Health Mistakes to Avoid in 2026 (Sleep, Sugar, Phones & More) | NXT Chapter With T.D. Jakes

My first concern was that you had a stroke. I was concerned that you had a stroke. And when blood flow is cut off, whether it be to the brain or to the heart, seconds matter. Hello, family. I'm T.D. Jakesson. I'm the host of Next Chapter. And who knows what the Next Chapter will be? Sometimes there are certain changes. And the changes are disruptive and not anticipated. Have you considered the possibilities of what can happen in your life? I've got a very, very knowledgeable and special guest that I'm excited to share with you and to share his knowledge, his wisdom, and his perspectives, which I find to be very unique in the person of Dr. Darryl Ames. Welcome. I am thrilled to have you here. I've been looking forward to this day just to share with my audience some of the things that we talk about in private. Chapter number one, becoming a doctor. Let's start, though. Let's back up all the way back up to your career journey. Can you talk a little bit about your career history? Yeah. My father's side of the family is originally from Mississippi, my mother from Tennessee. They migrated a part of the Great Migration into the Midwest. My father was an all-quorn student who got involved with the civil rights and had to flee Mississippi and ended up where his brothers were somewhere in Michigan and Detroit and somewhere in Chicago. And so my journey started just outside Chicago in a small town called Joliett. And from a very young age, I knew that I wanted to be a physician. My grandmother always told a story, which I don't know how true it is. She said that one day she was outside the church and one of the deacons ran to her and told her that he had watched me turn muddy water clear. And then he knew that I had some special gift. And so from that time, though, from a very young age, I knew that I wanted to be a physician. You know, when you think about that desire, talk a little bit more about how you made your desire to become a reality, because I remember growing up in school. And they'd always ask all of us, what do you want to be when you grew up in some said farm in some said engineers? And very few people followed through that journey all the way to the end. So tell us about your education, your background, the schools you want to do that sort of thing. So I'm a mixture of different, we spent six years in the Chicago area. My father took a job with the Dow Chemical Company. We moved to Midland, Michigan, which if you grew up in Michigan, people hold their hand up. And the tri cities, Saginaw's where Stevie Wonder and Dre Mon Green are from. Yes. Bay City, I think Madonna's from there. And then there was a little Midland where I grew up. And we spent some time in Midland, then I spent four years in upstate New York. That was a very tough school system. And around sixth grade, we moved back to Michigan, back to Midland, and I graduated, and then went to college in Atlanta at Morehouse. Wow, I didn't know that. I didn't know that part about Stevie Wonder. I didn't know that they had produced that many influential people. So you ended up at Morehouse, and what did you take at Morehouse, and where did you go? I was a science major, knew that I wanted to be a physician. I think a lot of people aren't aware, but the HBCUs are critical to the supply of physicians. Morehouse, in particular, produces more black physicians, black male physicians than anywhere in the country. The folks at Howard, Mike, grimace a little bit, but Howard and some of the other black institutions are where we get our black physicians from. So from there, I was planning to go back either to the University of Michigan or to Wayne State, and my mentor, JK Haynes, at Morehouse, and another person that is well familiar to most of the folks that were in the science program named Dr. Blocker, steered me to the School of Medicine, where at Lou Sullivan had founded a black medical school at a time where we had a shortage. It was designed to reach the rural areas because there's still an under supply of black physicians. And we see a deficit of young men now going to medical school more than we have even in past years. So I went to the School of Medicine, and from there, I rotated in my time at Grady Hospital. I was exposed to surgery because at first, I thought I was gonna be an obstetrician, gynecologist. And then I rotated and thought I was being a cardiologist. And when I got to the surgical rotation, there was an attitude that I didn't belong. And all you have to do to spur me along is tell me I can't do something, and that's what I wanna do. And so I ended up deciding to take the route of surgery, and I went to the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss, and Jackson, and I did my five years of general surgery training there, and made it back to Atlanta and into Dallas where I did a fellowship in critical care. And John Hopkins is somewhere in your story too. Mark Jenkins. Mark Jenkins, look at it. He's a John Hopkins guy. I went to the med school and then went to Ole Miss, and got very good training in Mississippi. I will tell you, people used to sleep on it, but the trauma center there was the only level one in the state. And a very famous doctor, Dr. Hardy, who was very instrumental in bringing African American surgeons to the forefront of the community, the surgical community was there. And that's where Megger Evers was operated on when he was shot. That's where the first heart transplant was attempted. It was a primate heart, but it was attempted on a black man, and he had notoriety for that. The actual successful heart transplant that we talk about happened in South Africa with a position named Christian Bernard. But I shared that story because my intern year, we were in there and we were operating and the chest was open and they asked me where was the first heart transplant. And when I said South Africa Christian Bernard, the room went silent. Okay. Tempted number two, diversity and medicine. To our listening audience, this is more than a matter of the, and you work on more people than black people, you work on anybody that comes along. But the advantage of having a diverse staff of physicians who understand cultural distinctions and the different nuances are certain things that African Americans bodies are made differently. They have different maladies like sickle cell anemia. They can easily be misdiagnosed. And having a wide array of people, male and female, what have you, creates a sensitivity and a comptability between the patient and the doctor that they might not otherwise get. And you can see into some things because you understand the nuances of how that particular person or species, their body reacts, blood pressure, more sensitive to hypertension or diabetes or that sort of thing. Don't you think that the more diverse the staff is at a hospital, the more proficient they become? Yeah, the word that comes to mind for me is empathy. It's one thing for you to get a call and someone says, your child's in the car wreck versus somebody gives you a call and says, somebody you know who's child's in the wreck. Your ability to respond is based on how you identify with that person. And I think the diversity that's become a bad word, but I think it's needed because we identify, we understand Papa worked at the plant. Papa ate fat back and greens. Right. Papa had hypertension. You know, we understand the stresses of being a black man in the 60s and in the 50s working hard. Your family, you often tell the story of your father and how he resurrected a business in the stressors. So we identify. And so when I'm called in on a level one trauma in the emergency room and I come down and I see a young black male, a young Hispanic male and even sometimes a young white male, I identify with my kids, they're of that age. I think about them out at college driving and a drunk driver coming