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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Shampoo, style, check-up

Jennifer L. Boen The News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Ind.)

We expect our doctor, dentist and optometrist to be on the lookout for significant – or subtle – changes in our health. But an important watchdog most people don’t think about is their hairstylist or barber.

Three years ago, Fort Wayne, Ind., dentist Robert Ketcham went for his monthly haircut to his longtime stylist, Carol Rulka. While cutting his hair, Rulka noticed a change in a mole in the hairline at the back of his head. “I’d seen it before, but it really grew and it was irregular in shape,” Rulka recalled.

Ketcham remembers that day well. “She sounded worried about it. She said, ‘You’d better get it checked out.’ ” So he went to a dermatologist. A biopsy confirmed it was melanoma, a type of skin cancer. Surgery successfully removed it.

A few weeks ago, Rulka noticed another regular client, a woman who had recently completed chemotherapy, had a yellow cast to her skin. The woman had not noticed it, but at Rulka’s suggestion, she called her doctor. Tests showed her liver was failing. “She called me and said, ‘Thank you, Carol. No one else told me I was yellow.” ‘

The curriculum in today’s beauty and cosmetology schools includes information on recognizing skin cancers, detecting changes in the texture or growth pattern of hair, and knowledge about a variety of communicable diseases, said Nancy Norton, senior instructor at Ravenscroft Beauty College, in Fort Wayne.

Norton remembers noticing a customer’s significant hair loss from her previous visit. She recommended the woman see her doctor. “She was diagnosed with diabetes,” Norton said. Although diabetes doesn’t normally cause hair loss and may not have been the cause of this woman’s thinning hair, Norton said the client repeatedly thanked her for helping her get an early diagnosis of diabetes.

The role of salons and the professionals who work in them is also becoming one of educator. Using hair salons to disseminate health information is the focus of a federally funded early-detection project at the University of Alabama in Birmingham’s School of Medicine. Beauty Shop Talk was the brainchild of Theresa Wynn, professor at UAB School of Medicine’s Division of Preventive Medicine.

While sitting in the salon one day, Wynn was intrigued with the free-flowing chatter between stylists and clients about health issues. She recognized the important conduit of health information a stylist could be.

“If women trust someone to do their hair, they can trust them to do anything. They are their lay therapists, their lay counselors,” Wynn said.

Over the next nine months, nine stylists who were given several hours of education in breast and cervical cancer and the importance of prevention, shared the information with clients in six community salons, owned and patronized by African Americans. African-American women are more likely to die from breast cancer than Caucasian women, even though African-American women have a lower incidence of the disease. Libraries with an array of educational materials on breast and cervical cancer were set up in each shop.

Initial results of the Beauty Shop Talk intervention found:

69 percent of clients received more advice and information about breast and cervical cancer than they had prior to the intervention.

69 percent have had or plan to have a mammogram.

94 percent have either had or plan to have a Pap test.

79 percent have performed or plan to perform a monthly breast self-exam.

100 percent said Shop Talk is a good method for women to get health information.

In the next phase of the Shop Talk project, prostate cancer information will be offered at local barbershops, Wynn said. Surveys of men showed they want the information but want to access it at their own pace and were less interested in talking openly about the issue than women were about breast and cervical cancer.

Training of the stylists emphasized they are not diagnosticians or medical experts.

“We want them to dialogue, to encourage and support but not to get into opinions about (a client’s) course of treatment,” Wynn said.

A program in Atlanta called REACH for Wellness is teaching barbers and stylists how to take blood pressures. About a third of people with high blood pressure don’t know they have it. The goal is to detect hypertension in its earliest stages and encourage clients to see a doctor if the pressure is elevated.

The program, developed in part by the Association of Black Cardiologists, offers a nonclinical setting for blood pressure checks. That is an important factor for people with “white coat syndrome,” Wynn said, meaning their blood pressure rises at the doctor’s office.

Norton said although local hair salons have not formally embraced the role of health educator, she expects it to be evident soon.

“Women talk to their hairstylist about absolutely everything,” Rulka said. “Women and health issues in a salon are just a natural combination.” Ketcham agrees both salons and barbershops are ideal places to draw attention to health issues and recognize problems.

“As a dentist, I see lesions on faces. The head and neck are the most likely places to see them,” he said. “But I think there’s a segment of the population that almost never sees a dentist, yet almost everybody gets a haircut.”

“So if half go to a dentist but 100 percent get a haircut,” he said, “I think there’s definitely a place for the people giving the haircuts to be effective in these things.”