Our mission
is to advance health equity in black communities by implementing
anti racist programs, advocacy, education, and research. So it's an
organization I started with three of my very close friends
from Emory. When we were in school at Emory, we
were learning a lot. We were getting our masters in
(01:24):
public health, and we were just learning a lot of
like facts about health disparity. So every day every class,
we would like see all these graphs that were like, obviously,
black people up here, we have higher rates of everything,
and we're gonna die sooner of a lot of different illnesses.
And so we were learning all of these statistics. But
you know, it's easy to kind of take away from
(01:45):
that that like, maybe there's some potential like biological issue
with black folks that's causing that. But what we really
start to have conversations about amongst ourselves was that really
it's racism, systemic racism that's causing those health disparities that
we see. So when we graduated, we were like, let's
do something about that, Like let's try this, you know,
(02:06):
start an organization. And when we started, we were really
just like open to anything, like we would take any opportunity,
any like anything, anyone asked us to do, we would
do it. And so but now we've kind of really
honed down some of the things that we provide. So
we provide health education, anti racists and critical race theory,
(02:26):
education and training to emerging and current health professionals. We
also do just like nationwide public health programs as well
as global, we also operate in South Africa and we
do research, advocacy and our community health events which we
really love doing. And you know, Angela, you were part
of one of our events.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Yeah, congression of that, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
So last year's Congressional Black Caucus Foundations Annual meeting, we
did an event in partnership with Amgen. It was our
Heart Health Equity panel that you hosted, did x job
and doctor Jones was there with us as well. Speak Yeah,
we have great pictures of you actually, yeah. Yeah, And
(03:10):
so we're just really happy to be able to bring
a lot of the things we talked about in that
conversation to the audience today.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Well, listen, this is just an inser and there's a
lot to unpack, but we're going to introduce everybody and
then have the conversation because you said so many things
that I think are going to be so important for
what we're about to discuss. But next up, speak of
Carl Hasty from the Bronx.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Is that right, or I just want to make.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Sure the proudly from the Bronx. He's the Speaker of
the New York State Assembly. And so for you to
be here, I know a lot of what you do
has to do You're always out in the community, and
I remember during the pandemic like you were front and
center making sure that people were getting taken care of.
And so I just want you to talk about why
(03:53):
what you do is so important for making sure that
there are healthy people here in the city.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Well, as you say, Angelie, you know, health is wealth
and and for me, we just want the whole person
to be okay. From a government standpoint, and particularly for me,
I want to make sure that people can have a
good job, have a place to leave live, and they
have you know, good health. And so I try to,
you know, stay in my lane, and I take the
(04:20):
advice of experts, and I probably just try to find
the way in the in the funding to make sure
that we can do that in New York and.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Particularly the Bronx.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
You know, the Bronx is known as the most unhealthiest
county in the entire state of New York, and it's
also the most minority county of any in the in
the state of New York as well.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
So it's a challenge. You know.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Are we making progress, Yes, but the mission is not
it's not finished yet.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Okay, well, thank you for that, Doctor Warren Jones, who
I had the pleasure of meeting when we were at
the Congression of Black Caucus last year. You have a
powerful story to tell. This is something that's near and
dear to your hearts. You're a family physition with expertise
in cardiovascular health.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
Yes, your heart is the center of the family more
than your physiologic heart. It's your emotional heart, it's your
intellectual heart, it's the center of the family. You can't
be a family physician without focusing on that. My belief
strongly is that if we can keep families heart healthy,
(05:26):
we can keep them together longer. A lot of people
focus on how do you add years to someone's life,
But I want to focus on how to add life
to those years, And the way that you do that
is by having a healthy, strong family bond. You eat together,
you work together, you work out together and you pray together.
I'm so excited to meet the speaker because I went
(05:49):
to school in the Bronx for two years. I do
with Clinton High.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
School and live the part he loves you from that
not far away from where he was.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
I was at one forty seventh and third, one forty
nine and thirty, so I understand the burden that exists
in that area and I remember it from all those
years ago, back in the sixties. I've had the pleasure
of gaining a platform where I can share information by
being the first black president of the American Academy of
Family Physicians. And it's not that Academy represents over one
(06:21):
hundred and eighty four thousand family physicians across America. It's
not about look at me. It's about how do I
leverage that position to get the right messages out. For instance,
one of the things that Miss Wheeler talked about was
health disparities. Not I' would ask people, is diabetes health disparity?
And they'd say yes, And I'd say is heart disease
(06:41):
a health disparity? And they'd say yes, And I say,
neither one is a health disparity. They are symptoms of
health disparities. It's the systematic problem, the system problem that
creates the disparities. So I like to have people be
aware of what's the difference between the disparate condition and
the community and the infrastructure that creates that problem. And
(07:04):
I'd love to talk with you more about that today.
I'm just so excited to be here with you. Thank
you for the chance to be here.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Oh no, I'm excited. I learned a lot from you
when we did that panel together. That's why I'm really
excited that you're here, and Paula like with the work
that you're doing. I was telling you on the way here,
we were riding together, and I was talking about my
own issues that I've had, and I think all of us,
if it's not personal, but we have somebody close to
us that has had, you know, heart issues and heart disease,
(07:33):
and so I can say that within my own family.
I know, you know, for myself, I know you reached
out to me initially because I've been open about the
issues that I've had with my cholesterol being really high
when I was young. You know, I was in my
early thirties and the doctor told me, oh, your cholesterol
is so high it will be an issue for you
later if you don't take care of it now. And
(07:54):
fortunately I was able to find that out early on
and really make some changes in my lifestyle that were
permanent changes that I had to make in order to
make sure and it's been fine ever since, but definitely
something that I continue to monitor. And so when we
talk about that, Paula, I was also telling you, I
also read that people will tell you that in the
(08:14):
Black community we don't have the highest rates of high cholesterol,
but when it comes to heart disease, have we die
at a higher rate than any other group of people.
So can we talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Yeah, definitely, And for Black health, we really like to
focus less on kind of like individual actions and telling
people you need to do this, you need to eat healthier,
you need to do that. Like those things are obviously
very very important, but for us as an organization, we
really go back to what you were getting to, doctor Jones,
(08:48):
those social determinants of health. And how so, social determinants
of health are the non medical factors that affect your health.
So it's things like where you live, the quality of
your edge education, the access to the kinds of food,
nutritious foods are not. And so we know like Detroit,
New York, Atlanta, you know, all the places that our
(09:12):
people live, like, there's a lot of residential racial segregation,
and so issues like that, like policies things like redlining
that are still operating that like racial segregation that causes
black people to have less access to these health promoting resources,
to those social determinants of health. So that's why you
(09:34):
can look at almost any issue, you know, health outcome,
particularly cardiovascular disease, and you see these immense differences by
race with these health disparities.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
What are some things you've learned, Carl, just from being
in the Bronx and like you said, the issues in
the Bronx that you guys have had, and what are
some things that you feel like have been useful or helpful,
and what is some of the pushback that you feel
like you receive when it comes to residents.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
Well, we do try to do that as well, as
I said, you know, when I first got elect to speaker,
we said we want to have a family's First agenda,
uplifting all aspects of a family and particularly women who
are put in you know, in black households, often the
leaders of those households. We just tried to do all
of those things that uplifted. So of course, trying to
(10:22):
put an educate a let's say, importance on funding education,
funding higher education, making sure that people do have access
to healthcare, and still trying to push people from using
the emergency rooms as their primary care physicians. That's often
the biggest challenge that I find in the BRONX, getting
(10:43):
people to want to go to their doctor rectly and
go get the regular checkups. It's like people often are
behind and just trying to play. So we're really just
trying to move the whole the whole structure that surrounds people,
particularly people of color, to just try to move them forward.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
And doctor Warren Jones, I talked specifically about cholesterol right now,
So can we discuss that a little bit because some
people might be listening and not understand because I know,
even for me, I mean I learned this in school,
but I still need to keep getting it, like ingrained
in me the different types. Because there's good cholesterol, there's
bad cholesterol. How can you monitor that? What's the problem
with the bad cholesterol?
Speaker 5 (11:22):
Yes, Well, as you learned in school, cholesterol is a compound. Okay,
it's kind of a waxy kind of substance, and it's
found all over the body. One of the problems that
people don't recognize is when we talk about heart disease.
The same way cholesterol affects the blood vessels and the heart,
it afflects the brain, it affects the kidneys, it affects
(11:42):
the liver, it affects the eyes, it affects all of it.
So the cholesterol is something we've got to be careful
to learn about. There are two categories of cholesterol. Three actually,
there's something called triglycerides, and there's low density lip of
proteins and high density lipe of proteins. The triglycerides we
(12:03):
don't really worry as much about because it's easier to
manage them. They're short acting. It's the HDL, which is
a good cholesterol. You want to have high numbers. You
get that, but doing all of the things that I
don't really do as much as I should, by eating
healthy and exercising and working out, so you know, you
don't get a gut like this by working on your
(12:23):
HDL all the time. But then there's the LDL, the
low density lipe of protein. That's the one that people
usually call the bad cholesterol, and the reason is because
it is most readily turned into the plaques that line.
Imagine you've got a host pipe in your backyard and
(12:44):
the rust the dirt builds up in that hosset pipe
and begins to block off that hole and you can't
get the water through. That's what cholesterol does to your
blood vessels. So it's the cholesterol that builds up that
leads that to be a problem. And when you've got
a low density like of protein that's high, you got
much better chance of having that. So what are we
(13:06):
worried about? My goddaughter niece had a stroke at thirty nine.