across the road. So I think to your point, empathy, we have to, you know, you like to say it and your sermons, we have a high priest who can be touched by the feeling of our infirmity. Absolutely. We need that touch, we need that connection. See, I'm a little bit scared this guy's going to take my job. You know, because he's proficient in both languages, which is an odd parallel between spirituality and science and having them fused together in one person and understanding it. But what I want you to realize that makes this on nearly the first anniversary since I had my heart attack, chapter three, my heart attack, that my personal physician who was in the service when that happened to me immediately contacted to him, Dr. Amos, and Dr. Amos was expecting me who also attends my church. And it was a welcome face, a first face I saw when I got out of the ambulance with his. And he looked at me and said, don't worry about anything, you're going to be all right. And I've relaxed, I just believed into it. I rested into it. And besides, I didn't really think at that point that I had had a heart attack. I thought that I was dehydrated. I thought maybe, you know, it was some minor or something, but I didn't think it was anything that serious. But Dr. Jailway and her head let you know the severity of the situation we were dealing with. And they were fighting for my life. In fact, one person said, had I been five minutes later getting to the emergency room that I probably wouldn't have made it? But this guy was on watch there. When you first heard about what had happened to me, because you've seen me preach and teach and run across the aisle and cross over pews and stand on my head and do all kinds of stuff. When you first heard about it, what went through your mind? So the physician side kicks in and we start like a computer ticking off differential diagnoses. What makes a person a faint? And there are a lot of things we talk about, thinkable episodes, something that causes a certain shock. You can have something called a vagal response. But when I talked to Dr. Wagner, my first concern was that you had a stroke. I was concerned that you had a stroke. And when blood flow is cut off, whether it be to the brain or to the heart, seconds matter. And so in my mind, when I hear that, I flip over kind of a mental picture of an hourglass and the sand is coming down. And trauma, we call it the golden hour trauma. I know when a bleeding patient comes in, I have a set window to stop that bleeding. We say all bleeding stops eventually. And I always tell my residents, either we stop it or the body stops it's not good. So I was concerned that you were having a lack of blood flow to the brain. And I didn't know whether it was a hypotensive stroke where blood vessel had ruptured or whether a blood clot had cut off. But I knew that if you had a stroke, we had to get thrombocainease or streptocainease in the clot cluster, we call it, immediately to restore blood flow. And so when I met you and we talked and you recognized me. Yes. So I knew that you were cognitive. Yes. And so if you recall, and you may not remember, the first thing I did was I had already moved heaven and earth in the emergency room, and we cleared everything and we took you to the CAT scanner. Yes. And I sat there and watched the images roll off. And while we were getting everything set up, we were also doing EKGs. Yes. And the scan was giving us information that EKG alerted us that you had an abnormal EKG and signs of myocardial ischemia, no blood flow to the heart. Now, this is the thing you got to realize. I had just had a complete physical. I had just had a great EKG. I had already lost 30 some pounds. I didn't feel any pain, no numbness in my arm. I didn't feel any tingling in my feet. None of the things that they tell you to look for. And so the diagnosis was shocking to me. Yes. Yeah, when the doctor said to me, you've had a massive heart attack. I almost said, get out of here. You know, because we have a certain picture of what trauma will look like, but it doesn't look the same in everybody. And even though you have been to your physicians and gone through your routines, and your EKG looks good and all of that, it doesn't necessarily mean that you won't have a certain turn of events that disrupts your entire... It disrupted my whole life in some ways. Well, I will tell you that in particular, I went and watched them put the catheter in your leg and squirted die, and you had clotted off your right coronary artery. And so the right side of your heart was not really getting oxygen and functioning. Fortunately for you, you know, your heart was strong enough and you were still getting some blood flow. But that can be caused by low flow state. A lot of times with heart attacks, we see blockages of the arteries. You know, they're completely occluded. And they have to go in and put a balloon in and dilate the artery and kind of reestablish flow. But with your stint being placed, you immediately, once they gave you the heparin, which we used to... Grandma must say thin the blood. Once you got the bolus of heparin and they started shooting the x-rays, I watched as your heart, the right heart coronary vessel opened up. You did go into a funky little arrhythmia that made me a little nervous. I sat there for a while and you quickly converted. And I've opened up kids' chest in the middle of the night because they've been shot. And I can tell you that when you touch the heart or you hold the heart, it's very sensitive. It will fibulate and kind of the coordination of its contractions get off. And that's what you experienced when we say an arrhythmia. Because I think a lot of people think that when they say that Lamar Hamlin had a heart attack, he didn't have the event that you had. He took a shot to the chest, which threw off the rhythm of his chest. And so now the heart is not coordinated in its contraction. We say, and we call it the love dove, where the ventricles contract and relax and then the atrium contract and relax. So you look at, when you look at the news and you see people like Lamar have that kind of event, even though it's not your patience, you're kind of diagnosed in the conditions of that circumstance, that situation. Funny thing about mine was, I didn't have high cholesterol. I didn't have any of the normal things and you studied my chart intensely. And we've talked about this before. I like to say this is layman's terms. I'm going to break this down in the eighth grade English. I like to say what was on my heart, got in my heart, stressed, you know, pressure. And you realize you pride yourself on being strong. You pride yourself on being relentless. You pride yourself on how much stress you can ingest and keep on going. Sure. But you don't realize that the body keeps score. It does. Yeah. And sooner or later the body is going to what's on your heart ends up in your heart. And now you can't ignore it. And it's not about being strong anymore. You talk to me a little bit about the normal old way of handling a patient like me coming in, breaking through the ribcage, taking out the heart, doing all of that. But because of modern technology, I didn't have any stitches. They didn't break my ribcage. They didn't take my heart out. None of that happened. They went in through my wrist. And I literally left the hospital with a bandage you could have gotten Walgreens or somewhere over the entrance point of where they went in. The thing that was amazing to me about you is that you stood over top of the doctor who was doing the procedure. The technology advanced to the point that I didn't have to go through what my father would have had to go through. Sure. And you stayed there and kind of oversaw everything. Exercise a little, flex on a mischief of staff and was able to see that through chapter 4, unhealthy America. How much have you seen medicine advanced with technology that things that used to be one way