Stan and Clarence chat with Dr. Haithum Hussein and Tony Moore about the patient perspective of strokes.Listen along as Tony shares his patient story. Join the conversation at healthchatterpodcast.comBrought to you in support of Hue-MAN, who is Creating Healthy Communities through Innovative Partnerships. More about their work can be found at http://huemanpartnership.org/
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Health Chatter. And today's show is a special show on a stroke survivor. And you'll hear his story. We'll get to that in a minute. Previously, beforehand, we had done a show on stroke and all the information that you, the listening audience, should really know about it, the different types of stroke, how to prevent a stroke, treat a stroke and manage it.
But today will be special because we'll hear from somebody who's gone through it. So stay with us for a second. We've got a great crew, as always, that keeps us going and gives us all the background information we need, does all the technical work for us. We have Sheridan Nygaard. who's doing our recording today. She also does some of our background research for our team and also our marketing.
Maddie Levine-Wolf, Aaron Collins, Deandra Howard, also three of our researchers. Matthew Campbell, who normally does our production stuff. He's overseas right now. He'll be back, I believe, next week. So thanks to everybody. You guys are really, really wonderful. It's really a It's a pleasure working with this crew because they really know how to do it. And it's really, really nice.
And then, of course, there's Clarence Jones. Clarence and I have been doing this for a while. We're great colleagues. We love doing this. We love chatting about different topics in health. And today's topic is no different. So thank you, Clarence. And then also Human Partnership is our partner. is our community-oriented group that looks at a variety of different health issues in the community.
And they are our sponsor for Health Chatter. So many thanks to them. You can see more information about them at their website, humanpartnership.org, O-R-G. So thank you to everybody. Today, we have two guests with us, Dr. Haitham Hussain, who worked with us on the previous show on stroke. And he was the one who recommended that we also talk to a patient. So Haitham, thank you for coming.
helping us put this show together. And I'm gonna turn it over to you because I have a sense that you have a nice relationship with our other guests. So I'll let you introduce them.
Thank you very much, Stan. And hello to everyone. Thank you, Clarence, for having us again here. I am a stroke neurologist at the University of Minnesota. And about a year ago, Excuse me. About a year ago, we had a stroke patient who was very upset with us because he was discharged from the hospital before we talked to him about what exactly caused his stroke and...
The beginning of the relationship was a little bit rough, but I saw him in the clinic after his discharge and kind of clarified the misunderstanding. And we became friends since then. And I like my friend slash patient because of... how eloquent he is, and being an African American man, he taught me and also my colleagues and trainees at the University of Minnesota a lot.
He taught us a lot about how the African-American community view the healthcare system and how we can approach an African-American person who is sick in a way to build trust because trust is severely lacking. And I'm also the current board president of the American Heart Association. I brought my patient friend to the American Heart Association meeting and he shared his story with them.
I'm always very pleased and happy to let him talk and tell his story because there is no way that any of us can really experience and explain as much as he can. So without further ado, I introduce Tony Moore, my good friend. And thank you, Tony, for being here and being generous with your time.
And I know sometimes this is a little bit traumatic to go over the story of what happened to you, but I see great good come out from you sharing the experience.
Well, hello and thank you. So this is new to me. I have friends that do podcasts, but it's a little bit different because I don't know where to start here. But I want to say thanks to everyone for even inviting me to come and share my story in some narrative once again. So, yeah.
It's great. It's great having you. And so let's start. I start at the beginning, you know, uh, started at, you know, I, I suppose when you started maybe feeling symptoms, that might be, that might be a starting point.
Absolutely. So, um, was actually on a walk with my significant other. We were going for, you know, the, um, Hey, we should go for a walk. I was like, I don't want to. And then I'm like, maybe I should. So, um, we decided to go for a walk in the neighborhood.
And about maybe five blocks down the road, so 10, 15 minutes down the walkway, I started feeling my left foot kind of going a little bit numb. And, you know, I was thinking that old athlete, you know, it's kind of, you know, maybe it's one of those kind of things that your foot's just acting up. But, you know, and so... We continued on and we crossed the street.