Fortunately she lived a lot of people don't. I'd give
talks and I'd ask how many of you had someone
in your family that had a stroke before age fifty,
and over half the audience's hands would go up when
they were people of color. And it got to the
(13:28):
point that even my own daughter died early on from
complications of heart disease. She had some signs of congestive
heart failure in her forties, and I told her she
needed a defibrillator, something to shock her heart back into functioning,
(13:50):
and I said, talk to your doctor about it. She
went and talked to a doctor and he said, well,
we can manage you without it. Three weeks later she
was dead.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
Clinicians often don't listen closely to women if they don't
take care of the women regularly. If you have the
longitudinal relationship where people know you know them and they
know you, then you have a good example we all
saw during COVID where this's female physician actually chronicled her
(14:25):
own demise from complications of COVID, whether the system did
not believe her thought she was drug seeking even though
she was a physician describing her symptoms. So that's one
one of the challenges of the symptoms. But so we've
got to work with health professionals and folks in your community,
your listeners. They've got to say, I want my doctor
(14:48):
to listen to me.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Because sometimes you go to the doctor and they don't
have a lot of time. There's patients waiting, and they're
trying to get you in and out, and it might
be something wrong and you're telling them or you feel rushed,
so you're not able to really like explain in detail,
and sometimes they'll tell you, well, you'll be fine. If
it keeps on bothering. You call me back and you're like, okay,
because you don't want to be a bother really, and
(15:11):
you're thinking about, okay, there's a line of people and
they're just trying to rust me out the door. But
you need to advocate for yourself.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
When you get in front of that doctor. You're the
most important person in the world. But you've got homework
to do when you get Before you go, make a
note to yourself with the things that you want to
make sure and the document the symptoms you've been having
so that you can effectively and efficiently convey all of
that information. But if you want to wander, there is
some time for that.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Right The other thing people have to stop doing is
googling stuff to see, you know, how people will have
something wrong and then go on Google and then diagnose themselves.
I'm a little guilty of that sometimes, but honestly, you know,
it is important to make sure that we have our
annual checkups and like you said, document and make sure
when you go in there you know what you're.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Going in there for.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Because sometimes you'll be like, okay, this is let me
just google this. Oh I just need some you know, X,
Y and Z to try to fix this, and it
could be something that the longer you wait, it's worse,
Like if I didn't go when I did, it could
have been way worse for me later. And even knowing
what you want to get checked out for, like when
we go to the doctor, what should what should we
(16:18):
be asking?
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Like what type of testing should we be having done?
Speaker 4 (16:22):
Well, you know, Andrew, you mentioned a funny funny story.
You know, when I, if I eat a lot of
processed foods, I end up having GI issues. And so
as you say, going on the internet, I thought I
had everything colon cancer and I remember while I was
they were taking in for the colonoscopy. I remember saying
this to my doctor and he said, stay off the
(16:44):
f and internet.
Speaker 5 (16:45):
That's what you have.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
But you know, but I but I was very descriptive
with him, and I do think it is the doctor says,
you know, you gotta be honest. Tell your doctor what
you know, what's you know, what's going on, what you're feeling,
Don't hold any don't hold anything anything back when you
go doctor. Typically black men are the worst. I'm not
one of those, you know. Fortunate for me. I have
every doctor's cell phone number.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I'm annoying to all of them, have a cough.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
I just to that point because I think with us,
you know, I think the body is a wonderful machine.
Most times it does tell you when something is wrong,
and I just think we have to sometimes listen to
our bodies and communicate that to the doctor.
Speaker 5 (17:23):
That is so critically important. Listen to your body. Way
back in nineteen seventy one when I started medical school,
not when the earth was cool. Just after that, my doctor,
my professor, said, if you listen to the patients, they
will tell you what's wrong. They may not give you
the diagnosis, but they'll tell you enough so that you
(17:45):
know what's wrong. And so one of the things I
try to do today is to teach young doctors and
medical schoodents to listen to their patients. And I tell patients,
the best thing you can be is an informed, intelligent,
motivated person when you're going to see your doctor. That's
the best of all circumstances.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Yeah, and so what should we be asking for, like
what type of testing? I definitely want to know that
because I told Paul of this earlier.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
So when you watch the video, you'll see. But the reason.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Why I went and even was doing like blood testing
and everything was X that was cheating. But you know,
what should we be asking for when we go When
we're getting because I remember even getting my life insurance,
you know, they do everything because they want to make
sure that share and good health before they issue that policy.
But when we go to the doctor, what should we
be saying we need to get done just for a
(18:35):
general checkup.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
I mean, I'll say, for me, you know, I was
in a car accident. I'd say in like the early nineties,
and I'd say, you know, maybe twenty something years later,
I found that I have bone spurs on my on
my neck and sometimes it triggers and I get this
excruciating pain, and I'd go to my orthopedic doctor and
he compare the X rays and he says, even though
(18:57):
there's no change in the X ray, he says, but
I don't care what the X ray shows me.
Speaker 5 (19:02):
I care what you're telling me that you're feeling.
Speaker 4 (19:04):
So I think that we should never back away from
what we're feeling and just be as honest and descriptive
as you can. What you talked about, what you what
you are, you know what your feeling. I feel like
that that helps, even though I'd say what I saw
on the X ray looked like there was no change,
but I was in a lot of pain.
Speaker 5 (19:22):
Yeah, and that's a very real thing. UH doctors want
you to talk to them about pain rather than you're
going to talk to uh missally in the community who
tells you to buy all of this stuff that you
waste your money and you don't feel better. But one
of the things that you can do. This is one
of the times you can go to the internet.
Speaker 6 (19:41):
There are there are recommendations from something called the United
States a Preventive Services Task Force, and they recommend and
at your age group the kinds of things that you
need to be screened for. Okay, if you look up
the USPSTF, the United States Preventive Services Task Force for
(20:02):
your age, it'll tell you age and gender, It'll tell
you and.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
I would encourage you to make a list of those things.
Don't take them the article. Make a list of them
and ask that of your doc when you go in.
I had eleven brothers and sisters. I've only got nine now,
and I can tell you that for the last forty
years I've been telling them to do that, and they
end up going in there and getting what they wanted
(20:29):
and they're living longer because of that. So I would
encourage you to do it.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Now, what role does family history play when it comes
to cardiovascular disease.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
Plays a big role. It's not always the decisions you make,
it's fund of your genetic makeup. Also, that's why there's
something called familial hypercholesterolemia familiar familiar hyperlipidemia, where even though
families may eat well and exercise, that in certain family
(21:03):
lines as a genetic potential predisposition. So what we're doing
now in science is we're looking for genetic markers, and
these genetic markers are telling us who are the people
that are at greater risk. One of the things that
most of your women on the phone, I mean, on
the program we'll learn about is the genetic testing about
breast cancer. We now know which families are at higher risk,
(21:26):
and there are other Heart disease has similar kinds of
things that are being developed. But I can tell you
that with the medications that exists and the changes in
your exercise and eating, you can overcome those challenges. Most
often if you're honest with yourself so you know, if
you live in the community where it's not a safe
(21:47):
place to walk, get together with the speaker and some
of the folks to go to Walmart and say, dedicate
a section of your parking lot where we can walk safely.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
All right, Age, And I learned today too, Angela. You're
already kind of doing something like that with your club.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, And I've done in my round club really as
a way to get people who normally wouldn't work out
to come and do that.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
So you don't have to run, you can walk, you
can jog.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
So now we can ask Kyle to join us.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
And I want to touch on something you said earlier,
Carl about colon cancer and how a lot of times
black men don't like to go get tested for certain things.
And that's that's an issue that's really near to Black
health because we had a very big national and still
do have a national colon cancer screening program. Because something
that's very important for us is kind of building this
(22:36):
bridge between the black community and doctors, because we know
a lot of times it's hard for us to actually
get there, whether it's where we live or our relationship.
Is a lot of mistrust between our communities and you know,
the medical system. And so where we kind of come
in as a as a nonprofit is to try to
(22:56):
help provide people with resources that they might not otherwise get.
And so one of the ones I also wanted to
plug was it's a program that Ampjin has. You can
go to what is my LDL dot com and actually
find out information and find out your eligibility to receive
a free LDL or like that that bad cholesterol to
(23:18):
get a free LDL test. So go to what is
my LDL dot com and get more information on how
you can get one of those tests if for some reason,
you know, you're unable to right now go to the
doctor and you just want to have that information for
yourself too. There are free resources, and so for black health,
that's really important for us to like give people free
resources and take some of that out of the clinic,
(23:40):
you know, and put it in people's hands.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
You know, people will tell you that racism doesn't exist anymore,
depending on who you ask, But can we talk about
racism in the healthcare system and how that does affect
our community?
Speaker 5 (23:55):
Well, do you know, the Institute of Matterson did some
research After many years folks were saying we're being treated
differently and having different outcomes as people of color, and
that there was disparity in the way we were managed.
And it wasn't until that research actually occurred by the
(24:18):
Institute of Medicine. They showed that for fully insured blacks
and fully insured brown people that the quality of care
they got was significantly lower than the quality of care
offer to fully insured whites. Now we're not talking about
people who were poor. We took the best, okay, of
(24:38):
both communities. And if you want to go to the internet,
look up the IOM Report on Health Disparities, okay, and
that'll show you. There's a graphic to show the difference.
So race plays a big role. The big problem I
would ask you to do is to try to find
the clinician, a physician, a nurse practitioners, someone that you
(24:59):
care care that you seek for health care who can
identify with you, someone that's either has a similar background
or similar gender, because the cultural relationship in healthcare is
critically important. I'll tell you about another family member who
complained for a lot of times, many years about a
misery on her side, and I kept telling her to
(25:20):
tell her doctor. When I finally moved close to where
she was. I had her to go see a female
physician that I knew would listen to her. She saw
on her Thursday, did a CT on a Friday, and
Monday removed a big cancer off of her kidney. Wow,
the misery on her side for those three years was
a cancer three years and nobody would listen to her
(25:42):
enough to be able to take it from her misery
to something physiologic. So you got to find a health
care provider, a doctor that you can communicate, communicate with,
especially surrounding heart disease and cholesterol management, because it affects
so many different systems. As we talked to and I'm
sorry everybody doesn't have a master's in communication of hard information.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Yeah, Well, governmentally, one of the biggest challenges that we're
looking at, particularly amongst Black women, as maternal mortality.
Speaker 5 (26:14):
Yes, and that's been a.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Huge issue here that we're trying to come up with
a legislation to have a commission to study why it
seems that more Black women seem to be dying during
childbirth than And as you said, it's not women who
are just don't medicate, it's women who have private insurance
are still not getting the same type of quality of
care as their white counterpart to have a baby. So
(26:37):
that's so governmentally, like I said, I try to take
the information, make sure that we can have legislation and
funding to try to figure out some of these challenges.