whether it's heart attacks, Alzheimer's, how much is the medical frontier being altered and changed by the introduction of technology, not to mention AI? Great question. And I want to highlight something that you said because people need to hear this. When you talked about being strong and what was going on in the inside, that resonated with me because I have this conversation all the time. And people go to the movies and nowadays we have these big theaters and there's loud booms. And I like top gun because Tom Cruise is in this, you know, this fast machine that's speeding beyond the speed of sound and the bullets or the missiles are flying and people get this sense that they know what Tom Cruise is going through. But I explain that when I'm in the operating room and your loved one is bleeding out and I'm trying to figure it out, watching the movie is one thing, but neural hormones, epinephrine, stress. So while you're cool on the inside, that doesn't mean that your body isn't releasing cortisol. That is not secreting insulin, that is not secreting catacolamines. So that stress internal is happening whether external ures cool is a cucumber. And so I think that's important because a lot of men, particularly black men, we feel like when we build up our muscles, that somehow we don't recognize that we can be having internal stresses that are affecting our organs. I would add to that too, that we live in a culture in a society where women pride themselves on being in a strong black woman. Sometimes you can be strong to your own detriment. Getting stronger on the outside doesn't mean that you're getting better on the inside. That's what I learned, that no appointment, no date, nobody being an empath coming to the rescue of other people should supersede you taking the time to take care of yourself. When you look at the taking care of yourself and we're seeing somebody my age, you kind of expect my age or my size, my stress level, my schedule, my traveling, all of that, it makes sense that that would happen. But we're seeing young men, young women, who are having heart attacks in their 40s and in their late 30s. What is it, what we're eating? Is it how we're living? What is causing that increase, that incline in fatalities? I think you've hit on something. And I'm going to, I'm a good listener. You asked me about the technology. So the computers are making us learn everything faster. Medicine is changing dynamically. Things that we used to do, now that we've got AI and the internet and the computations of computer, they have explained things in ways we've never seen. So the frontier is going to be less and less invasive. We're using robots now to operate. We're using computer algorithms and AI to make diagnoses. We're using it in the field of radiology to make predictions, to look at films. So that answers your question that you asked. Now, as far as the second part of it with the young people, yes, our food supply is contaminated. Grandmothers, beans, used to grow in the garden. Right. And my grandmother had hogs. They killed them hogs. I remember my grandmother would go out. My dad's mom would go out and grab the chicken and ring that chicken's neck. That's right. If you had to do that now, Chick-fil-A would go out of business. That's right. Because nobody's going to ring that chicken neck. So the food has been mass-produced. And I'm going to, you didn't ask me this, but I will tell you. So I have college-aged kids. And one of the things that the young people that hear this need to know is people think that because we now have legalized production of marijuana that it's safer. Okay. The THC in marijuana has gone from some people estimate from 3% to 30%. The fields that they are growing now are being fertilized. So you think that, you know, when back when the gangsters were doing it, they couldn't fly a crop duster over there and fertilize their field. So I mentioned dental phosphates, pesticides, all of the things that are in the food. We have an addiction to sugar in this country. High fructose corn syrup is in everything. So the kids are eating these chemicals, these dyes, these sugars. So we have people like Chad Wood Boseman, who at a very young age, the Black Panther dies of stage 4 colon cancer. When we can put people, send them to the moon, we misdiagnosing a preventable and curable disease in him. So the food supply, we all drink out of plastic bottles. There's radiation from our phones. I mean, we could go on and on and on. And then there's stress, and then we don't exercise anymore. We're sitting in these chairs, we're in front of the computers. We don't go out in the field and work. So those things are combining to increase the incidence of colorectal cancer, breast cancer, mental illness, all of it is happening at a younger age in the population that did not have the benefit that we had of having more natural food. The other thing that I think is important you mentioned Chad Wood Boseman, I think that we glorify talent and we don't separate talent from the person. And because he was so extremely talented, extremely gifted, extremely promising, that sometimes talent can be a distraction from health care and taking care of yourself. And you lean into your talent, but you don't understand that health is a new wealth. And if you don't have a healthy body, no matter how successful you are, you won't be able to spend it. You're going to leave it to somebody if you don't take care of yourself. Well, I don't want to get us in trouble. So I'm going to be very careful what I say. But we have very high profile prominent people in this country that eat things like McDonald's every day. And I have friends that own McDonald's. So I don't want to just be disparaging. Because that's not my point. My point is to what you just address, being talented does not mean that you eat well, or that you sleep well, or that you drink well, being talented means that people celebrate you for your talents. And it does not always correspond to being able to understand what is a healthy life. How much should you be sleeping? What should you be eating? What should you be taking in? Fast food. I'll just say this Bishop, anything that's in plastic that you can put in a machine and leave for 60 days has to have been embalmed and preserved in order for it not. You can't put an apple in a vending machine and leave it there for three months. But you can put that thing that's they've manufactured and processed and put in there. Our kids are eating processed food. And another misnomer that seems to be changing wealthy people or famous people or political figures are said to get the best health care. And in some cases that's true. But when you look at LeBron James son, all of that wealth and all of that success did not stop him from having a healthy bent that was almost catastrophic. Yes, and they're pushing these young athletes now. These kids are now in these select teams where when we grew up we played baseball, we played football, we played basketball. Now these kids at a very young age are getting diagnosed because or being directed because everybody's trying to produce the next Venus William, the next Tiger Woods. So they take their kids and they super specialize them and they only do one thing. You know, I have grandchildren and I have noticed I bought my grandson a dirt bike so he could get out and play outside because he never goes outside to play. And he kind of rode around in it and I realized I was in it with him with my foot hanging out there some smaller wood. I didn't even fit inside the dirt bike but I'm trying to get him involved in getting out, getting air, getting some light, getting vitamin D, which we have a deficiency in in black people and understanding that the son is important but we have raised the generation of kids who are used to playing with our pets. In video games. In video games. So in a short time he gets off the dirt bike and goes in and gets on his