Photography by Jay Shelp
Dr. Sanjay Maniar wears street clothes when he goes to Shack’s Barber and Beauty Salon—or Big Tymers Hair or Leonard’s Barber College or Kamikaze Kutz. If a guy’s already got hypertension, he doesn’t need the jolt of seeing a white coat with “Barnes-Jewish Hospital” embroidered on it.
But he does need his blood pressure checked.
One walk-in at Maniar’s free pop-up health clinic had a systolic blood pressure (the top number) of 230—and quite a few have sailed past 180. “Normal’s 120, we prescribe meds after 140, and 180’s extremely dangerous,” he explains. “These are folks who could easily have a stroke at any minute.”
A resident in internal medicine, Maniar plans to become a cardiologist. He and several other residents started making these visits as volunteers with Better Family Life, a St. Louis nonprofit. “Barnes did a community health-needs assessment, and the heart-disease mortality rate in [the ZIP code] 63113 was almost double the rate in Clayton,” he says. “Life expectancy dropped from 82 to 65. And there was an almost fivefold increase in preventable hospitalizations.”
So when the nonprofit lost funding for the project, the volunteers just kept showing up.
Barbershops and salons, it turns out, are perfect places for a stealth attack: People are relaxed, waiting around, ready for personal attention and a little gossip. Maniar needs only a table, two chairs, and maybe “turning down the hip-hop, so we can get the right blood pressure.” The mood’s amiable and low-key. If somebody detours around the scale (“Oh, y’know, I just had breakfast”) nobody yells. But if there’s cause for concern, Maniar acts. He’s sent a few people straight from the barbershop to the ER.
“We’re seeing what happens when disease goes unnoticed, unmonitored, and uncared for,” he says. To reverse that process, he’s perfected his powers of persuasion: “I’ll ask, ‘Do you want to see your grandkids get older? Your kids?’ People won’t necessarily change their habits for themselves; they say, ‘Oh, it’s just me,’ and they’re stubborn. But thinking about their kids, that’s where it takes root.”
Maniar looks forward to these Saturday mornings. He finds himself giving out free advice about aches and rashes, brochures for everything from migraines to arthritis, and recipes for turkey burgers. When people proudly inform him that they eat lightly, lots of soup, he gently breaks the news of canned soup’s sodium content. And he really should get a kickback from Mrs. Dash.
Not to mention all the grandkids.