Speaker 5 (26:45):
Well, I thank him for that, because it's not just
it's not just maternal mortality or funeral mortality. You've got healthy,
you've got well, you've got young, well insured people like
in my own family who still have small forgestationally babies,
babies born with low birth weight, and they fully insured
and they eat healthy. So a lot of research needs
(27:07):
to be done because babies that are born smaller at
greater risk of having problems later on. And I think
that mister speaker, if you can have them take a
look at that as well, I think that will help immensely.
American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology has a working group
on attacking feudal mortality. The track star Alison Felix. Felix
(27:32):
spoke to us last year and she talked about her
own experience how she almost lost her life with pregnancy,
and now we've got the track Start of Mississippi who
just lost her life last year. So I hope that
that work gets funded and done because we're losing too
many intelligent, beautiful Black women and their babies to this condition.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And you know, one thing that I have seen people
being more aware of is doula's and that the the
necessity of having a doula there with you to advocate
for you and know the questions to ask and know
some things maybe not necessary, some things maybe you do need,
and having somebody there that is well versed so that
(28:13):
they can make sure that they are speaking up for
you or telling you what it is that you need
to know, or when you're not able to make a
decision on the spot about something, being able to give
the information that you may need, because there's times that
women are having c sections that they may not need
to you know. Again, like just so many different things
that we may not have the information to know what
(28:34):
to ask or what to even say. So I think
that's something that has been really helpful lately, because doulas
is something I only heard of, maybe in the past
few years, but this has been around, you know, way
longer than that. And Speaker Hasey, you know what I
wanted to ask you about too, we were talking about
these social.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Determinants of health, and.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
So what about stress, right like, because I feel like
us does add you know, to cardiovascular disease. And obviously,
doctor Warren Jones, you can tell us more about that.
But what are some things that you see people stressed
out about the most in New York that can cause
health issues.
Speaker 4 (29:14):
I'd say lack of secure housing is a big issue,
you know. I'd say the big three, lack of lack
of access to healthcare, lacks of lack of access to employment.
You know, those are usually the big three motivators of stress.
And we see that even follows through and I've even
tried even when we're looking at educating our young people
(29:36):
that often we seem like we only worried about what
was happening, you know, to Johnny while he was you know,
in school.
Speaker 5 (29:43):
For those you know, six hours.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
But we also have to look at what is the
environment that Johnny's going home to and what is his
parents going through? This sometimes can affect the you know,
the entire families. That's why we're trying to, as I say,
you try to look at not not look at these
things as in silos. But how did they all come
together when it looks like even an individual individual person,
you know, do they have a job, do they have
(30:05):
good housing? And then as it goes on, you know
into the children. So those I'd say, the big, the
big things that can lead.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
To stresscause sometimes people felt physically ill from the stress.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
So is that a real thing?
Speaker 5 (30:18):
Yes, it is a real thing. There was Actually there
were actually some studies that were done by the NIH
about ten years ago that would These were studies that
were done in the rat population and they showed the
rest the rat, stressed rat, the normal rat okay, and
they were able to show her not only the structure
(30:38):
of the rat change to where it was skinny and malnourished,
but it also had genetic changes that led to his
offspring or her offsprings and potentially having problems with stress.
So it's a very real, real thing. I tell people,
don't don't freak out about the word stress. There's two
types of stress. There's eu stress, you stress in dis stress. Distress.
(31:02):
EU stress is what you get when you're about to shoot,
go and run that track meet, when you go out
to run with your friends, that surge of energy that's
you stress. That's good for you. It's the distress that's
harmful when you're worried how am I going to feed,
how am I going to do this, and how I'm
going to do the others. So the number one thing
I think causes problems for many women around stress surrounding
(31:24):
stress is getting access to behavioral health support in order
to decompress someone that's stress and help them to learn
how to deal with it. And so they internalize it
because nobody wants to be viewed as weak. Okay, So
I think the thing that bothers me is that women
are the keys are the health of a family, and
if they're not healthy, how can the family? It's your fault.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
No, But we talk about this a lot too in
our anti racism and health workshops, you know, like how
racism causes poor health outcosms. We teach just that concept
and stress itself, like stress that can come from racial
violence and discrimination that has a direct impact on negative
health outcomes. But then exactly as you were saying, speaker,
(32:09):
he see like there's a lot of stress that is
caused by these conditions in which people live on safe housing,
poor access to food, and just all the day to
day things that people go through and then that has
a negative outcome, negative impact on mental and physical health outcomes.
So it really works in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
You know what else I want to talk about too.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
As we're discussing this, Okay, these drugs that like ozempic
and we go, we all of that was for diabetes, right,
but now a lot of people are taking that for
weight loss issues. And then I see lawsuits popping up.
I see all kinds of things happening. So doctor Warren Jones,
I want you to just let us know when is
it time to get on this medication? Is it harmful
(32:52):
for people who are doing this? I mean, because listen,
obesity can lead to a lot of times to heart disease, right,
So I just want to get from you, doctor Warren Jones,
not from the internet, you know, your thoughts on that,
because I do know a lot of people who are
taking your zembic.
Speaker 5 (33:10):
She showing us how to put you on the hot seat.
Ozempic is designed to help your body to metabolize the
sugars you take in and when your insulin isn't working. Well,
that's the concept. But one of the things that does
is it helps your body from taking in too much sugar,
and there's that extra sugar that you're not taking in
(33:33):
that's causing your body's weight to go down because it's
going out in you bowel movements. There's certain people for
whom those types of drugs are not helpful. If someone
has an irritable bowel disease or some other GI problems,
that may not work well for them. If they have
problems with severe constipation, it may not work for them. Okay,
(33:59):
I really ask people, don't make a decision. I was
looking at something this morning and it was saying, you
don't even have to go see your doctor. Just write
to us and we'll have you talk to someone and
we'll send it to your home.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Market.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Don't do that, women, because I get them all the
time Olympic and He's like, just right.
Speaker 5 (34:24):
In and get folks. For some individuals, Uh, that class
of drugs may be the answer from having a bypass
surgery or something else, but you shouldn't make that decision
on your own. Take it to your medical home that
person or the team of people that are usual in
(34:47):
customary source care, those people whose phone number you have. Okay,
that when you walk in, they'll say, I haven't really
good to see you again, go and talk to them
and have them help you to make an informed decision. Now,
just remember that you also got to know when to stop.
Some of the lawsuits come from something called what GOVI face,
(35:10):
where some people lose so much weight that their facial
structures begin to slide down. Because it wasn't well, it's
once you start losing weight. Really it's it's it's called
it's called Osempic face and google it. Okay, yeah, but
so that's why it needs to be done in a
(35:30):
clinical setting. Done in a clinical setting. Right now, there's
too much me to hug. But I am not a
candidate for a GOVI or Ozmpics. So somebody you guys
have just stuck with me.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Okay, So you know, I do want to see for
all of us here today, what are some things that
we do in recognition for ourselves to make sure that
we remain healthy and that we are taking care of
our own cardiovascular health. Because I know, for me having
had that issue, it's something that always has stuck in
my mind ever since I had that high cholestero I
was like, I do not want to have to be
(36:01):
on medication for the rest of my life and it's
something that I've made lifestyle changes, but it's always a
work in progress, and so sometimes.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
I fall, but I get back up there.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
And so there are certain things that I've implemented in
my life long term to make sure that I'm, you know,
doing better than I have in the past.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
So why don't we start with you, Paula?
Speaker 3 (36:22):
Sure, Yeah, I love this question. And I was telling
you earlier too that I also was told by a
doctor that my cholesterol was a bit high and that
kind of shook me up as well. And so I
start to implement things very similar to you, Angela, Like
I go on walks a lot. I walk my dog,
and I make sure to go on long walks with
my dog just so that I can you know, exercise,
(36:43):
get that like low impact activity in my day. And
then I'm also really big back to our conversation about stress,
like I think a lot about what is stressing me
out and trying to eliminate those things from my life,
particularly as a black woman, knowing how heart disease is
for us. So I'm like, look, if this is stressing
me out, if this guy is stressing me out, if.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
That's whatever, he's gotta go.
Speaker 5 (37:06):
You're not good for my home.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
I really am really like very big on my mental
health and my stress levels.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yeah, I know your job is stressful.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
I'd say, to be honest, after the whole Andrew CMO,
the question of impeachment that was really a lot was
was on me. I know, the center of potential was
on him, but with the New York State Assembly being
the ones to decide whether he would be in peace
or at you, I really say, like after that summer,
I says, you know, I cannot let this job consume
(37:40):
me like that. So I said, I'm going to start
doing me things. Soon after that, I started to learn
how to play the guitar. I can't play eight print songs.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Okayrances his favorite. If you follow him, you know that
I just started.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
You know, I do have a have a treadmill in
my house. I have a treadmill in my apartment in Albany.
We built this beautiful brand new y m c A,
which I'm remember I having been there, you know, recently, And
as you say, sometimes you know, you stay on top
of it and then sometimes you fall up. I find
that my weight kind of is worse when I'm in
Albany because sometimes I feel like I do stress eat
(38:12):
and as soon as I'm done, you know, I can
get back on my healthy, my healthy regimen. But it's
like you just try to get better. I do try
to walk a lot. Marcusia who drives me. He hates
when I.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
Tell him I want to walk because he doesn't want
me to walk by myself.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
No, But I just try to do those those small
things and really the managing of the of the stress
because sometimes with the stress it can trigger, you know,
the issue that I have with the bone starts from
the carts and then so I really just try to
figure out ways to just relax the stress.
Speaker 5 (38:42):
I like to you know, play.
Speaker 4 (38:44):
Video games and and you know, do fantasy sports to
kind of give me something outside of this, you know
job that I love that is that it's actually tough,
but doing more me things. Like I said, the guitar
is a really big stress relief. Of my two guitars,
this one is named the Laura and the other one's
named Dorothy.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Which is.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Why but you know it's more of the girls in
the songs.
Speaker 5 (39:10):
But you know, well, I name the new car Nikki.
But that's kind of what I do. I love it
you're so genuine. I love it. I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And what do you do, doctor Warren Jones.
Speaker 5 (39:28):
Believe it or not, I learned to compensate. I put
myself in a mindset where I'm not gonna let this
bother me, okay, And I try to manage my own
expectations instead of letting people set the expectations for me.
