英语访谈节目:急诊室医生"砖城"寻根之旅

SAMPSON DAVIS:It absolutely can.

I mean, these stories, collection of stories in this book really chronicles patients that I have seen throughout my career practicing emergency medicine. And it's always issues around health care and access to health care in inner cities.

RAY SUAREZ:Access ends up being an enormous issue, because very sick people land in the E.R.s where you have worked, and it's a lifetime of accumulated effects, and now you have to fix them.

SAMPSON DAVIS:Right, and fix them fast, in that split-second.

So I see patients come in who are suffering from heart attacks, obviously, who have strokes, but the strokes are a result of uncontrolled high blood pressure, who maybe are on dialysis, and that's an effect of their uncontrolled diabetes and high blood pressure.

I see trauma cases, gunshot—young gunshot victims who prematurely lose their lives on the streets. I see cases of patients who don't have health insurance, and so they try to doctor themselves at home. And when all else fails, they just sort of finally give in and cave and come to the emergency department for treatment.

On the other side of the spectrum, I'm also seeing mental illness, exacerbation of mental illness, depression, schizophrenia untreated, undiagnosed, where the patients have chronically suffered from these ailments and never seek treatment. Society just sort of passed them by, and there's no outlet for them to sort of tap into, so that they can treat their depression or their illness that they're suffering from.

RAY SUAREZ:That's a lot of the tension in the stories that you tell.

As an emergency room doctor, you're seeing people in a fleeting, rather than longitudinal, way, and your frustration comes through a lot, because you can't change their lives in one night together.

SAMPSON DAVIS:Right. And that's exactly the point.

So, for me, it's important to say, what can we do, what can be done, and to step outside the emergency part, to step outside the confines of my comfort zone, the hospital, and reach into the community and say, hey, listen, you need to take your medications every day, you need to be a champion of your ailment.

As a family, everyone needs to sort of bond together and help treat dad who may be suffering from cancer or who hasn't gone for his precancerous screening. Prevention is so key. And a lot of the patients unfortunately that I see, they don't go for the preventative care. And by the time they're diagnosed, it's too late.

And then the frustration comes through from my end, because I'm saying, I could have been—diagnosed you with the throat cancer, or told you to stop smoking, or been an advocate in your health care and have the screening that you needed to sort of diagnose this early. You could have had treatment, and lived long enough to see your kids grow up and your grandchildren born, and see them thrive.

There's sort of fear sometimes and apprehension when it comes to medicine because of the lack of what are—difficult to perceive and understanding what's going on with your body. And it's truly—it's not. Once you invest that time and that energy, you can take better care of yourself than any physician or nurse practitioner or health care worker can do for you.

RAY SUAREZ:But you can't fix some of the original causes of these illnesses, the malnutrition that's driven by poverty, the asthma that's made worse by life in an aging tenement home.

There are causes that you know very well since you grew up in Newark that can't be changed even by the best health care. It's too late by that time.

SAMPSON DAVIS:I agree.

And so the issue is multifaceted. It's not one sort of spot that you can fix and change everything. But I think this is a start. I'm also advocating education, because I feel that, if we educate ourselves, the more we educate ourselves, that we can overcome poverty, and the fact that if we do it as a community, and we stick together, we bond together, and we support one another with education, with health, then we can start to fix some of the issues at the root of the cause.

And so we can erase—we can erase families who are struggling to get by on minimum wage. We can erase the drug abuse that we see on the streets and in the home. We can erase the gun violence and the domestic violence, and we can start to bring attention to mental illness.

But this can only be done if everyone in the community is invested. And so I think it has to be a position that we all take in which we say, yes, take better care of yourself. Yes, go for your pre-screening to make sure that you don't have any ailment that can be detrimental to you down the road.

But we also can then turn to our youth and our adults and say, it's OK to get educated on these matters. It's OK to do well in school for the young person that's in school. It's OK to achieve and be academically successful and show your academic excellence.

Sometimes, in the inner cities, especially amongst the adolescent peer group, there's some tension where it comes to you doing well in school. It's almost perceived as you're being a nerd, or you're corny, you're trying to do better than everyone else. And so I wanted to erase that sort of issue and take away and empower the youth and say if they call you a nerd today for doing well in school, that's OK, because they will be calling you boss tomorrow.

RAY SUAREZ:The book is "Living and Dying in Brick City."

Dr. Sampson Davis, thanks a lot.

SAMPSON DAVIS:Thank you.