And by the time we crossed the street at the corner, that numbness had gone to the bottom of my knee down. And so I felt instead of walking, I was more like throwing my leg forward. And I was telling Julie that, no, this is something a little bit different. And about halfway up the next street, it now had sort of gotten to my hip level. And at that time, I'm thinking, so...
About, so this was last year. So five years ago, one of my good friends that I played football with, just a, we call him a fawn, a freak of nature athlete, played for Dallas Cowboys, went to school, ran a, was as fast as me, weighed more than me, but he ran a 4.3, could lift out the gym, all the things from an athletic perspective that you would just say, this guy is the one. And
We were going to go back to our alma mater and unfortunately he couldn't make it because he had a catastrophic stroke where they had to do some surgery and he's now in a home. So at the time that I started feeling this, I'm thinking like, am I starting to have a stroke? So I sat down.
because I didn't want to do one of those things where you get full paralysis, if it is a stroke, and then you fall flat. So I sat down and I'm holding my arms out, you know, doing, you know, trying to move and everything like that. And then once it hit my arm, I told Julia, I said, I think I'm having a stroke. And I got to say that maybe about three times.
And then I lost my tongue and the face droop and everything happened. Wow. And from there, that's kind of where a little bit of the panic and more the real panic sort of set in. And, you know, it's funny because the stream of consciousness, what I was thinking about that time is. So I used to have a motorcycle back in the late 90s, early 2000s. Stopped riding.
And then that year, I think I just had bought my motorcycle. And so my whole thought process is I just bought a motorcycle and I can never ride it again because I'm having a stroke.
So let me let me ask you something, Tony. Do you, at that point, do you think, or maybe I should say prior to you having that episode, were you aware of the signs and symptoms of a stroke? Were you knowledgeable about any of it or were you kind of forced into dealing with it because of what was happening to you?
When you say knowledgeable, I would say that because of my buddy Rodney, I sort of versed myself as to what a stroke looks like. Yeah. Okay. But I don't really think that I went down into the trenches of salt, meat, all the other kind of things. And from that standpoint, because they were my lifestyle was one that, you know, I was proud of myself for my age, for my age.
I always look better, did everything better than all my peers at that same level. Right. So, you know, all my peers typically outweigh me by age. 30 to 40 pounds. They eat way worse than I do. They drink way worse than I do.
So all the things that I've purposely stayed away from and tried to, you know, like I didn't believe in medication, so I always wanted to do things so I didn't have to go on medications, right? So let me ask you this.
You say that you knew about the stroke warning signs, right? Did you then call 911 right away or there was a little bit of denial that, oh, this cannot be happening to me or was there a delay or you just called right away?
Not with me. I was telling Julie once my arm, once it hit my hand, I'm having a stroke. I'm having a stroke. We need to call 9-1-1. I'm having a stroke. We need to call 9-1-1. And the conversation was really, no, you're really, no, you're not. Oh, you know, it was one of those kinds of things. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And luckily for me, where I was having my stroke, I was on the corner, um,
Near a neighbor's house. And we didn't take our phones. We were both together. So why do I need a phone? So, you know, I wouldn't not be paying attention to her, those kind of things. And luckily, a lady was coming by walking and she had a phone. And so we called. And it seemed like it took forever for help to arrive. Yeah.
So the first thing that happened was the officer showed up and he had no clue whatsoever in terms of really what to do, except it felt like he was trying to keep the area clear, but there was nobody to keep the area clear from. Right. And but I did stay kind of calm. But again, the things that were going through my head, I was telling you about, you know, the motorcycle and some other things.
