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Health and haircuts: College Park resident spreads medical awareness through barbershops

Posted on: January 16, 2025

By IJEOMA OPARA

Yarrow resident Stephen B. Thomas, director of UMD’s Center for Health Equity, works with barbers and hair stylists to bring health education to their customers.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ijeoma Opara

University of Pittsburgh professor Stephen B. Thomas walked into a local barbershop for a haircut in 2005 and overheard a conversation between the barber and a customer who had just started taking a new medication.

The barber told the customer the hypertension pills could hamper sexual performance.

“I looked at [his] face. I’m realizing that he’s not going to take those pills,” Thomas, now the director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland (UMD), said. “And his doctor has no idea there’s somebody [the barber] in the community with that kind of influence who’s not even a health professional.”

At that moment, an idea came to Thomas: If he could bring accurate medical information to people through community hubs like barbershops and salons, members of vulnerable populations might wind up healthier.

“What if the barber would have said: ‘If you are having side effects, erectile dysfunction, tell your doctor, don’t be ashamed, they can adjust the medication?’” Thomas, who lives in College Park’s Yarrow neighborhood, asked. “And that’s where the whole idea of HAIR was born.”

Shortly after, Thomas, a public health professor, started Health Advocates In-Reach and Research (HAIR), an initiative that trains Black barbers and stylists to educate their customers on health issues.

Thomas said he has always been interested in medicine.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1953 as the third child of six, he grew up with his family in Hilltop, then a predominantly white neighborhood.

One of the things Thomas eagerly anticipated as a child was starting school, in part because his sister, Barbara, was the first Black student at West Mound Elementary School, which he would later attend.

He didn’t realize until much later that the school’s white principal walked Barbara home every day–which Thomas believed at the time was an honor–because she had been the victim of racial violence and the principal’s company was for safety.

Mike Brown, manager of The Shop Spa in Hyattsville, was the first barber to join HAIR, Health Advocates In-Reach and Research.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ijeoma Opara

Hoping to become a dentist, Thomas, now 71, did not pass a chalk-carving exercise–which required students to fashion an enamel tooth from a long piece of chalk–and did not qualify. So he studied zoology and health education instead, earning his bachelor’s degree from The Ohio State University in 1980 while working as a respiratory therapist at different hospitals in Ohio. He earned a master’s degree in 1981 from Illinois State University and a Ph.D. in 1985 from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

Thomas began his career as a professor at UMD in 1986 before joining the faculty at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta in 1993, and then moving to the University of Pittsburgh in 2000.

Ten years later, Thomas returned to UMD, where he founded the Center for Health Equity.

Almost immediately, Thomas started recruiting local barbers to participate in HAIR.

His first recruit was Mike Brown, who manages The Shop Spa in Hyattsville.

“It’s been an amazing journey,” Brown said on a recent Saturday afternoon as he carefully trimmed a client’s hair and reflected on The Shop Spa’s earliest program around colorectal cancer.

Brown’s father had died of colorectal cancer, so when he saw a “chance to swing back at cancer,” he grabbed it and has held on since then, he said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Thomas and Brown organized Shots at the Shop to bring vaccines to customers at The Shop Spa.

The novel initiative attracted the attention of the White House, which endorsed Thomas’ effort to train 1,000 Black barbers and stylists across the country to combat the spread of COVID-19 disinformation.

Approximately 100 barbers and stylists have joined the HAIR network.

“We are not actual doctors ourselves, but the symptoms that we do speak of, clients have got checked out and found out something was wrong,” Brown said.

At The Shop Spa on the Saturday before Christmas, clients held conversations in small clusters over the whirring sound of clippers. Thomas had invited Kimberly Boddie, a lupus patient who works for The Lupus Foundation of America, to visit the barbershop that day and give a brief presentation.

“Sitting here in this barbershop today has been very impactful,” Boddie said. “Some people didn’t even know what lupus was.”

Lupus, an autoimmune disease, causes the body’s immune system to fight healthy tissues. For Boddie, the ailment led to a hysterectomy and double mastectomy.

One barbershop client, Reginald Walker, left the barbershop clutching at some reading materials Boddie shared.

“I just came in for my regular shape up and just so happened to hear her talk about lupus,” Walker said. “My cousin suffers from it, and she’s actually on a list to have her kidney transplant.”

The HAIR program has spread to Montgomery County and Baltimore. In Houston, a team of Black barbers and stylists started a screening campaign in 2004 about peripheral artery disease (PAD). Thomas said he hired a computer gamer and graphic designer to create an online game, “Padmaster,” to help people learn more about PAD.

Beyond HAIR, Thomas has explored other ways to bring health care to underserved communities.

In 2014, he collaborated with Catholic Charities DC to launch the Mission of Mercy and Health Equity Festival in Prince George’s County. The group offered free dental care to more than 1,000 people who lined up overnight outside of UMD’s Xfinity Center waiting for service. 

The group held the festival again in 2016 and 2019, but has not organized it since the pandemic.

Still, the two-day event’s success did not come without challenges. Thomas said he faced opposition, especially in 2014, when some colleagues pushed back at the idea of having the festival on campus.

“Somebody said: ‘Are you bringing all these poor people on campus?’” he said.

Funding the event also was a challenge. Thomas said he raised $160,000 for each festival, adding that he will bring it back only “if there is institutional commitment” from the university and the community.

For now, Thomas is working with stylists to create a new program under HAIR, called Tea Time, to focus on sexual wellness and HIV treatments. He is also working with barbers and stylists to combat opioid abuse.

“The most important thing is that we are being hyperlocal and we are prioritizing the most vulnerable,” he said.

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