video games and continues to play his video game. So I ended up by me what? You know, I thought, okay, if you want I will. But the thing about it is while they might be great babysitters, sitting at that age with that energy, with that testosterone being developed, with all of that growth pattern, some people have said it is sitting is more dangerous than smoking on the body. What do you think about that? I think we look at my friends that are spine surgeons have a great future because everybody now is going to the chiropractor, everybody is having back surgery because we sit. That's why a lot of the modern executives have these desk where they stand at their desk instead of sitting in the chair. And I coach basketball for my children and I found that the kids that I was coaching didn't have the same level of coordination. They were sitting down playing video games instead of going outside and shooting the basketball. And you know, my kids, I had to talk to them because I would go in the room and they'd be in there like zombies playing on these networks and they'd have a bag, a bowl of skittles, a bowl of gummy worms. So they're in there eating high fructose corn syrup and they're charged up and their brain is high stimulated and they're playing these games and they're killing. That's the other thing. You know, some of these games, you know, our kids are killing things for people and then they didn't want to go to school and read a book because of all that stimulation. So I do think that you're on to something. I think it's, I'm not going to say that smoking is better. But I mentioned the marijuana because at the colleges, I've said this, our young people are severely addicted to marijuana. When you go into the college campus, there's a mushroom cloud and we spoke to officials at one of the college and they said, well, they're using and I said, well, it's one thing recreational. But if you have to have it every day, that's not used, that's abuse. And we need to deal with particularly our young African-American men who are all smoked out. I don't know how they're going to fit into this world as jobs are going away. We know what AI is doing to the future. These kids need to be locked in and figuring out what they're going to do. So this is more than individual choices. This societal changes. The jobs that are coming out now are sit down jobs. They're all technological. They're AI. And we need those young people to be bright in AI. We have to be intentional. My grandfather didn't have a gem. He didn't go work out. He didn't get a membership at a gem club. But by the time he got through working in the fields and getting up early and milking cows and doing all that kind of stuff, he got a workout in. He got stimulation. He got movement. When this country manufactured more goods and products, whether you worked for Pittsburgh Steel or Union Carboud or Monsanto or what have you, you had a job where you were active. You were moving. You were loading trucks. You were dealing with the settling, dealing with oxygen dealing with all of that. All of those jobs have gone away. And most of the jobs even, most of the jobs even regardless of your age are sit down jobs. Most of the snacks are full of sugar and fruit toast and all of that. I think it even has something to do with all the farmers. Talk to us a little bit about that because that is rampant in our community. There is a growing community of people that believe that sugar metabolism is all things evil is connected to all timers. It affects the brain. We know it affects the kidneys. It affects the pancreas. It affects the heart. When you eat too much sugar, you make fat. When you have big loads of insulin secreted, you can't lose fat for at least 10 hours. 10 hours? 10 hours. Because insulin is what they call an anabolic steroid. It stores. A catabolic steroid is increasing the metabolism. Insulin causes when your sugar is high and the body detects it, it's a creed insulin and insulin tells the body, store fat. Once you get a bolus of insulin, and most of the country is insulin resistant now because we're eating so much sugar, the insulin doesn't work as well. That's why the GLPs have caught fashion because that's what they're doing. They make insulin more effective. GLPs? Yes. Explain what they're doing. Ozzemic. Those drugs. What about ozemic? I know it was originally created to help diabetic people. Now people are using it to lose weight to help themselves. What's the real story on ozemic and medications like that? What do we gain? What do we risk being obese as a problem? So you do want to lose weight, but at what expense? Well, I think that it's going to take some time for us to fully understand all of the risks that were associated with these drugs that were being developed. We know that they function hormonally. Obesity is a disease. It is a disease physiologically, and it is a disease psychologically. As you know, there are people that have been minds of 60 and 70 and 80 and they can't stop eating. So I think if you ask me what I prefer to take a pill or a shot, inject myself versus having half my stomach cut off or having my intestines rerouted, I would tell you that I think the pharmaceutical approach is less harmful. I do think that it's going to take some time before we understand how these drugs interact. Anytime you take a drug, there is going to be a positive effect and there are going to be some side effects. And we try to balance to make sure that's what chemotherapy is. Chemotherapy is an attempt to kill the cells that are bad without killing all the cells that are good. So I think that the verdict is not out. They are developing now, O'Zimpyk was the first generation. We got Monjaro, which was the second generation, and now Farmer is coming up with a third generation. And so, man loves the tinker. And we'll have to wait and see where this falls out. We're going to be banned. Everybody wants to be banned. But not exercise. But not exercise. We want to be strong and not go to the gym. Exactly. Exactly. That's the problem. And so that's an opportunity for us to really rethink how we handle it. It's less invasive than the surgery she talked about cutting your stomach out and that sort of thing. And so, to the infusion of diverse types of medications, it also includes supplements. So some of us are mixing supplements with prescribed medications, not realizing that it's all going into the same body and releasing different things and it has different effects. And we're not talking to doctors. I am forever texting Dr. Dio with pictures of some supplement I've discovered or something I saw if it's going to be harmful or disagree with other things that I'm doing and taking. And I think having that expert advice and leaning on it is very important. I don't think most of the supplements that are out there have even been FDA approved. And I don't know what factory you go into the store and you buy something in a health store. Where was it produced? Was it produced in this country? How did this country? Where was the methods to make sure that it was biologically appropriate, that it was a sanitary place that it produced? Anybody can get it and say, you know, if you take... And this is the danger of social media. You know this. Once you start thumbing and they get an algorithm on you, all of a sudden you start having these guys saying, you don't have to have that back pain. Yeah. You know, take this medicine and it's... No one is regulating that industry now. Right. And the danger with that, my first doctor when I came to Dallas said to me, any time you have to advertise the medication we are hard, it probably doesn't work. I was golfing with a gentleman and he was querying me during the course and he was saying, well what about this and what about that and what about... And I kept telling him, well, you know, Tuna's made in a can is not, you know, Tuna's got mercury in it. And he was like, I thought