And then I started thinking on the positive things about, you know, I'm grateful. I took care of, you know, my life insurance and all these other kind of things. And I mean, I went from from not being able to do something to the worst tragedies of the whole thing. And then finally.
about because i it was it seemed like it was 30 minutes before the ambulance showed up it seemed like yeah yeah a lot of time and that is a lot of time yeah and in the time from the phone call to them showing up i started to feel i could close and open my hand again
And in the midst of them coming, getting me off the ground and putting me into the ambulance, then I could start to get some movement back.
So for our listening audience, I'm going to try to link a little bit. between what we're hearing now and what we talked about in our show with you previously, Haitham. Time is of the essence, okay? If you think you are having a stroke, you call 911. And there's some really good reasons for it because time is of the essence. And Haitham, you can talk about that a little bit more in detail.
But the truth of the matter is if you get into an ambulance and if they think you truly are having a stroke, they can warn the ER and they can get you in immediately without wasting any time whatsoever. For the listening audience, 911, emergency, don't wait. This is the opportunity to really hopefully save lives.
Can we quickly review the stroke warning signs for the audience?
Sure, we could do that, and then we'll circle back to Tony. Go ahead.
Weakness of one of the arms, one of the legs, one side of the body. Droopiness of one side of the face. Numbness or loss of sensation in one side of the body or one of the extremities. Difficulty speaking, either the words are slurred or a person is unable to express themselves in words or having difficulty understanding.
Difficulty with vision, either one eye goes blind without pain or both eyes cannot see one half of the visual field. Sudden loss of balance and coordination. And we call them, there is a mnemonic, BEFAST, B-E-F-A-S-T. B for balance, E for eye, F for face, A for arm, S for speech, and T is time to call 911.
Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Let's pick it up, Tony. So now you're in the ambulance.
Yeah. So I have a... I don't like needles. Right. So first thing they want to do is start poking me with not just the small needles, but the big ones. Right.
Yeah.
And I'm like, do I need to go through that and everything? Hey, I can move my arm now. You know, don't poke me. But they said, well, you know, this is the protocol. I was kind of, you know, again, disappointed.
A lot of things going through my brain is you don't need to have medical personnel unless you know that you had a bad issue, like you're having a bad issue, and then therefore you need to have something. So don't poke a hole in me if I don't know that what you're doing is a necessity to be putting holes in me.
Yeah.
OK, so after going through that, because I'm kind of standoffish and there's some history behind that, and I'll unpack that a little bit later. But so I get, you know, the needles and everything. They rush me to the hospital and they're having a conversation with me. And then from there, they take me into a room. And so there I go into a room.
and um meet with a couple of doctors and then they do they send me in to get a uh an mri come back from the mri and then i go back to the room and then from there it's well we'll have somebody come back and explain to you what's going on from that standpoint but um I didn't have what my buddy had, which is like a blockage that they had to open up and go in and get that moving some kind of way.
Cause if you don't have oxygen or something like that for a long enough time, then that's an issue. So that's kind of where things were left it at that.
So Hytham, let me ask you from what you just heard, um, Is that typical as far as initial emergency care for a potential stroke patient?
So when someone comes with stroke symptoms that are ongoing, we activate something called a stroke code. And that means that the emergency doctor, the neurologist on service, the pharmacist, the radiologist, the interventional radiology lab, everybody becomes alert that there is a potential stroke case that might require emergency treatment.
However, if someone comes with stroke symptoms that subsided, and we think that person might have had a transient ischemic attack or TIA, Many people feel that just getting an MRI will give us all the information we need beyond what a CT scan would do. I don't really remember if Tony went for CT first and did an MRI or went to MRI right away. I think we have both images.
I think I did both. Right. I think the CT is the first one. Right. And then I went later on that evening for the MRI.
Right. Yeah, but there is, of course, a lot of work, Clarence and Stan, that we do to speed up the stroke code process. And we calculate the time from the patient coming to the hospital to the patient getting treatment in minutes. We call it the door-to-needle time. Yeah.
And, you know, there is a lot of resources that are utilized to just shorten the door to needle time by five minutes or something. And that would people, you know, count as great success. So what we struggle with is when people are late coming to the hospital. And we really want to avoid that. And I just did an analysis of our data. looking at white versus non-white.