Sometimes people will look at me sitting down watching the
(39:48):
game and they don't realize that I'm doing mental gymnastics
that whole game, okay, and I'm working on things, and uh,
my wife gets upset because she she'll know I have
a big talk coming up, and when are you gonna
work on it. I've been working on it for three days.
But then I get out in a walk. I something
(40:08):
very simple that people can do if you're in a building,
walk the stairs.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
And I said, I do that. Yeah, I'm in the airport.
I don't take the walk the move and walkway.
Speaker 5 (40:17):
I walk. Yeah, two up and one down every day.
It's a good way to do it. And and also,
you know, really just put a reminder. I've got this
watch that says, stand up and walk, you idiot. My
wife is in the background. I mean, even if she's
(40:40):
not home, I still hear. Okay, no, but Tom, and
you also got to find somebody who can egg you on,
who can function in your best interests with you and
for you, because there are gonna be sometimes that you're
going to say, I really don't want to do this,
but there's somebody that look at you, that you know cares,
and then they will say you really need to and
(41:01):
that push your help. Sometimes the caring environment will work.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
And accountability partners, that's what I call it.
Speaker 5 (41:11):
All right, but thank you for the chance to talk
about this. You know, just think again about how black
women have the highest rate of death and complications of
cardiovascar disease. And who are the most important peoples and
people in our in our African American society. Our mothers,
our daughters are women, okay, and we and we've got
(41:33):
to help them to be healthy and let them know
that we love them enough to care about them. So
get them to go and get their screenings, because they'll
make my wife make sure I go, and sometimes I
have to remind her to go.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Yeah, and honestly, and also passing it down to the
next generation. Sometimes we have such bad habits from our
whole lives, and our parents had such bad habits, and
our grandparents had such bad eating habits, and those are
things that we, you know, can pass down. And even
like going to school in public school, the things that
they feed you at school.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
It's just a lot of.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Things that I think in the environment that can you know,
continue to keep this going.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
But we have to be more aware.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
And I think for everybody listening, if you have a family,
if you have children, just think about making sure that
they're doing things better. And sometimes that's leading by example,
making sure that you do things better. You know, get
a juicer at home and put some fruits and vegetables delicious,
and you can make your own juices with your own
favorite fruits and vegetables at home, you know, and then
your kids will start to give that to your kids
(42:33):
and they realize it tastes good, and so it can
be healthy and delicious at the same time. It doesn't
have to be healthy and nasty. You can have great
tasting things at home.
Speaker 5 (42:44):
And one of the problems the speaker probably has an
Albany is everybody wants to take him out to dinner
to meet with him and pick his brain.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
And if they're paying, okay, face time, but actually know
what it is.
Speaker 5 (43:02):
I don't do a lot of that.
Speaker 4 (43:03):
If it's not like a fundraising on an official dinner
or something like that. I kind of just say I
call my apartment the cave.
Speaker 5 (43:09):
I kind of just you know, stay there.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
But really what it is is the snacking while you're
sitting around. That is more than the you know, people
have chocolate. You know, we have a member's lounge. I
try to get more healthy things that we do have
healthy foods in there, but it's the it's the intimate
and snacking, I think is what kind.
Speaker 7 (43:30):
Of testimony testimony from the Unfortunately, one of the exceptions
has a big candy bowl of like little the mini
kit cats.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
And just we have this problem up here, I heard
because there's always like some sponsor. We have food every Wednesday,
you know, and it's like a lot of food and everything.
Speaker 5 (43:52):
That the big meal. It's the snacking, Yeah, the little
snacks that I think kind of one meal to day.
I started it in the morning and I ended it.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Was okay, now I get it.
Speaker 5 (44:06):
For the whole day, Yes, I just it just goes
all day.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Well, how can people reach all of you because we
do want to learn more about black health. And again,
if you guys want to get your get more information,
you can go to my l d L dot com.
What what is my l d L dot com? And
that's where you can get more information on how to
get a free L d L test as well. But
Paula for Black Health, how can people reach you?
Speaker 3 (44:28):
Yeah? Yeah, please, we want everyone to stay connected with
Black Health. We have a lot of exciting programs. I mean,
almost everything we talked about today, we have a program
coming on this year that's going to address it. So
please find us on social media. We're on all social
media platforms at Black Health. That's b l k H
L t H.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
All right, so much Angela, No, thank you, And again
that's what is my L d L dot com. That's
how you can get that free L d L test.
Now speak of Carl, do you want people to reach you?
Speaker 5 (44:55):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (44:55):
People want to know what they do anyway, try to
understand or ask, you know, what are we doing i'd
say in a government sense of on all of these
topics that we talked about today. And of course angel
thank you you know for doing this. You know, friendship
that we've had over the years. I appreciate you caring
about black people, but you can reach me a speaker
(45:16):
at NY Assembly dot gov.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Okay, great, thank you, and doctor Warren Jones.
Speaker 5 (45:21):
Yeah. I invite people to feel free to reach out
to me if I can assist you. But I just
want to advise you of something. I can't treat you
over the phone. Okay, but if you've got a question
on how to phrase something to take to your doctor,
I can help with that. I can give you friendly advice,
but I'm not going to treat you over the phone.
You can use my email at d R W. A.
(45:42):
Jones at gmail dot com and feel free to ask
the question. The worst questions are those that are never asked. Okay,
that's a fact, so we can find a way to
do it. And I just want to tell you I
heard about black health long before I met them. You
got to be the chain you want to see.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
I love having your community.
Speaker 5 (46:03):
You got to be the change you want to see,
and they're being the change by going out, by structuring things,
by interfacing with folks who are willing to fund. You
got to be the change you want to see. So
thank you for that.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
What if you have somebody who you love close to
you that you cannot get them to go to the doctor.
Speaker 5 (46:21):
Word the hell out of them. That's what I do
every time. I've got folks that are smoking, and I
tell them all the time stop smoking. So they still
walking around so they don't have to see me. But
seriously worry them, but from a position of love rather
than annoyance, because if it's annoyance, they're going to turn
you off. But if you can find a way to
(46:43):
convey that. But you know how much I care, and
that's why I'm saying this to you, And tell you what,
if you're afraid to go, let's go together. I'll go
with you and I'll sit out there and if you
want go see the doctor, and you can have them
send me a copy of R and I'll go over
it with you. Okay, But you gotta give them a
comfort zone for them to know that it's safe to
(47:06):
do that. I hear things about people that their family
members will never ever hear because they've got to have
They know that with me, it's a safe zone. So
you gotta find a way to have that with someone.
I'm sure the speaker has that too, with people that
coming there and confessing his office the same thing. You know,
we gotta do that for each other. And that's how
we spread the love right excellent, we were loving in camp.
(47:29):
I do that to strangers.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
If I see people smoking, I walk up to them
and say, those things are gonna kill you. And I say,
I say, this will all just love and affection and
I just want you to And I say that to
complete strangers.
Speaker 3 (47:39):
So I will say, I'll put my public health perspective
on this one, which is just that like as a
public health practitioner, a lot of times what we think
about is like harm reduction instead of just totally. So
with's smoking, like a lot of people, it's hard for
them to just stop. So I had someone I love
dearly who smoked a lot, and I would tell them,
(48:00):
like just just document like how much you smoke, and
then next week, try to smoke one or two less
in the week, so like just reducing over time. And
so that's that's how I show love and understanding, compassion
and going along with them in that journey too, because
it's like just do what you can to get a
little bit more out of out of life, you know.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
So next time you go up to somebody say, listen,
document how much you smoke and just try to reduce that.
Speaker 6 (48:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (48:27):
I have done that, though people they struggle saying, like
with weight and things like that. I tell them probably
to me. But the easiest thing was when I wanted
to start to lose weight was cutting out the sugary drinks.
Because you can still get to eat as much as
you did, but the amount of sugar that you take in.
Speaker 5 (48:43):
I can't even drink those things anymore. They's so sweet.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
But that was one way for people, you know, struggle
with their weight and stuff like that gilt to it,
but you don't realize how much calories you actually drink
drinking these super sugary drinks.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
And read the labels too.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
Sometimes you're buying things and you think it's healthy and
then you read the bag.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
And you're like, whoa, I want to tell you what
it is.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
In the um It'll be like this is ninety five
juice and you're like, what type of juice?
Speaker 5 (49:10):
You know?
Speaker 1 (49:11):
What does that mean?
Speaker 5 (49:12):
An angel? One of the other things you can have
people do is be innovative. You know, every time I
talk to someone in January, they said, this is what
I'm giving up for the new year, and then it
only lasts one month, And to ask them, why don't
you come up with an innovator in an innovative solution.
Why don't you say, this is what I'm sacrificing this month.
If you can get the month to the month with
(49:33):
fewer drinks, Okay, I'm going to go back, and then
the week the month after that, I want to do
it again, and you can get in the habit of
finding out you really can live without those things. Especially
now that this is Black Health Month, we want to
focus on that and come up with some healthful ways
of doing things.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
All right, perfect, well, Paula, thank you so much for
putting us all together, you know, in the same room.
I really do appreciate all the work that you've been
doing out of the goodness, and.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
I really appreciate your support.
Speaker 3 (50:01):
It has meant a lot of us.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
All Right, Well, thank you again. Health is wealth is
way up.
Speaker 4 (50:06):
And I will say it's like a lot of times
the elected officials or the professions, but I really say
it's like it's like the community groups, the on the
ground groups that really help make a you know community,
you know, wonderful.
Speaker 5 (50:17):
So I want to thank you for what you do.
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (50:20):
Okay, all right, it's way up, guys, way up.
What's up its way up at Angela Yee.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm Angela Yee, and we have a very special Wealth
Wednesday today. And wealth is not only about finances. It's
all about health too, right, because what do we say,
we say health is wealth and it is also.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Minority Health Month.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
That's the time to talk about health disparities and how
we can improve our health and the health.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Of our communities.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Now we'll be specific to New York City today because
we do have health disparities here in heart disease all right,
cardiovascular disease, which includes heart attack and stroke. It's a
leading cause of death in New York and stroke prevalence
is higher among Black adults in the state than all
other racial groups. So I have a great panel of
people here today and I'll introduce you one by one.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
But I'll start with you.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Paula Wheeler is the co founder of Black Health in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
But you're from the d.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, I'm from Detroit.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
You're from Detroit but now in Atlanta, and you went
to college in Atlanta, and so I want to talk
about how well what Black Health is and how you
founded that.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Absolutely. So Black Health is a nonprofit organization. Our mission
is to advance health equity in black communities by implementing
anti racist programs, advocacy, education, and research. So it's an
organization I started with three of my very close friends
from Emory. When we were in school at Emory, we
were learning a lot. We were getting our masters in
(01:24):
public health, and we were just learning a lot of
like facts about health disparity. So every day every class,
we would like see all these graphs that were like, obviously,
black people up here, we have higher rates of everything,
and we're gonna die sooner of a lot of different illnesses.