that was healthy. And he says, why? I go in and I take these protein bars and I said, well, you know, the protein doesn't really, you know, help you like you think it does. The body doesn't really take it in. And by the time we got to about the fourth hole, he said, he says, what can I eat? Right, right. It is frustrating. It's frustrating. It's frustrating. And the other thing that I'm seeing a lot of is prostate cancer, colon cancer. A lot of times we can eat the right things, but if our intestines are not able to extract the nutrients out of it, that can be harmful too. Look at all the men that died of prostate cancer recently. Look at a very famous football player that we both have run into that just recently had his entire bladder removed. Yeah. As you already pointed out, younger, more severe, more aggressive, it's got to be the food. Yeah. That's what's changed. Yeah. We haven't changed, you know, hundreds of years. You know, we haven't changed. It's the environment. It's the level of stress. It's the food that we're eating. So it's been said that watching short-form videos affects the brain. The many things to the brain more than drinking alcohol. So I have not read scientific studies that I could use to validate it, but this is what I will say. I think we know that things that cause you to get excited and capture your attention, particularly in young kids. When we talk about ADHD, we see that a lot of our young black kids are diagnosed with that. We know that these kids that are playing videos can't hold attention span. We know that if you don't learn to read at a very young age, it's very hard to learn to be a disciplined reader later on in life. And the thing that I think is fascinating about this is the culture, the media culture, is driving towards shorter clips. I was just recently on vacation and I could tell you the person because I know you know who they are. But they were telling me about their business and that they had to come off of their blogging because they were using YouTube format and YouTube was trying to compete with TikTok. And they wanted shorter formats and shorter clips. I think they're more addictive. I think they're more, and you know this, if you go to bed and you open up a novel or you open up the Bible, you might fall asleep in 20 minutes. But if you get on Instagram or TikTok, man, you look up, it's three or four o'clock in the morning. Right. I'll tell you, I think Netflix and all that, once you get on a show, you know, and you can't cut it off. Right, right. You will sit up there and spend six hours trying to get to the end. We used to have to wait until the next week to see what Batman and Robin did. Yeah. Now we don't have the tune. We just keep watching over and over again. I think you should stop talking about me like that. This is my show. Just talk about me like that. I found myself open three o'clock in the morning just going from one to the other in a sequel of stories. What I should have been sleeping. They hanged a cliffhanger. My wife would go one for it. Less to why it's one more. And it is one within the cliffhanger. You got to go to the next. Right. Right. Chapter five. Trusting doctors. You know, there has been a love-hate relationship between our culture and doctors and medicine. Some cynicism and not just now, not just our culture, but a lot of cultures, where people are allowing people to make medical decisions. Who do not have medical backgrounds. I think from the African-American perspective or black or high, you want to phrase whatever the common term is in your community for that. Our history with doctors has not always been good. And so from generation to generation, there's a skepticism passed down. The Tuskegee experiments and all of that kind of stuff. How do we begin to rebuild trust? Because you can prescribe all day long and you can talk all day long, but if I don't trust you. And I'm getting on social media, all of these other theories. There's all these different theories that contradict each other being fed to us perpetually, on and on and on. How in all the noise of what is right and wrong do we differentiate and understand what can be trusted? Well, I think you mentioned the Tuskegee experiments. My wife's grandfather was a part of those gentlemen that were experimented on. We have Henrietta Lackie, the healer sale. I think Oprah produced a story about her, the woman at John Hopkins, where they produced the Immortal Sale line. She had cervical cancer. They never told her what she had. They told her that they experimented on young African-American men and women at the turn of the last century to learn. And so that created a huge distrust in the African-American community. I argue with my patients a lot because they come in and they tell me, Dr. Google said this. Dr. Google said that. And I remind them that that's different than a double-blinded retrospective. I've reviewed Journal where a bunch of experts have gotten together and debated the safety and efficacy of a drug. So I think that it is up to us we need to educate more people like us that connect to us. You know it could be two o'clock in the morning. You know you got a surgeon you can call. You know you have a primary care physician you can call. And I think again it goes back to empathy and connection. I think we have to have those connections. I think we need them now more than ever. Right, right. Let's not assume that this generation understands the Tuskegee experiment. Let's take a minute and backtrack and break down exactly what happened in Alabama. So there were a group of gentlemen that were diagnosed with syphilis that were studied to see the effects of syphilis instead of treated. And it was intentional. And I do research in part of my certification for research as I have to go back and look at the Tuskegee experiments. What happened in Nuremberg when they found out what Hitler was doing. Hitler was experimenting on twins. He was operating on people. They put Russian soldiers in the cold to see how hypothermia affected the body. And so now we have all these laws and rules to try to protect people for that. But basically black people were experimented on and not provided the health care in order to treat other people, other Americans, white Americans, with the information that was garnered from those experiments. I think we're eradicating our history and altering our history to only show the best parts of us. But you actually learn more through your mistakes than you do through your successes. And just for the benefit so that history doesn't repeat itself, we need to have some knowledge about that. And it's not just in America, it's also in Africa. They were experimenting on all sorts of things we're doing through colonization. A lot of people have been used, as you talked about Hitler and all of the experiments that were done on various groups of people. Why isn't it true that we are not more united in speaking out and speaking up since this is a common problem amongst poor people? Let's be honest. Rich people are not experimented on like that. Why are we not more united in connecting with one another and pushing back and saying no because right now it's not even a fight between humanity and science. We're letting people make decisions about our bodies who have no medical background at all. It's become more political than it has been medicine. Why are we not speaking up and speaking out about it? Well, one of the things, I was reflecting on this coming in, isolation is a terrible thing to be ostracized, to experience loneliness. Even the divine Godhead, there was Father, Son and Holy Spirit, there were in community. The only thing that shook Jesus was when he knew that he was about to be separated from the Father. That broke him in the garden. Everything else, he could handle death, he knocked it out, disease, he knocked it out. But in those hours where he knew that he was going to be separated from the Father, he