And we have about six or seven hours difference in the median time from stroke symptom onset to arrival to the hospital. Seven hours difference between the two groups. So I can talk about this later, but I want Tony to tell us you spent the entire night in the hospital and then the next day you saw a doctor, a hospitalist, and you were discharged?
Yeah, so cut to I'm antsy, right? I can move. I'm not really getting a lot of information per se, but I did go through some testing. All the tests sort of came back a little bit negative. And after I had my CT scan, they said, well, you have a little bit of a blockage, but that's all they told me.
You have a little bit of a blockage, we think, behind your eye, and we think that that's maybe the cause of what it was. But that's all I was given. So the night before, I'm in the hospital. They tell me I have a little bit of a blockage. OK. Then I go into the hospital. I stay overnight. And I see another person that does the echo on my chest.
And after that, it's pretty much, you know, they keep checking on me, but there's not really a lot going on. And so the discharge time is coming up. It's three o'clock. I'm ready to get out of the hospital. You know, I'm okay. I can move. And still hadn't seen a neurologist. No, I've seen somebody that was... Not you, not your team.
I, you know, they send in the hospital staff that sort of comes in and do those kind of things. But nobody that was, I guess, part of my actual true care team or anything of that nature. So about two o'clock, they tell me they're going to release me for the three o'clock switch over or whatever. And so I pack up my things and Julie and I leave the hospital.
And we're approximately 20 minutes from the hospital when Dr. Hussein's colleague gives me a call.
The neurologist who was on service that week.
And at the time, he says, Tony, can I talk to you for a moment? And I was almost even hesitant to answer the phone. Like, why are they calling me to leave something at the hospital? And we start having a conversation and he tells me, well, I shouldn't have been discharged. And I said, well, and then that so that's instantly one of the things that coming from a diverse community that was upset.
Right. Then he says, well, we'd like to review all your information. And that's why we want you to come back. And at that time, I was I almost had like an attitude of like, you know, no, not doing it. Don't care what you got to say. You know, all that should have been taken care of. Where were you during the 12 hours? I was at the hospital. Right.
So it was 12 hours.
Well, I came into the hospital at nine something that night and I left at three o'clock the next day. So 12 plus six, I was at the hospital for over 18 hours.
Wow. Okay. All right. I could, to a certain extent, trying to put myself in your shoes, I can understand your thought process. It's just like, what the heck here? It's like, you're telling me to come back now? What's going on here?
Go ahead. The reason behind that, though, is the worst part is my initial information that was given to me is that I have a little bit of a blockage. Dr. Hussein's colleague told me that I had a 70% blockage. So there's a big difference between 70% and a little percent of blockage. No kidding. At least 69%. Yeah. And so at that point, I was thinking that I'm kind of on death's door.
And why did it take for me to get information about me being that blocked? having that much blockage or being in that much danger that that wasn't dealt with between 9 p.m. and 3 p.m. the following day.
So let me ask you, Haitham, given this time frame that we're talking about here, an 18-hour time frame, was the window lost as far as providing... necessary medication for an ischemic stroke?
No, we do the intervention when we go with microcatheters, thin tubes and wires, arteries to open them up when there is 100% blockage.
Okay, got it.
But when there is less than complete blockage, 70% or something like that, with oral medications most of the time such as aspirin and clopidogrel combination which he got when he was in the emergency room but he was not seen by the stroke team he was seen by an internist And the stroke team has a very long list of patients.
And because Tony's case was kind of special, they wanted to have enough time to sit down and talk to him. And they were not aware that he was being discharged. So he kind of freaked out and called him and asked him to come back. But at that point, I think in his mind, he was thinking, Oh, they just let me go because I'm black. And, um,
he just was angry and didn't yeah we tried to rectify that by having him come to the my clinic within like a couple days or something i don't remember how many days difference um and we explained everything well let me back let me back up because i want to correct something yeah and what's what's your colleague's name again
Chris. Yeah, so Dr. Chris was trying to have a conversation with me and it goes a little something like this. Well, Tony, you know, you have the 70% blockage and we really want to go back and go through your films. And by the way, we have a study that we'd like you to do.