And so we were learning all of these statistics. But
you know, it's easy to kind of take away from
(01:45):
that that like, maybe there's some potential like biological issue
with black folks that's causing that. But what we really
start to have conversations about amongst ourselves was that really
it's racism, systemic racism that's causing those health disparities that
we see. So when we graduated, we were like, let's
do something about that, Like let's try this, you know,
(02:06):
start an organization. And when we started, we were really
just like open to anything, like we would take any opportunity,
any like anything, anyone asked us to do, we would
do it. And so but now we've kind of really
honed down some of the things that we provide. So
we provide health education, anti racists and critical race theory,
(02:26):
education and training to emerging and current health professionals. We
also do just like nationwide public health programs as well
as global, we also operate in South Africa and we
do research, advocacy and our community health events which we
really love doing. And you know, Angela, you were part
of one of our events.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Yeah, congression of that, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
So last year's Congressional Black Caucus Foundations Annual meeting, we
did an event in partnership with Amgen. It was our
Heart Health Equity panel that you hosted, did x job
and doctor Jones was there with us as well. Speak Yeah,
we have great pictures of you actually, yeah. Yeah, And
(03:10):
so we're just really happy to be able to bring
a lot of the things we talked about in that
conversation to the audience today.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Well, listen, this is just an inser and there's a
lot to unpack, but we're going to introduce everybody and
then have the conversation because you said so many things
that I think are going to be so important for
what we're about to discuss. But next up, speak of
Carl Hasty from the Bronx.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Is that right, or I just want to make.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Sure the proudly from the Bronx. He's the Speaker of
the New York State Assembly. And so for you to
be here, I know a lot of what you do
has to do You're always out in the community, and
I remember during the pandemic like you were front and
center making sure that people were getting taken care of.
And so I just want you to talk about why
(03:53):
what you do is so important for making sure that
there are healthy people here in the city.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
Well, as you say, Angelie, you know, health is wealth
and and for me, we just want the whole person
to be okay. From a government standpoint, and particularly for me,
I want to make sure that people can have a
good job, have a place to leave live, and they
have you know, good health. And so I try to,
you know, stay in my lane, and I take the
(04:20):
advice of experts, and I probably just try to find
the way in the in the funding to make sure
that we can do that in New York and.
Speaker 5 (04:28):
Particularly the Bronx.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
You know, the Bronx is known as the most unhealthiest
county in the entire state of New York, and it's
also the most minority county of any in the in
the state of New York as well.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
So it's a challenge. You know.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Are we making progress, Yes, but the mission is not
it's not finished yet.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Okay, well, thank you for that, Doctor Warren Jones, who
I had the pleasure of meeting when we were at
the Congression of Black Caucus last year. You have a
powerful story to tell. This is something that's near and
dear to your hearts. You're a family physition with expertise
in cardiovascular health.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
Yes, your heart is the center of the family more
than your physiologic heart. It's your emotional heart, it's your
intellectual heart, it's the center of the family. You can't
be a family physician without focusing on that. My belief
strongly is that if we can keep families heart healthy,
(05:26):
we can keep them together longer. A lot of people
focus on how do you add years to someone's life,
But I want to focus on how to add life
to those years, And the way that you do that
is by having a healthy, strong family bond. You eat together,
you work together, you work out together and you pray together.
I'm so excited to meet the speaker because I went
(05:49):
to school in the Bronx for two years. I do
with Clinton High.
Speaker 6 (05:52):
School and live the part he loves you from that
not far away from where he was.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
I was at one forty seventh and third, one forty
nine and thirty, so I understand the burden that exists
in that area and I remember it from all those
years ago, back in the sixties. I've had the pleasure
of gaining a platform where I can share information by
being the first black president of the American Academy of
Family Physicians. And it's not that Academy represents over one
(06:21):
hundred and eighty four thousand family physicians across America. It's
not about look at me. It's about how do I
leverage that position to get the right messages out. For instance,
one of the things that Miss Wheeler talked about was
health disparities. Not I' would ask people, is diabetes health disparity?
And they'd say yes, And I'd say is heart disease
(06:41):
a health disparity? And they'd say yes, And I say,
neither one is a health disparity. They are symptoms of
health disparities. It's the systematic problem, the system problem that
creates the disparities. So I like to have people be
aware of what's the difference between the disparate condition and
the community and the infrastructure that creates that problem. And
(07:04):
I'd love to talk with you more about that today.
I'm just so excited to be here with you. Thank
you for the chance to be here.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Oh no, I'm excited. I learned a lot from you
when we did that panel together. That's why I'm really
excited that you're here, and Paula like with the work
that you're doing. I was telling you on the way here,
we were riding together, and I was talking about my
own issues that I've had, and I think all of us,
if it's not personal, but we have somebody close to
us that has had, you know, heart issues and heart disease,
(07:33):
and so I can say that within my own family.
I know, you know, for myself, I know you reached
out to me initially because I've been open about the
issues that I've had with my cholesterol being really high
when I was young. You know, I was in my
early thirties and the doctor told me, oh, your cholesterol
is so high it will be an issue for you
later if you don't take care of it now. And
(07:54):
fortunately I was able to find that out early on
and really make some changes in my lifestyle that were
permanent changes that I had to make in order to
make sure and it's been fine ever since, but definitely
something that I continue to monitor. And so when we
talk about that, Paula, I was also telling you, I
also read that people will tell you that in the
(08:14):
Black community we don't have the highest rates of high cholesterol,
but when it comes to heart disease, have we die
at a higher rate than any other group of people.
So can we talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Yeah, definitely, And for Black health, we really like to
focus less on kind of like individual actions and telling
people you need to do this, you need to eat healthier,
you need to do that. Like those things are obviously
very very important, but for us as an organization, we
really go back to what you were getting to, doctor Jones,
(08:48):
those social determinants of health. And how so, social determinants
of health are the non medical factors that affect your health.
So it's things like where you live, the quality of
your edge education, the access to the kinds of food,
nutritious foods are not. And so we know like Detroit,
New York, Atlanta, you know, all the places that our
(09:12):
people live, like, there's a lot of residential racial segregation,
and so issues like that, like policies things like redlining
that are still operating that like racial segregation that causes
black people to have less access to these health promoting resources,
to those social determinants of health. So that's why you
(09:34):
can look at almost any issue, you know, health outcome,
particularly cardiovascular disease, and you see these immense differences by
race with these health disparities.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
What are some things you've learned, Carl, just from being
in the Bronx and like you said, the issues in
the Bronx that you guys have had, and what are
some things that you feel like have been useful or helpful,
and what is some of the pushback that you feel
like you receive when it comes to residents.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
Well, we do try to do that as well, as
I said, you know, when I first got elect to speaker,
we said we want to have a family's First agenda,
uplifting all aspects of a family and particularly women who
are put in you know, in black households, often the
leaders of those households. We just tried to do all
of those things that uplifted. So of course, trying to
(10:22):
put an educate a let's say, importance on funding education,
funding higher education, making sure that people do have access
to healthcare, and still trying to push people from using
the emergency rooms as their primary care physicians. That's often
the biggest challenge that I find in the BRONX, getting
(10:43):
people to want to go to their doctor rectly and
go get the regular checkups. It's like people often are
behind and just trying to play. So we're really just
trying to move the whole the whole structure that surrounds people,
particularly people of color, to just try to move them forward.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
And doctor Warren Jones, I talked specifically about cholesterol right now,
So can we discuss that a little bit because some
people might be listening and not understand because I know,
even for me, I mean I learned this in school,
but I still need to keep getting it, like ingrained
in me the different types. Because there's good cholesterol, there's
bad cholesterol. How can you monitor that? What's the problem
with the bad cholesterol?
Speaker 5 (11:22):
Yes, Well, as you learned in school, cholesterol is a compound. Okay,
it's kind of a waxy kind of substance, and it's
found all over the body. One of the problems that
people don't recognize is when we talk about heart disease.
The same way cholesterol affects the blood vessels and the heart,
it afflects the brain, it affects the kidneys, it affects
(11:42):
the liver, it affects the eyes, it affects all of it.
So the cholesterol is something we've got to be careful
to learn about. There are two categories of cholesterol. Three actually,
there's something called triglycerides, and there's low density lip of
proteins and high density lipe of proteins. The triglycerides we
(12:03):
don't really worry as much about because it's easier to
manage them. They're short acting. It's the HDL, which is
a good cholesterol. You want to have high numbers. You
get that, but doing all of the things that I
don't really do as much as I should, by eating
healthy and exercising and working out, so you know, you
don't get a gut like this by working on your
(12:23):
HDL all the time. But then there's the LDL, the
low density lipe of protein. That's the one that people
usually call the bad cholesterol, and the reason is because
it is most readily turned into the plaques that line.
Imagine you've got a host pipe in your backyard and
(12:44):
the rust the dirt builds up in that hosset pipe
and begins to block off that hole and you can't
get the water through. That's what cholesterol does to your
blood vessels. So it's the cholesterol that builds up that
leads that to be a problem. And when you've got
a low density like of protein that's high, you got
much better chance of having that. So what are we
(13:06):
worried about? My goddaughter niece had a stroke at thirty nine.