took three men with him and he said, could you not watch for one hour? And then when he hung on that cross, he said, Eli, Eli, Lamox, Subbac the Nigh, why have you forsaken me? I think the isolation that we experience in our community has been extremely detrimental. We don't know who to talk to, we don't know who to trust. And I think when you look at what's going on in social media, all of these hoaxes, all of these death hoaxes, so and so died the day, you know they didn't. So and so just did this, you know they didn't. I think, and then now, Eli, I can put a picture of you, make you talk, and use your voice, and say, I just went into the church and shot five people and it would go all over the internet. And people would be trying to fact check it. Yeah, I've been dead five times, by the way. I have read it in the paper I'm dead, it's misinformation, disinformation, it is becoming harder and harder to separate the hamburger from the state. I think what you're saying, what I hear you saying is the same thing that we advise people about building relationships with their bankers, building relationship with your doctors. Right. I think that not just coming in a crisis situation, you had a crisis in trauma or emergency rooms and all that sort of thing, but we don't need to wait to the house burn down to call the fire department. We have to have those relationships. We were built for community. It's not good that man should be alone. To me, there's nothing more devastating than isolation. When I meet people that are suffering, particularly the ravages of mental dysfunctions and thought disorders, they isolate themselves. When people get ready to commit suicide, they isolate themselves. Their parents say, we didn't know what was going on. Little Johnny was up in the room. We thought he was all right. He was going up there and little Johnny had taken pills or little Johnny had shot himself. I do think that we have to build from the family. You and I could have another podcast just talking about the disintegration of the black family, the incarceration of black men, the amasculation of black men. We hear a lot of talk about our sisters. My wife always reminds me of a quote that says that black women were the mules of the earth. She quotes a famous author. But I do think that these things are telling a story of a community that has been fragmented. It's been fragmented. It goes all the way back to slavery. And like you said, people don't want to hear that history now. We know that history repeats itself. And we say in surgery that there's good judgment and bad judgment and good judgment often came from bad judgment. A lot of what we're doing in medicine now is because we learn from our mistakes. So if we disregard our mistakes, we take the possibility of our success. And we destined ourselves to repeat them. Yeah, that's a very frightening thing. So what do you think about the post, the brownie post, and give me your insight on that situation? We know that you can hide behind an alias name and say all kinds of things about people and no one even knows who you are. So everybody becomes an expert on the internet and in social media. There is a lot of information and misinformation about the vaccine going around. What I will say is, and I said this to some of the guys I went to college, I remember when I used to go down to that store in the hood with a little house and knock on the door and buy you a dime bag. And you didn't know what, who produced it, what was in it. And now of a sudden, you don't want to take a vaccine that has gone through a high degree of scientific scrutiny. You don't know what's in a bag of chocolate chip cookies. You don't know what's in the bag of potato chips. We open that, look at the bag of potato chips and see when they start talking about potassium citrate and this chemical and that chemical. So I think that there's a lot of superstition that's not based in reality. I know a lot of people that took the COVID vaccine and they're fine. I know that my brother-in-law works at the CDC in Atlanta and we recently had a man shoot up to CDC because he's blaming the vaccine for problems he has. I think this is one of the greatest problems facing this generation is how do we decipher what is true, how do we decide what is real, how do we distinguish AI from reality? Yes, it's amazing. Because it has become more perfected, it becomes more and more difficult, especially for a non-professional to be able to detect it. I know you can't diagnose a patient you haven't seen but allegedly the symptoms with our current president, President Trump, where his ankles are swelling and he's stumbling from time to time. Just from an observer's point of view, what type of symptoms, what do the symptoms make you concerned? If he came in to treat him, what would you check first? I would do a broad metabolic panel. I would do a very thorough interrogation of electrolytes, hormones, levels in him. We know it's very public that he has a horrible diet. We know that he technically is obese. I saw just the other day a picture of him in the Oval Office where he twitched his shoulder and people are speculating on what's going on. He doesn't look healthy. He doesn't look healthy. What about the Mark Sun is that? I believe he was on blood thinners and I believe that maybe he had some what we call echa-mosis from it. I think the swelling in his legs may have been correlated with it. It happens as you get older as you know things start not working well. I can't speculate on one of the other things. This is a great question because this person that we're talking about has been the chief trumpeter of a term called fake news and has created obscurity and confused. A lack of clarity to where people don't know what they're watching on the news is true. You turn on one channel and you hear one thing, you turn on another channel and it's like that was a different event and they're talking about the same event. That's what I was reluctant to bring it up because even as you scroll and you read about all these things, you don't know how much is true and how much is fiction. These are reports that have been validated or passed through the media, not just social media. I was wondering for other people who are experiencing similar maladies and swelling of the ankles is extremely swollen. The discoloration on the hand and so forth and so on, what would be the first place you would check and what should they be asking or telling their doctors about their condition? They need to look at their medications and to see, you know this, medications, when you take a lot of them, they interact with each other. Every medication has a good side and a side effect. But I would remind people that President Trump took the vaccine, President Obama took the vaccine, President Biden took the vaccine. There were a whole lot of people that have taken the vaccine. So this whole fear that something horrible has happened, I took the vaccine, I know you took the vaccine. We operated with the information that we had at the time. We made the best decision under those circumstances that we could. People were dying everywhere. Yeah, and the dying of death rate has gone way down. Even though there are exceptions to every medication. Sometimes when they get to describing what the medication cured, then they start talking about the side effects. I'm not sure whether the side effects aren't worse than the thing you're trying to cure. And then when you mix them with other medications that are in your body, those medications start fighting against each other. But I thought this is a primary figure in our country who is going through a malady in right in front of our face. And I just wondered as a physician and as a professional, where you would start to search. So thank you for sharing that with us. Chapter six, prevent health issues. When you think about solutions, we've talked about the problems, we've talked about