Or be part of, right?
Or be part of. Yeah. And Clarence, I'm going to involve you in this portion of the conversation. As another minority who is African-American, does every Black household grow up knowing about the Tuskegee experiment? I could tell you, no. I could tell you that.
So in communities where history has shown that America has done these clandestine little experiments in Black communities, I was really angry that I was approached for something left out. So I was discharged under one pretense. asked to come back and then in the same breath, asked to participate in some revolutionary new study for black people, black and brown people.
And only thing I thought about was the results of the Tuskegee experiment, syphilis and all those other kinds of things and sickle cell and everything else that has happened throughout time when minorities have been, in terms of my brain, used as a Guinea pig to do something.
Yeah, yeah.
And so without being rude at that time, I said, I'm not sure. I'll have to check with some other people. But as soon as I got off the phone with him, I think that I was using every... I went full Richard Pryor in my own car and started having little conversations about how I felt and using language that wasn't appropriate to air in a podcast. Right. But we get the gist. Yes.
So that was the situation. And I had a lot of angst about the way moving forward.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So at some point, you did move forward, right? I did. Okay. All right. So let's take it from that point. whereby you came to the conclusion that I need some medical attention or further medical attention?
Well, I believe I needed further medical attention. I just didn't know if I wanted to do this study, right? Okay, got it. Okay. That's the piece. So... while I needed that, it became that I finally had a chance to have a conversation with Hyzen. And did we talk first before I saw you or actually in your office and we talked candidly?
I think we talked in the office.
Okay. So I have family members that are in the medical field. So as soon as I got off the phone with Dr. Chris, I started making some phone calls and I started asking them about what their thoughts are from a professional position. And then they were assuring me that where things were 40, 50, 60 years ago are not where things are today in working with medical professionals.
So you at least need to go hear them out. So I put on my skeptical hat and went to go see Dr. Hussein and we had a- Good decision, good decision. So, and we unpacked a lot of historic information and dealing with one another to get to a level that to me is missed when minorities have issues in coming into the hospital.
maybe not stroke-related, but heart-related, all things related, there are a lot of things that if it's not the common cold or a broken bone or something like that, and it gets to these other things that are warranted where you need to start taking different type of care of yourself and internals, that everybody is met with skepticism because...
there's that innate thing in a person that says, I'm the getting pig in this, or I'm not being treated the way that I need to be treated compared to my contemporaries of a different color.
Yeah. Can I use a word that he told me once? He actually was giving us a lecture at the university. And he said, just give me whatever you're going to give the white guy. Yeah. That was the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So part of it... He believed that, or maybe that's in their mind. We don't. There's this mistrust.
It's like, is there black medication and is there white medication?
No, no, no.
It's like, come on.
Well, Stan, here's the situation. There's choices that are typically given out, like you can do this or you can do that. I'm not the professional. But to me, white folks have a better survival rate on things. I don't even know if it's an ask. It's more of a, you know, what did you do there? Why am I given this choice that I could take a lesser route than go all in? Right?
And that was kind of my thought process is, what are you going to do for Jim Jones, CEO of US Bank? That's what I want.
Yeah, yeah, I totally hear you. And I think it isn't like there is black medicine and white medicine. There is attention to details. There is being, you know, providing high quality care. There is spending, you know, enough time to really understand what the struggles are. And, you know, you can...
You can imagine if Joe Biden's cousin or something goes to the hospital versus one of our cousins go to the hospital. There is more attention and there's more time that maybe because of power. But there is also this perceived, at least.
feeling among the minority communities that they are not being given the same quality of care, the same attention, the same understanding of their struggles as white patients. There's no way that we can ignore that or run away from that.