Fortunately she lived a lot of people don't. I'd give
talks and I'd ask how many of you had someone
in your family that had a stroke before age fifty,
and over half the audience's hands would go up when
they were people of color. And it got to the
(13:28):
point that even my own daughter died early on from
complications of heart disease. She had some signs of congestive
heart failure in her forties, and I told her she
needed a defibrillator, something to shock her heart back into functioning,
(13:50):
and I said, talk to your doctor about it. She
went and talked to a doctor and he said, well,
we can manage you without it. Three weeks later she
was dead.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
Clinicians often don't listen closely to women if they don't
take care of the women regularly. If you have the
longitudinal relationship where people know you know them and they
know you, then you have a good example we all
saw during COVID where this's female physician actually chronicled her
(14:25):
own demise from complications of COVID, whether the system did
not believe her thought she was drug seeking even though
she was a physician describing her symptoms. So that's one
one of the challenges of the symptoms. But so we've
got to work with health professionals and folks in your community,
your listeners. They've got to say, I want my doctor
(14:48):
to listen to me.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Because sometimes you go to the doctor and they don't
have a lot of time. There's patients waiting, and they're
trying to get you in and out, and it might
be something wrong and you're telling them or you feel rushed,
so you're not able to really like explain in detail,
and sometimes they'll tell you, well, you'll be fine. If
it keeps on bothering. You call me back and you're like, okay,
because you don't want to be a bother really, and
(15:11):
you're thinking about, okay, there's a line of people and
they're just trying to rust me out the door. But
you need to advocate for yourself.
Speaker 5 (15:17):
When you get in front of that doctor. You're the
most important person in the world. But you've got homework
to do when you get Before you go, make a
note to yourself with the things that you want to
make sure and the document the symptoms you've been having
so that you can effectively and efficiently convey all of
that information. But if you want to wander, there is
some time for that.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Right The other thing people have to stop doing is
googling stuff to see, you know, how people will have
something wrong and then go on Google and then diagnose themselves.
I'm a little guilty of that sometimes, but honestly, you know,
it is important to make sure that we have our
annual checkups and like you said, document and make sure
when you go in there you know what you're.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Going in there for.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Because sometimes you'll be like, okay, this is let me
just google this. Oh I just need some you know, X,
Y and Z to try to fix this, and it
could be something that the longer you wait, it's worse,
Like if I didn't go when I did, it could
have been way worse for me later. And even knowing
what you want to get checked out for, like when
we go to the doctor, what should what should we
(16:18):
be asking?
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Like what type of testing should we be having done?
Speaker 4 (16:22):
Well, you know, Andrew, you mentioned a funny funny story.
You know, when I, if I eat a lot of
processed foods, I end up having GI issues. And so
as you say, going on the internet, I thought I
had everything colon cancer and I remember while I was
they were taking in for the colonoscopy. I remember saying
this to my doctor and he said, stay off the
(16:44):
f and internet.
Speaker 5 (16:45):
That's what you have.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
But you know, but I but I was very descriptive
with him, and I do think it is the doctor says,
you know, you gotta be honest. Tell your doctor what
you know, what's you know, what's going on, what you're feeling,
Don't hold any don't hold anything anything back when you
go doctor. Typically black men are the worst. I'm not
one of those, you know. Fortunate for me. I have
every doctor's cell phone number.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I'm annoying to all of them, have a cough.
Speaker 4 (17:10):
I just to that point because I think with us,
you know, I think the body is a wonderful machine.
Most times it does tell you when something is wrong,
and I just think we have to sometimes listen to
our bodies and communicate that to the doctor.
Speaker 5 (17:23):
That is so critically important. Listen to your body. Way
back in nineteen seventy one when I started medical school,
not when the earth was cool. Just after that, my doctor,
my professor, said, if you listen to the patients, they
will tell you what's wrong. They may not give you
the diagnosis, but they'll tell you enough so that you
(17:45):
know what's wrong. And so one of the things I
try to do today is to teach young doctors and
medical schoodents to listen to their patients. And I tell patients,
the best thing you can be is an informed, intelligent,
motivated person when you're going to see your doctor. That's
the best of all circumstances.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Yeah, and so what should we be asking for, like
what type of testing? I definitely want to know that
because I told Paul of this earlier.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
So when you watch the video, you'll see. But the reason.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Why I went and even was doing like blood testing
and everything was X that was cheating. But you know,
what should we be asking for when we go When
we're getting because I remember even getting my life insurance,
you know, they do everything because they want to make
sure that share and good health before they issue that policy.
But when we go to the doctor, what should we
be saying we need to get done just for a
(18:35):
general checkup.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
I mean, I'll say, for me, you know, I was
in a car accident. I'd say in like the early nineties,
and I'd say, you know, maybe twenty something years later,
I found that I have bone spurs on my on
my neck and sometimes it triggers and I get this
excruciating pain, and I'd go to my orthopedic doctor and
he compare the X rays and he says, even though
(18:57):
there's no change in the X ray, he says, but
I don't care what the X ray shows me.
Speaker 5 (19:02):
I care what you're telling me that you're feeling.
Speaker 4 (19:04):
So I think that we should never back away from
what we're feeling and just be as honest and descriptive
as you can. What you talked about, what you what
you are, you know what your feeling. I feel like
that that helps, even though I'd say what I saw
on the X ray looked like there was no change,
but I was in a lot of pain.
Speaker 5 (19:22):
Yeah, and that's a very real thing. UH doctors want
you to talk to them about pain rather than you're
going to talk to uh missally in the community who
tells you to buy all of this stuff that you
waste your money and you don't feel better. But one
of the things that you can do. This is one
of the times you can go to the internet.
Speaker 6 (19:41):
There are there are recommendations from something called the United
States a Preventive Services Task Force, and they recommend and
at your age group the kinds of things that you
need to be screened for. Okay, if you look up
the USPSTF, the United States Preventive Services Task Force for
(20:02):
your age, it'll tell you age and gender, It'll tell
you and.
Speaker 5 (20:07):
I would encourage you to make a list of those things.
Don't take them the article. Make a list of them
and ask that of your doc when you go in.
I had eleven brothers and sisters. I've only got nine now,
and I can tell you that for the last forty
years I've been telling them to do that, and they
end up going in there and getting what they wanted
(20:29):
and they're living longer because of that. So I would
encourage you to do it.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Now, what role does family history play when it comes
to cardiovascular disease.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
Plays a big role. It's not always the decisions you make,
it's fund of your genetic makeup. Also, that's why there's
something called familial hypercholesterolemia familiar familiar hyperlipidemia, where even though
families may eat well and exercise, that in certain family
(21:03):
lines as a genetic potential predisposition. So what we're doing
now in science is we're looking for genetic markers, and
these genetic markers are telling us who are the people
that are at greater risk. One of the things that
most of your women on the phone, I mean, on
the program we'll learn about is the genetic testing about
breast cancer. We now know which families are at higher risk,
(21:26):
and there are other Heart disease has similar kinds of
things that are being developed. But I can tell you
that with the medications that exists and the changes in
your exercise and eating, you can overcome those challenges. Most
often if you're honest with yourself so you know, if
you live in the community where it's not a safe
(21:47):
place to walk, get together with the speaker and some
of the folks to go to Walmart and say, dedicate
a section of your parking lot where we can walk safely.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
All right, Age, And I learned today too, Angela. You're
already kind of doing something like that with your club.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Yeah, And I've done in my round club really as
a way to get people who normally wouldn't work out
to come and do that.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
So you don't have to run, you can walk, you
can jog.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
So now we can ask Kyle to join us.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
And I want to touch on something you said earlier,
Carl about colon cancer and how a lot of times
black men don't like to go get tested for certain things.
And that's that's an issue that's really near to Black
health because we had a very big national and still
do have a national colon cancer screening program. Because something
that's very important for us is kind of building this
(22:36):
bridge between the black community and doctors, because we know
a lot of times it's hard for us to actually
get there, whether it's where we live or our relationship.
Is a lot of mistrust between our communities and you know,
the medical system. And so where we kind of come
in as a as a nonprofit is to try to
(22:56):
help provide people with resources that they might not otherwise get.
And so one of the ones I also wanted to
plug was it's a program that Ampjin has. You can
go to what is my LDL dot com and actually
find out information and find out your eligibility to receive
a free LDL or like that that bad cholesterol to
(23:18):
get a free LDL test. So go to what is
my LDL dot com and get more information on how
you can get one of those tests if for some reason,
you know, you're unable to right now go to the
doctor and you just want to have that information for
yourself too. There are free resources, and so for black health,
that's really important for us to like give people free
resources and take some of that out of the clinic,
(23:40):
you know, and put it in people's hands.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
You know, people will tell you that racism doesn't exist anymore,
depending on who you ask, But can we talk about
racism in the healthcare system and how that does affect
our community?
Speaker 5 (23:55):
Well, do you know, the Institute of Matterson did some
research After many years folks were saying we're being treated
differently and having different outcomes as people of color, and
that there was disparity in the way we were managed.
And it wasn't until that research actually occurred by the
(24:18):
Institute of Medicine. They showed that for fully insured blacks
and fully insured brown people that the quality of care
they got was significantly lower than the quality of care
offer to fully insured whites. Now we're not talking about
people who were poor. We took the best, okay, of
(24:38):
both communities. And if you want to go to the internet,
look up the IOM Report on Health Disparities, okay, and
that'll show you. There's a graphic to show the difference.
So race plays a big role. The big problem I
would ask you to do is to try to find
the clinician, a physician, a nurse practitioners, someone that you
(24:59):
care care that you seek for health care who can
identify with you, someone that's either has a similar background
or similar gender, because the cultural relationship in healthcare is
critically important. I'll tell you about another family member who
complained for a lot of times, many years about a
misery on her side, and I kept telling her to
(25:20):
tell her doctor. When I finally moved close to where
she was. I had her to go see a female
physician that I knew would listen to her. She saw
on her Thursday, did a CT on a Friday, and
Monday removed a big cancer off of her kidney. Wow,
the misery on her side for those three years was
a cancer three years and nobody would listen to her
(25:42):
enough to be able to take it from her misery
to something physiologic. So you got to find a health
care provider, a doctor that you can communicate, communicate with,
especially surrounding heart disease and cholesterol management, because it affects
so many different systems. As we talked to and I'm
sorry everybody doesn't have a master's in communication of hard information.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Yeah, Well, governmentally, one of the biggest challenges that we're
looking at, particularly amongst Black women, as maternal mortality.