the maladies, we've talked about the health impairments. Let's talk about the solutions. What are some of the things that we can do little small things that have large impacts on our health before we have hearted types, before we have dementia, before we have those sorts of things? What are some things that we can put into practice, like sleep habits, eating the right things, that we can begin to do to be intentional about preserving this body. You only get one. I think number one, I tell everybody, read what you eat. Just look at what you're eating. They make them write it on the box. So look at what you're eating. People use the internet for everything. There's a lot of information out there on the internet about what you're eating. I think children have to be brought up in an environment where they're presented healthy food. It's criminal what we've been given the kids in the schools. You know, high-carb diets with sugar and processed food. So I think it starts one of the things that we implemented in our family and I'm so grateful, and I give my wife credit for it, we made the kids sit down and eat with us. We're so busy. You know this. Right. We're so busy, we miss that time. We have to sit down and eat a healthy meal and not always go out to the fast food restaurant and pick it up where everybody then goes to their room and gets on their phone and eats. So I think the nuclear family is the where it starts. I think we have to sit down and eat together. I think we have to teach our kids healthy choices. Somebody said to me that if we don't start eating our food as our medicine will become our food. I agree. I recently was asked by a good friend of mine to go and speak to a men's group at church and I was to talk about health and they wanted me to talk about heart disease, even though I'm a trauma surgeon. And I got in there and when I walked in the door they had fried chicken cookies. And I stood up and I said, we probably going to have a little momma here. And they all lie and the guy that organized, he said, we only do it once a year. You know I said, okay. But yeah, I do think that we've got to be more astute about eating the right kind of things, getting sleep. Nobody sleeps anymore, Bishop. Right. People go and they take pills to go to sleep. They go to therapists to learn how to sleep. They're doing everything because we no longer sleep anymore. What can we do about that? Well, you know, I think all this electronic stimulation is part of the reason our lives are so busy. We can't, you should be one to be able to, how do you cut your brain off? How do you work with draw? I use my phone when I'm on call and I go to work mode so that I don't get these pings and these bings because nowadays through that electronic thing that we hold in our hand, everybody has access to us 24 hours. You used to go up and go for a walk and nobody could get to you. Right. You used to go talk to God and spend a few times in prayer and go back to now everywhere we go. We're getting pings and bings and people are coming at us. Yeah, you know, and our attention in Spain is decreasing. It is. We went from the big screen movies to shorter stories told on television, to Facebook, which gave you a space for longer content to Instagram, which is shorter content, to TikTok, which is even shorter content. Our attention span is because it's literally withering our brain. And I will admit, I'll be honest. I slept for a long time with my phone by my bed. The first thing I did as soon as I opened my eyes was for my phone to see what was going on. And I have started being more intentional about getting up and stretching and moving and going out and getting some sunlight and doing some other things and getting new regiments and breaking those habits. It's like breaking an addiction. Sure it is. It's really an addiction. And so far, the screen is concerned. The body doesn't know to go to sleep when you're watching screens right up to bedtime and in the bed while you're in the bed. And I've been guilty of that too. But those are some of the small changes that we can do to make things better. And finding doctors like yourself who care, one of the things that I said to our producer. One of the things that really touched my heart is how you stayed, wavy on your shift, 24 hours and did not leave until I was out of danger. That kind of thing is born out of compassion, empathy and relationship. And there are people out there in the hospitals who really do care. They're not just there for the paycheck. There are people out there who really do care. But our relationship started before the crisis. Right. And building those relationships makes me not a number, not an insurance claim, brings back the dignity of being a person. Right. I've seen some people that put pictures of their loved ones who were in ICU on the counter just so that the technicians could remember. This was him with being. Yeah, this is a human being. This is a person who had a life because sometimes when you do that all day, you become hardened to the fact that they are there. They are real people, but you, you, my friend are real people. Well, I appreciate that. I knew that I was involved in taking care of somebody that meant a lot to a lot of people. And so it was, it was personal for me. And when I go into the emergency room, it's personal for me. And I do think that one of the things that led me to do trauma surgery was if you look around the country, trauma is taught at major hubs, urban settings. Mostly on black and brown people. And the people that learn to do the art of surgery then go out into fancier communities where they make, you know, a good living. But, you know, I was along with a lot of the colleagues that served. We were dedicated to the cause of serving the underserved and being there. And I will say this, one of the things that is very important and I had a young man say this to me the other day. When you get shot and somebody opens up your chest and we saw the vessels, what happened to the mind of a 12 year old or a 14 year old to get shot. We throw that little kid back into school thinking that he's normal. Those people need to talk to somebody. Right. I don't care how tough he is. I don't care whether his brother was a gang banger. When you're 14 years old and somebody opens up your chest and puts you back together, that doesn't mean that you're mentally well. Or that you're ready to re-assimulate. We cannot forget that it is the whole person that needs to be. You know, you talked about it. The fact that we had a connection, the fact that you knew that I was there, the fact that I was there beyond the initial procedure. That means something. Yes. It meant a whole lot. It meant a whole lot. Chapter number seven. Generational trauma. I want to spend a moment talking about generational trauma. You know, David fought a giant that wasn't his battle to fight. Right. And a lot of times passing down through history, there's been a lot of materials written both for Jews and blacks and other ethnicities and groups of people. And even people who grew up in toxic environments, that they grow up in a constant atmosphere of trauma to the point that their DNA is rearranged. And so all of a sudden you're acting out of a trauma that you didn't personally experience. For example, maybe you didn't go through the Holocaust with your grandmother, then. And it has affected your trauma and you're having a traumatic response to something that you didn't experience. You didn't go through slavery. Maybe your third generation from slavery. My great grandmother was a slave. But that trauma passes down generationally and often distorts how we process, how we deal with, how we react to different things like that. Have you done much research into that? Is there anything we can do to break that traumatic curse that is not a result of something we experienced? But maybe our mothers or grandmothers experienced it long way. Well, I