And to the point of what Hytham was saying, my thought was there's no way they would have let a 56-year-old white man leave the hospital with 70% blockage without having a conversation. Absolutely.
So, you know, here's partially a takeaway for the audience, too. It doesn't matter if it's a stroke. It could be any medical condition here. There should be equity. There should be the same kind of care for one as it is for the other, okay? It's just the way it should be, okay? We'll get back to stroke in just a second. Clarence, are you there? I don't know if he can connect the end.
He's having a little bit of problem connecting it, but let me, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. I just got back into the cities.
I was out in the country and I could, and my internet was not that good. I heard part of that. Yeah. I heard part of that. And I think that part of, uh,
What I'm glad we're having this conversation is that I recently was working with Dr. Niloufar Hadidi at the University of Minnesota on an African-American stroke project where we're talking about some of the same things is how do you make people aware? What should people know? And then how do you communicate with your doctor about whatever the condition was?
We just happened to be talking about strokes. But I'm really glad, Tony, that you're telling your story because I think that you know, many people don't really understand the nuances that happen with these issues and why it's so important for us to, first of all, to know ourselves, what's going on, but also to be able to communicate with our doctors.
So, you know, Tony, you also mentioned a really, really important aspect here, and then I'll let you take the mic here, but is this idea of trust. And fortunately, you were able to create trust in, in frankly, a pretty quick manner with, with Hytham. Okay.
And that, but that even took some conversation from what, from what I understand in order for you to gain that in order for you to proceed with the care that you needed. Okay. Take it from there.
So one of the things, Clarence, I think you might've missed. I was, I had asked you, Blacks in general, typically girl understanding are hearing the stories of the Tuskegee experiments.
Right.
Right. And so when you are raised that your government or institutions do things to minorities that they typically don't need, that you don't hear about white America being treated a certain way. You grow up with sort of a reservation for anything being introduced new as, hey, we want to try this new thing with you. So cut to me having my conversations with Hytham and moving forward.
One of the things about communication and trust was I basically posed, how is this different? than anything else in history that has been done for black folks under the guise that it's supposed to be better for them. And turns out 20, 30 years later that it was actually a setup distrust and, oh, there's no accountability for injecting people with something that actually makes them sick.
And we can sit back and watch them because it's an experiment, right? Yeah.
Right.
And those were the issues that I was having with this whole thing, along with the fact that if I would have been a Caucasian male or female, I would not have been released out of that hospital with 70% blockage in my brain without seeing the top neurologist that the hospital had to offer.
You know, I want to say that I want to say this real quickly, though. And Tony, I totally understand you, because that's one of the it's one of the challenges for us, you know, in terms of the work that we do is that there are people that are very skeptical of the of the system. OK.
And I think people like myself who who've had a chance to kind of work with the system, we understand that that's not that's not always in the majority of the cases the issue. Sometimes we just have we have, as you just said, because of the mistrust, people will not will not trust. do a study, but those things also in the, on the other hand, those things impact us as well.
I don't know if you know that. I mean, I know you know that, but, but because we're not involved in the studies, many times when the medicines come out, they don't necessarily work as effectively for us as they do for other people.
Yeah. Yeah. That's part of where Haitham and I had gotten to in terms of lack of information. So we finally got to here. But I think that that was the root cause of apprehension for most people. I agree. Is exactly what you're saying. We can't get to the solution because there's distrust there. And that's what we had to work on was...
How do we bridge that gap to get that trust involved, not only with myself, but with others in the community and moving forward? And so that was the phase that we really were talking about working on moving forward.
Right.
And I love that.
I'll tell you what disturbs me, and I'm glad you're telling the story behind it, is that is the fact of taking advantage of a medical situation, okay, where that needed to be foremost dealt with, okay, as opposed to, oh, by the way, you know, you should be part of this initiative. No. So what comes out of this, and Tony, maybe you can respond to this,
is it's one thing that the care that you got one way or the other, but it's also the mental anguish.