Speaker 5 (26:14):
Yes, and that's been a.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Huge issue here that we're trying to come up with
a legislation to have a commission to study why it
seems that more Black women seem to be dying during
childbirth than And as you said, it's not women who
are just don't medicate, it's women who have private insurance
are still not getting the same type of quality of
care as their white counterpart to have a baby. So
(26:37):
that's so governmentally, like I said, I try to take
the information, make sure that we can have legislation and
funding to try to figure out some of these challenges.
Speaker 5 (26:45):
Well, I thank him for that, because it's not just
it's not just maternal mortality or funeral mortality. You've got healthy,
you've got well, you've got young, well insured people like
in my own family who still have small forgestationally babies,
babies born with low birth weight, and they fully insured
and they eat healthy. So a lot of research needs
(27:07):
to be done because babies that are born smaller at
greater risk of having problems later on. And I think
that mister speaker, if you can have them take a
look at that as well, I think that will help immensely.
American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology has a working group
on attacking feudal mortality. The track star Alison Felix. Felix
(27:32):
spoke to us last year and she talked about her
own experience how she almost lost her life with pregnancy,
and now we've got the track Start of Mississippi who
just lost her life last year. So I hope that
that work gets funded and done because we're losing too
many intelligent, beautiful Black women and their babies to this condition.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And you know, one thing that I have seen people
being more aware of is doula's and that the the
necessity of having a doula there with you to advocate
for you and know the questions to ask and know
some things maybe not necessary, some things maybe you do need,
and having somebody there that is well versed so that
(28:13):
they can make sure that they are speaking up for
you or telling you what it is that you need
to know, or when you're not able to make a
decision on the spot about something, being able to give
the information that you may need, because there's times that
women are having c sections that they may not need
to you know. Again, like just so many different things
that we may not have the information to know what
(28:34):
to ask or what to even say. So I think
that's something that has been really helpful lately, because doulas
is something I only heard of, maybe in the past
few years, but this has been around, you know, way
longer than that. And Speaker Hasey, you know what I
wanted to ask you about too, we were talking about
these social.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
Determinants of health, and.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
So what about stress, right like, because I feel like
us does add you know, to cardiovascular disease. And obviously,
doctor Warren Jones, you can tell us more about that.
But what are some things that you see people stressed
out about the most in New York that can cause
health issues.
Speaker 4 (29:14):
I'd say lack of secure housing is a big issue,
you know. I'd say the big three, lack of lack
of access to healthcare, lacks of lack of access to employment.
You know, those are usually the big three motivators of stress.
And we see that even follows through and I've even
tried even when we're looking at educating our young people
(29:36):
that often we seem like we only worried about what
was happening, you know, to Johnny while he was you know,
in school.
Speaker 5 (29:43):
For those you know, six hours.
Speaker 4 (29:45):
But we also have to look at what is the
environment that Johnny's going home to and what is his
parents going through? This sometimes can affect the you know,
the entire families. That's why we're trying to, as I say,
you try to look at not not look at these
things as in silos. But how did they all come
together when it looks like even an individual individual person,
you know, do they have a job, do they have
(30:05):
good housing? And then as it goes on, you know
into the children. So those I'd say, the big, the
big things that can lead.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
To stresscause sometimes people felt physically ill from the stress.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
So is that a real thing?
Speaker 5 (30:18):
Yes, it is a real thing. There was Actually there
were actually some studies that were done by the NIH
about ten years ago that would These were studies that
were done in the rat population and they showed the
rest the rat, stressed rat, the normal rat okay, and
they were able to show her not only the structure
(30:38):
of the rat change to where it was skinny and malnourished,
but it also had genetic changes that led to his
offspring or her offsprings and potentially having problems with stress.
So it's a very real, real thing. I tell people,
don't don't freak out about the word stress. There's two
types of stress. There's eu stress, you stress in dis stress. Distress.
(31:02):
EU stress is what you get when you're about to shoot,
go and run that track meet, when you go out
to run with your friends, that surge of energy that's
you stress. That's good for you. It's the distress that's
harmful when you're worried how am I going to feed,
how am I going to do this, and how I'm
going to do the others. So the number one thing
I think causes problems for many women around stress surrounding
(31:24):
stress is getting access to behavioral health support in order
to decompress someone that's stress and help them to learn
how to deal with it. And so they internalize it
because nobody wants to be viewed as weak. Okay, So
I think the thing that bothers me is that women
are the keys are the health of a family, and
if they're not healthy, how can the family? It's your fault.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
No, But we talk about this a lot too in
our anti racism and health workshops, you know, like how
racism causes poor health outcosms. We teach just that concept
and stress itself, like stress that can come from racial
violence and discrimination that has a direct impact on negative
health outcomes. But then exactly as you were saying, speaker,
(32:09):
he see like there's a lot of stress that is
caused by these conditions in which people live on safe housing,
poor access to food, and just all the day to
day things that people go through and then that has
a negative outcome, negative impact on mental and physical health outcomes.
So it really works in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
You know what else I want to talk about too.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
As we're discussing this, Okay, these drugs that like ozempic
and we go, we all of that was for diabetes, right,
but now a lot of people are taking that for
weight loss issues. And then I see lawsuits popping up.
I see all kinds of things happening. So doctor Warren Jones,
I want you to just let us know when is
it time to get on this medication? Is it harmful
(32:52):
for people who are doing this? I mean, because listen,
obesity can lead to a lot of times to heart disease, right,
So I just want to get from you, doctor Warren Jones,
not from the internet, you know, your thoughts on that,
because I do know a lot of people who are
taking your zembic.
Speaker 5 (33:10):
She showing us how to put you on the hot seat.
Ozempic is designed to help your body to metabolize the
sugars you take in and when your insulin isn't working. Well,
that's the concept. But one of the things that does
is it helps your body from taking in too much sugar,
and there's that extra sugar that you're not taking in
(33:33):
that's causing your body's weight to go down because it's
going out in you bowel movements. There's certain people for
whom those types of drugs are not helpful. If someone
has an irritable bowel disease or some other GI problems,
that may not work well for them. If they have
problems with severe constipation, it may not work for them. Okay,
(33:59):
I really ask people, don't make a decision. I was
looking at something this morning and it was saying, you
don't even have to go see your doctor. Just write
to us and we'll have you talk to someone and
we'll send it to your home.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Market.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Don't do that, women, because I get them all the
time Olympic and He's like, just right.
Speaker 5 (34:24):
In and get folks. For some individuals, Uh, that class
of drugs may be the answer from having a bypass
surgery or something else, but you shouldn't make that decision
on your own. Take it to your medical home that
person or the team of people that are usual in
(34:47):
customary source care, those people whose phone number you have. Okay,
that when you walk in, they'll say, I haven't really
good to see you again, go and talk to them
and have them help you to make an informed decision. Now,
just remember that you also got to know when to stop.
Some of the lawsuits come from something called what GOVI face,
(35:10):
where some people lose so much weight that their facial
structures begin to slide down. Because it wasn't well, it's
once you start losing weight. Really it's it's it's called
it's called Osempic face and google it. Okay, yeah, but
so that's why it needs to be done in a
(35:30):
clinical setting. Done in a clinical setting. Right now, there's
too much me to hug. But I am not a
candidate for a GOVI or Ozmpics. So somebody you guys
have just stuck with me.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Okay, So you know, I do want to see for
all of us here today, what are some things that
we do in recognition for ourselves to make sure that
we remain healthy and that we are taking care of
our own cardiovascular health. Because I know, for me having
had that issue, it's something that always has stuck in
my mind ever since I had that high cholestero I
was like, I do not want to have to be
(36:01):
on medication for the rest of my life and it's
something that I've made lifestyle changes, but it's always a
work in progress, and so sometimes.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
I fall, but I get back up there.
Speaker 2 (36:11):
And so there are certain things that I've implemented in
my life long term to make sure that I'm, you know,
doing better than I have in the past.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
So why don't we start with you, Paula?
Speaker 3 (36:22):
Sure, Yeah, I love this question. And I was telling
you earlier too that I also was told by a
doctor that my cholesterol was a bit high and that
kind of shook me up as well. And so I
start to implement things very similar to you, Angela, Like
I go on walks a lot. I walk my dog,
and I make sure to go on long walks with
my dog just so that I can you know, exercise,
(36:43):
get that like low impact activity in my day. And
then I'm also really big back to our conversation about stress,
like I think a lot about what is stressing me
out and trying to eliminate those things from my life,
particularly as a black woman, knowing how heart disease is
for us. So I'm like, look, if this is stressing
me out, if this guy is stressing me out, if.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
That's whatever, he's gotta go.
Speaker 5 (37:06):
You're not good for my home.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
I really am really like very big on my mental
health and my stress levels.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Yeah, I know your job is stressful.
Speaker 4 (37:18):
I'd say, to be honest, after the whole Andrew CMO,
the question of impeachment that was really a lot was
was on me. I know, the center of potential was
on him, but with the New York State Assembly being
the ones to decide whether he would be in peace
or at you, I really say, like after that summer,
I says, you know, I cannot let this job consume
(37:40):
me like that. So I said, I'm going to start
doing me things. Soon after that, I started to learn
how to play the guitar. I can't play eight print songs.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
Okayrances his favorite. If you follow him, you know that
I just started.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
You know, I do have a have a treadmill in
my house. I have a treadmill in my apartment in Albany.
We built this beautiful brand new y m c A,
which I'm remember I having been there, you know, recently, And
as you say, sometimes you know, you stay on top
of it and then sometimes you fall up. I find
that my weight kind of is worse when I'm in
Albany because sometimes I feel like I do stress eat
(38:12):
and as soon as I'm done, you know, I can
get back on my healthy, my healthy regimen. But it's
like you just try to get better. I do try
to walk a lot. Marcusia who drives me. He hates
when I.
Speaker 5 (38:23):
Tell him I want to walk because he doesn't want
me to walk by myself.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
No, But I just try to do those those small
things and really the managing of the of the stress
because sometimes with the stress it can trigger, you know,
the issue that I have with the bone starts from
the carts and then so I really just try to
figure out ways to just relax the stress.
Speaker 5 (38:42):
I like to you know, play.
Speaker 4 (38:44):
Video games and and you know, do fantasy sports to
kind of give me something outside of this, you know
job that I love that is that it's actually tough,
but doing more me things. Like I said, the guitar
is a really big stress relief. Of my two guitars,
this one is named the Laura and the other one's
named Dorothy.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Which is.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
Why but you know it's more of the girls in
the songs.