haven't done scientific research, but I've lived. And I say that you know this particularly, African Americans in the South, there was a time when we couldn't talk. We couldn't express what was going on. We had, we put stuff in closets and we closed the door. And we thought that when we put that little monster in the closet that we killed that monster, but that monster was still there. And I think our unwillingness and our inability to talk about it has had a tremendous effect. It's like we were talking about stress. I think what you're talking about is in almost in a spiritual and a psychological way is a metaphor for stress. You know, our inability to tell people what happened to us and to share our stories. And now more than ever, people are trying to suppress the narrative. And so we're not allowed. I don't think you let it dominate you, but you have to understand why you have a hot temper. You know, you have to understand why you suppress things and you can't talk. My greatest fear, you know, with young, particularly young women is we see them in the emergency room. They've been abused. They've been physically beat. And they don't want to tell on the abuser. That's how they're processing. And they cannot heal that way. And I do think that you're speaking to something that we are seeing the manifestations of years of trauma and brutality. And I'll just say this. It bothers me that we see these stories published where these young people are being stopped by police officers and they're filming. And they're having these negative interactions. And we're seeing this and the kids are watching it over and over again. I told my boys, I said, if you get stopped, I need to do everything you can to make sure you live. I said, I can bail you out of jail. I can sue the police department, but I can't raise you from the dead. Absolutely. I went to, I finished with this story. I went to visit Coach McCartney who started Promise Keepers. And Promise Keepers was an amazing movement at that time to see stadiums filled up with white men talking about things that they no longer talk about today. If he tried to do that now, he'd probably get arrested and get picked up by ISIS or somebody rather than to talk about the things that he did. But I went out there to talk to him, one on one, to see what was different about you that made you have that level of empathy. And he said he went to a funeral because one of his players had lost a loved one. And the back of the church, predominantly black church, and he had never seen the amount of emotion, he moat from the crowd, the weeping, the crying, the screaming out and all of that. And he said he suddenly realized it wasn't a piphany. He had a moment where he realized they weren't just crying over the death of the loved one. Generations of pain. And I plotted his insight in understanding that. But I think we need to understand a little bit better that sometimes when people act out whether they're black, white or brown, that sometimes they are expressing trauma that they've not been able to express any other way. And Martin Luther King said that writing is the language of the people that are unheard. It is important to realize regardless of your background, suppressed anxiety doesn't go away. It either comes out in your health, it passes to your children, it acts out in your marriage, but maybe you were mad at your mother, but you took it out on your wife. One way or the other, it's going to express itself and finding healthy ways to express things and say what needs to be said, even if it isn't well received, even if it doesn't make you popular finding something way to vent will stop you from running into whatever and into. And that's why we're doing the show. Chapter number eight, crazy surgery. You live in stress, you live in an atmosphere where their sirens going off every few minutes, people are coming in, there's blood everywhere, people are in trauma, you're trauma specialist. What was the craziest if you can figure one above the other surgery or incident that you encountered in an emergency room? We often, people when they have traumatic chest trauma, sometimes in the emergency room, we have to open up the ribs and actually pull the heart out and massage the heart. We call it an ED thoracotomy. I've probably done 40 in my life or my career. And I have been surprised, just recently, had a guy that was shot multiple times and stabbed and had a build up of blood around his heart that we call pericardial tamponod. It stops the heart from contracting. I took him up to the operating room immediately, opened up his sternum, opened up his pericardium, released the blood, and we were able to save what, you know, there was a time when that would have been a fatal injury. But yeah, I've seen people shot with crossbows, where the bow went through the chest and barely missed one of the major vessels and we were able to get in and open up the chest and remove the arrow without unleashing a torrent of blood. You know, when you brought that up and made me think of the shooting that happened at one of your hospitals, there were a shooter got loose. Would you tell us story? Yeah, I am in my hospital always gets nervous when we tell it because of the the litigianist society we live in. But, but I can share what was public information is we had a gentleman who was visiting a patient in the hospital and it was his baby mama. They got into an altercation and when people went to her rescue, he was armed. He had an ankle bracelet on. There's a new law that governor signed into effect based on that incident. And he ended up killing two employees. This active shooter thing we just had in Minnesota, just the other day a young person in their 20s go in there and kill two children and wound it. I think there was a total of 14 injured and it reminds me of what happened in Sandy Hook, which was one of the most devastating events that ever that we've ever experienced in this country. How does that affect though you're a professional when you walk in there and you know that you're putting your life on the line, not just saving lives, but you're putting your life on the line every time you put on scrubs. How does that affect you and how do you spell really? Well, you know, it's a great question. I thought like you were saying that I was okay because I'm fairly stoic. You know, I think you called me a Vulcan at one point in time. Don't tell me. I'm very stoic, but I think internally I found out I was grinding my teeth at night. And I still have my wisdom teeth. I cracked several of them. And so I realized that my stress was being manifested at night by the grinding of my teeth. And now the dentist had to make me a bite block. So when I sleep, I put in a guard for my teeth because I'm cracking my teeth. But reading and playing my saxophone and reading are things that I do I vege out. Music is a great way. Music is powerful. Yes, a great way of dealing with stress. Thank you very much. Thank you. I was a pleasure and a privilege. Listen, I am so excited that you took the time to spend with my friend and physician and maybe pick up some information that would help you to realize the significance of the times that we're living in that you would allow yourself to have this moment with us is very, very important. I'm T.D. Jake's and it has been my honor to share our podcasts with you. I hope you walk away with just a little bit more information, empathy, preparation and strategy than what you had before you listened to this podcast. Make every moment come. Hey everybody, I want to take this time to thank you for watching the next chapter podcast. If this conversation inspired you, helped you reflect on an idea or spark something new inside of you. Make sure to like, comment and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. Remember, life isn't about how you begin. It's about how you finish strong. So start your next chapter with us right here every week.