Okay, and I don't think that that's, well, obviously, I don't think that's fair, but I greatly, greatly appreciate the fact that you're telling the story because you get a sense of the mental anguish that you were going through, besides the actual medical condition that you were trying to deal with. Go ahead.
Well, let me say this real quick. I think I think this is really good that we're entering into this kind of candid, open, honest conversation. And we're being very, very transparent. This is a issue that that, you know, that many, many, many people in our communities face. You know, it was interesting.
You know, sometimes we take it as as only happening to our people, but it's happened to a lot of folks. You know, one of the things that, and I'm gonna just say this real quick as kind of as a side, but also, you know, we talk about health disparities and people think that health disparities are only among, you know, people of color. Health disparities are also rural.
There are a lot of things that we don't talk candidly and honestly about what we think is just, you know, one group versus another group. And I love the fact that we can enter this conversation and talk about all of the myriad issues
that we have and why we need to be talking about trust we need to be talking about transparency we need to be talking about education and one of the things for me as a um and tony i am totally with you one of the things for me is that i believe that people from our own communities need to be talking more about these issues so that we don't have this uh this problem that we can kind of begin to minimize this problem as well yeah uh i i would totally agree with you on that
as I sidebar before I get back to this. Sure, go ahead. So once I got about 45, right, a lot of the things that start happening are things of, you know, are you where you need to be in your career? Because now you're on the second half of your life and relationships and everything else. And one of the things that I was raised is, You're stoic.
You don't talk about, especially in a black household. All my life, it was, we would always joke, Prozac Nation, right? And so that was the running joke because it was like, yeah, they're on drugs and volume and this and that and everything. But to us, oh, you gotta be strong and sturdy.
However, I dealt with a lot of things that from a lot of death was happening between age 45 and 52 and things that were affecting me that eternally,
i didn't really know how to deal with because you're told just to internalize it and move forward sort of suck it up right and now i'm understanding that that's the wrong thing but we were taught to do things a certain way and there's a lot of things about being taught that carry over which is the wrong thing we don't have the right conversations at the dinner table or just in life going back to what clarence was saying to share
how to better have a better health situation with being healthy and what you should be doing, how to eat. You know, I grew up eating a lot of fat and grease and everything else and all those other kind of things.
And I, you know, maybe I thought me working out and being an athlete trumped dealing with that where, you know, my health issues happened in my late 50s compared to my uncles and those guys in their 30s, 40s and 50s. So I didn't really think that I ever, I thought I was the one that beat the system because I was healthier.
Well, if I may interject to explain to the listeners, the study that we're talking about is a stroke prevention study. The stroke that Tony had was caused by a disease called intracranial atherosclerosis, severe narrowing of the arteries inside the head. And we do not have a good treatment for this condition. The risk of recurrence is about 23% in the first year.
So a quarter of our patients are going to have another stroke. And this condition is more prevalent in non-white races, Black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Asian populations. So we are very much interested in bringing into the, and this is a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, the NIH. It's not by like a drug company or anything.
And we want to study our Black patients and our Asian patients. And so I think my colleague's enthusiasm about Tony coming back is that first, the study offers what we think is kind of cutting edge medicine in terms of stroke prevention. So there is a chance that he will be on a combination of drugs that will in the future be shown to be superior.
And second, that he is part of the community that we are desperately want to understand. And so being a participant in the study really is a great service to the African-American community in general. And I acknowledge that it was just not the right moment to bring it up. And my colleague, as many other doctors really, are not very well versed with the psyche of the minority groups.