Speaker 5 (39:10):
But you know, well, I name the new car Nikki.
But that's kind of what I do. I love it
you're so genuine. I love it. I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
And what do you do, doctor Warren Jones.
Speaker 5 (39:28):
Believe it or not, I learned to compensate. I put
myself in a mindset where I'm not gonna let this
bother me, okay, And I try to manage my own
expectations instead of letting people set the expectations for me.
Sometimes people will look at me sitting down watching the
(39:48):
game and they don't realize that I'm doing mental gymnastics
that whole game, okay, and I'm working on things, and uh,
my wife gets upset because she she'll know I have
a big talk coming up, and when are you gonna
work on it. I've been working on it for three days.
But then I get out in a walk. I something
(40:08):
very simple that people can do if you're in a building,
walk the stairs.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
And I said, I do that. Yeah, I'm in the airport.
I don't take the walk the move and walkway.
Speaker 5 (40:17):
I walk. Yeah, two up and one down every day.
It's a good way to do it. And and also,
you know, really just put a reminder. I've got this
watch that says, stand up and walk, you idiot. My
wife is in the background. I mean, even if she's
(40:40):
not home, I still hear. Okay, no, but Tom, and
you also got to find somebody who can egg you on,
who can function in your best interests with you and
for you, because there are gonna be sometimes that you're
going to say, I really don't want to do this,
but there's somebody that look at you, that you know cares,
and then they will say you really need to and
(41:01):
that push your help. Sometimes the caring environment will work.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
And accountability partners, that's what I call it.
Speaker 5 (41:11):
All right, but thank you for the chance to talk
about this. You know, just think again about how black
women have the highest rate of death and complications of
cardiovascar disease. And who are the most important peoples and
people in our in our African American society. Our mothers,
our daughters are women, okay, and we and we've got
(41:33):
to help them to be healthy and let them know
that we love them enough to care about them. So
get them to go and get their screenings, because they'll
make my wife make sure I go, and sometimes I
have to remind her to go.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Yeah, and honestly, and also passing it down to the
next generation. Sometimes we have such bad habits from our
whole lives, and our parents had such bad habits, and
our grandparents had such bad eating habits, and those are
things that we, you know, can pass down. And even
like going to school in public school, the things that
they feed you at school.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
It's just a lot of.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Things that I think in the environment that can you know,
continue to keep this going.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
But we have to be more aware.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
And I think for everybody listening, if you have a family,
if you have children, just think about making sure that
they're doing things better. And sometimes that's leading by example,
making sure that you do things better. You know, get
a juicer at home and put some fruits and vegetables delicious,
and you can make your own juices with your own
favorite fruits and vegetables at home, you know, and then
your kids will start to give that to your kids
(42:33):
and they realize it tastes good, and so it can
be healthy and delicious at the same time. It doesn't
have to be healthy and nasty. You can have great
tasting things at home.
Speaker 5 (42:44):
And one of the problems the speaker probably has an
Albany is everybody wants to take him out to dinner
to meet with him and pick his brain.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
And if they're paying, okay, face time, but actually know
what it is.
Speaker 5 (43:02):
I don't do a lot of that.
Speaker 4 (43:03):
If it's not like a fundraising on an official dinner
or something like that. I kind of just say I
call my apartment the cave.
Speaker 5 (43:09):
I kind of just you know, stay there.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
But really what it is is the snacking while you're
sitting around. That is more than the you know, people
have chocolate. You know, we have a member's lounge. I
try to get more healthy things that we do have
healthy foods in there, but it's the it's the intimate
and snacking, I think is what kind.
Speaker 7 (43:30):
Of testimony testimony from the Unfortunately, one of the exceptions
has a big candy bowl of like little the mini
kit cats.
Speaker 2 (43:42):
And just we have this problem up here, I heard
because there's always like some sponsor. We have food every Wednesday,
you know, and it's like a lot of food and everything.
Speaker 5 (43:52):
That the big meal. It's the snacking, Yeah, the little
snacks that I think kind of one meal to day.
I started it in the morning and I ended it.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
Was okay, now I get it.
Speaker 5 (44:06):
For the whole day, Yes, I just it just goes
all day.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Well, how can people reach all of you because we
do want to learn more about black health. And again,
if you guys want to get your get more information,
you can go to my l d L dot com.
What what is my l d L dot com? And
that's where you can get more information on how to
get a free L d L test as well. But
Paula for Black Health, how can people reach you?
Speaker 3 (44:28):
Yeah? Yeah, please, we want everyone to stay connected with
Black Health. We have a lot of exciting programs. I mean,
almost everything we talked about today, we have a program
coming on this year that's going to address it. So
please find us on social media. We're on all social
media platforms at Black Health. That's b l k H
L t H.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
All right, so much Angela, No, thank you, And again
that's what is my L d L dot com. That's
how you can get that free L d L test.
Now speak of Carl, do you want people to reach you?
Speaker 5 (44:55):
Sure?
Speaker 4 (44:55):
People want to know what they do anyway, try to
understand or ask, you know, what are we doing i'd
say in a government sense of on all of these
topics that we talked about today. And of course angel
thank you you know for doing this. You know, friendship
that we've had over the years. I appreciate you caring
about black people, but you can reach me a speaker
(45:16):
at NY Assembly dot gov.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Okay, great, thank you, and doctor Warren Jones.
Speaker 5 (45:21):
Yeah. I invite people to feel free to reach out
to me if I can assist you. But I just
want to advise you of something. I can't treat you
over the phone. Okay, but if you've got a question
on how to phrase something to take to your doctor,
I can help with that. I can give you friendly advice,
but I'm not going to treat you over the phone.
You can use my email at d R W. A.
(45:42):
Jones at gmail dot com and feel free to ask
the question. The worst questions are those that are never asked. Okay,
that's a fact, so we can find a way to
do it. And I just want to tell you I
heard about black health long before I met them. You
got to be the chain you want to see.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
I love having your community.
Speaker 5 (46:03):
You got to be the change you want to see,
and they're being the change by going out, by structuring things,
by interfacing with folks who are willing to fund. You
got to be the change you want to see. So
thank you for that.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
What if you have somebody who you love close to
you that you cannot get them to go to the doctor.
Speaker 5 (46:21):
Word the hell out of them. That's what I do
every time. I've got folks that are smoking, and I
tell them all the time stop smoking. So they still
walking around so they don't have to see me. But
seriously worry them, but from a position of love rather
than annoyance, because if it's annoyance, they're going to turn
you off. But if you can find a way to
(46:43):
convey that. But you know how much I care, and
that's why I'm saying this to you, And tell you what,
if you're afraid to go, let's go together. I'll go
with you and I'll sit out there and if you
want go see the doctor, and you can have them
send me a copy of R and I'll go over
it with you. Okay, But you gotta give them a
comfort zone for them to know that it's safe to
(47:06):
do that. I hear things about people that their family
members will never ever hear because they've got to have
They know that with me, it's a safe zone. So
you gotta find a way to have that with someone.
I'm sure the speaker has that too, with people that
coming there and confessing his office the same thing. You know,
we gotta do that for each other. And that's how
we spread the love right excellent, we were loving in camp.
(47:29):
I do that to strangers.
Speaker 4 (47:30):
If I see people smoking, I walk up to them
and say, those things are gonna kill you. And I say,
I say, this will all just love and affection and
I just want you to And I say that to
complete strangers.
Speaker 3 (47:39):
So I will say, I'll put my public health perspective
on this one, which is just that like as a
public health practitioner, a lot of times what we think
about is like harm reduction instead of just totally. So
with's smoking, like a lot of people, it's hard for
them to just stop. So I had someone I love
dearly who smoked a lot, and I would tell them,
(48:00):
like just just document like how much you smoke, and
then next week, try to smoke one or two less
in the week, so like just reducing over time. And
so that's that's how I show love and understanding, compassion
and going along with them in that journey too, because
it's like just do what you can to get a
little bit more out of out of life, you know.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
So next time you go up to somebody say, listen,
document how much you smoke and just try to reduce that.
Speaker 6 (48:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (48:27):
I have done that, though people they struggle saying, like
with weight and things like that. I tell them probably
to me. But the easiest thing was when I wanted
to start to lose weight was cutting out the sugary drinks.
Because you can still get to eat as much as
you did, but the amount of sugar that you take in.
Speaker 5 (48:43):
I can't even drink those things anymore. They's so sweet.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
But that was one way for people, you know, struggle
with their weight and stuff like that gilt to it,
but you don't realize how much calories you actually drink
drinking these super sugary drinks.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
And read the labels too.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
Sometimes you're buying things and you think it's healthy and
then you read the bag.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
And you're like, whoa, I want to tell you what
it is.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
In the um It'll be like this is ninety five
juice and you're like, what type of juice?
Speaker 5 (49:10):
You know?
Speaker 1 (49:11):
What does that mean?
Speaker 5 (49:12):
An angel? One of the other things you can have
people do is be innovative. You know, every time I
talk to someone in January, they said, this is what
I'm giving up for the new year, and then it
only lasts one month, And to ask them, why don't
you come up with an innovator in an innovative solution.
Why don't you say, this is what I'm sacrificing this month.
If you can get the month to the month with
(49:33):
fewer drinks, Okay, I'm going to go back, and then
the week the month after that, I want to do
it again, and you can get in the habit of
finding out you really can live without those things. Especially
now that this is Black Health Month, we want to
focus on that and come up with some healthful ways
of doing things.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
All right, perfect, well, Paula, thank you so much for
putting us all together, you know, in the same room.
I really do appreciate all the work that you've been
doing out of the goodness, and.
Speaker 1 (50:00):
I really appreciate your support.
Speaker 3 (50:01):
It has meant a lot of us.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
All Right, Well, thank you again. Health is wealth is
way up.
Speaker 4 (50:06):
And I will say it's like a lot of times
the elected officials or the professions, but I really say
it's like it's like the community groups, the on the
ground groups that really help make a you know community,
you know, wonderful.
Speaker 5 (50:17):
So I want to thank you for what you do.
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (50:20):
Okay, all right, it's way up, guys, way up.
Way Up With Angela Yee News
Host
Angela Yee
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