A shave, a cut and please roll up your sleeve

Movies have been made and treatises have been written on the role of barbershops in African American life. In the pre-Civil Rights era, they were one of the first businesses that black men, especially in the South, could own, and, outside of churches, one of the few places they could gather.

In recent years, the barbershop has continued to be a place of fellowship, where African American men meet, gossip and dissect sports and politics across generational and socioeconomic lines.

Now barbershops across South Los Angeles have been targeted as the site of lifesaving efforts, thanks to Dr. Bill Releford and a squadron of other volunteers.

Releford, a podiatrist with a Miracle Mile-based private practice, was getting a bald fade at Inglewood's Finest Barbershop one Sunday, when the solution to a long-pondered dilemma came to him: African Americans have the highest rates of diabetes and heart disease of any group, yet black men are among the least likely to see a doctor regularly. So if the men wouldn't come to a doctor, he would bring a cadre of volunteer doctors and nurses to the barbershop.

The Black Barbershop Health Outreach Program was born that day in Inglewood in December 2007. The response was so enthusiastic that Releford expanded the program to 50 other L.A. barbershops, and then to barbershops in other states. This year, at 750 shops in 50 cities across 13 states, men who ordinarily would go nowhere near a doctor's office will be offered a health checkup in a setting so familiar that it will seem as routine as a haircut.

In Los Angeles alone, almost 1,200 men have been screened for diabetes and high blood pressure.

"It's taboo to go to the doctor, so he comes to them," said Dr. Pamela Blakely, a podiatrist and program volunteer. "The one place he can find them on a weekly basis is the barbershop."

Many men balk at going to the doctor, and various studies have tried to get at why. They see being sick as a sign of weakness. They don't like waiting in doctors' offices. They're scared of what they may find out.

"We don't want to know," said Inglewood's Finest barber Dave Robinson, 62. "We'd rather go through life letting things fix themselves."

What's more, there are cultural barriers to medical care in the black community. Blakely points out that blacks are more likely than whites to be uninsured. Some patients feel more comfortable seeing a doctor who shares their background and culture, and only about 3% of doctors and medical students in the U.S. are African American.

And distrust of the medical system has deep roots in the black community, a legacy, Blakely says, of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in which federal health officials followed 399 black men from Tuskegee, Ala., for 40 years without telling them they had the disease -- long after penicillin had been found to cure it.

Blakely sat behind a table one recent Saturday at Inglewood's Finest, cuffing arms and pricking fingers beneath a life-sized cutout of Lakers star Kobe Bryant and posters from "Barbershop," the 2002 movie starring Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer.

The shop buzzed, and not just from electric clippers. Customers chatted with barbers, each other and on cellphones. Young men milled outside the shop's entrance.

Dropping into the chair by Blakely's table seemed natural.

"Everybody who sits down in this chair knows someone who has diabetes, if they don't have it themselves," Blakely said. "You talk about six degrees of separation -- it's more like three. Or two or one."