And that's why I brought Tony to our meetings and he taught us A very important lesson, he said that you cannot ignore the elephant in the room. What happened to us over the decades and hundreds of years cannot be ignored. He cannot say I'm blind to color and I'm just going to treat everybody the same. No, you have to understand that there is this difference.
trust gap and you have to acknowledge it and you have to work on fixing it and building that bridge i agree i can tell you that uh chris my friend and colleague used that technique after after tony gave that lecture and it worked and he was delighted and i i told you tony right yep yep yeah he shared that that's that it has to be we have to respect the history
So here's, I think the unfortunate part of this is the context of how these all kind of came together. On one hand, you're dealing with a stroke. On the other hand, you're dealing with somebody who's saying, come back to the hospital. On the other hand, you're also talking about somebody who's saying, be part of an experiment. And you know what?
context, the contextual framework that surrounded your particular case here, Tony, in my estimation, is unfortunate and wrong. Okay. But what is really positive about it is how we can learn from it, how we can learn as providers of care, how we can learn as human beings. And I don't care what color you are. That's why I I really promote human partnership, H-U-E-M-A-N.
It doesn't matter what color we are, when it really comes down to these types of things. Clarence, some final thoughts here.
Yeah. I just want to say that I hope I'm coming through clear here. Yeah. But I do appreciate, you know, both of you for coming on our program and talking about this issue. And I know that I am working on some stroke issues outside of the health chatter that I will be talking with you specifically about stroke. And you'll be you'll be in contact with me.
And I know that there are many people that will be interested in hearing this conversation. So thank you both for being a part of us.
So, you know, some real clear takeaways links back to the first show that we had with you, Haitham. And that is truly everybody be aware of the signs and symptoms of a stroke.
And suspicion is good enough. Yeah. You have to be sure. Suspicion is good enough.
Good enough. Exactly. Yeah. If you just think you might be Call 911. It's better to be safe than sorry. Tony, I don't know how I can underscore my thanks to you for sharing your story. There's good that's come from it. And maybe that's the best I can tell you. People have become more aware. People are becoming more educated. And it's through people like you, that we get better.
And I underscore that a lot.
Thank you, Stan. I know you want to wrap because it sounds like the end of the program. So let me just share my points that if nobody can take anything away from this. One, ask the right question to have transparency of your doctors. I think that's probably the biggest thing. Two, while we didn't touch on it, to the point of had I not entered into this study, the care, standard care is 90 days.
Well, I was back in the hospital in January, right? So if standard care is only 90 days because of how things work out there in the world, this is that changing point to really how people live longer and not go back into their same practices that they were doing that caused them to have a stroke. And most people do. There is no change in their household diets and things of that nature.
So then that becomes an educational piece. And on the third portion is education to those that can, when you have these types of situations, the elephant in the room to Dr. Hussein's point is, listen, I need to have a conversation with you and the results of what I would like to have be an outcome or is a better outcome for you. But I need to share with you that I understand what I'm about to say.
that there's a lot of negativity and issues that have to be addressed in order for us to get to the right place so we can have the right conversation.
Absolutely. Yeah, there's the big picture. There's the big picture issues and there's what I call the immediacy issues. And we're trying to create the balance here. Thank you so much. You know, I... What I can say is that I hope you can use this podcast for further educational purposes going forward. For our listening audience, I hope you've learned a lot. I know I have.
This is a dynamic duo that we heard from today that have a very strong message. And I hope you all heard it. As a final reminder to our listening audience, get vaccinated. We're getting into the fall season here, and people are spending more time indoors, which increases community spread of all these different illnesses that we're trying to get a hand on.
So it's a good time to get vaccinated for flu, for COVID, for RSV, for pneumococcal disease. Check in with your physician to make sure that You're a candidate in the right timing for those vaccinations for you. Our next show will be on motivation in health. How is it that we get motivated to change our health habits? Do we have to be scared into it before we do it? Or do we embrace prevention?
So with that, keep health chatting away.
Hi, everyone. It's Matthew from Behind the Scenes. And I wanted to let everyone know that we have a new website up and running, HelpChatterPodcast.com. You can go on there. You can interact with us. You can communicate with us, send us a message. You can comment on each episode. You can rate us.
And it's just another way for everyone to communicate with Stan and Clarence and all of us at the Help Chatter team. So definitely check it out. Again, that's HelpChatterPodcast.com.