Dr. Barbara Ross-Lee: The First But Not The Last!

Welcome to Karen Hunt who is awesome and we are in the last couple of days of Women's

History Month.

But as you know, on all my platforms, every day is women's history, every day is black

history, every day is quasi, every day we celebrate greatness in all forms.

But today I wanted to say a special thank you to the life lived by Dr. Barbara Ross Lee.

This is going to be a couple of days of Barbara's tomorrow will be Barbara Jordan.

Today it is Dr. Barbara Ross Lee pioneering figure.

I'm going to break down all of the things that she has done in this discussion that I

have with her.

But what's really ironic is last week was a birthday of her younger sister whose name is Diana

Ross.

Okay.

So in the Ross family, we got Diana Ross and we got Dr. Barbara Ross Lee, who the eldest

of those six children went on to break all kinds of bounds and it was incredible to have

a conversation with her and have an interview with her and I want to share it with you today.

I'm really, really honored and excited to speak with this woman.

She's a pioneer, of course, the first woman to serve as dean of a United States medical

school from Detroit, raised in the project.

Somehow she made it out and then she gave back, right?

She came through one of those programs and we've been talking about that have allowed

for people to to live these kind of lives.

We're going to talk about it with Dr. Barbara Ross Lee.

Thank you very much and really pleased to be here.

Well, you are an icon and I'm grateful coming out of the projects of Detroit and Michigan.

Talk about that because your household produced some greatness.

You know, when you're living a really segregated society, you can only measure your value

by the people around you.

So I remember telling people, I didn't even know I was poor until I started high school,

you know, because everybody around me was poor.

So the project was not a deterrent to people moving ahead in life at the time.

It really was an opportunity to establish a base for families that were having economic

difficulties.

It occurred, you know, after the recession, people were laid off.

And so it was never perceived as a negative place to be.

I hear that a lot.

Particularly in New York, you know, there's some amazing stories when Queens Bridge when

it first opened and then I just think about it was supposed to be a bridge to get people

to solvency.

So you were raised in a home, you had your parents there.

There was a community, a sense of community within the building and I'm hearing that from

a lot of folk who were raised in projects in the 40s, 50s and 60s and then something happened.

Something happened.

Not quite sure whether it was the influx of drugs or whether it was the starving of resources,

but something shifted in this notion of giving people a leg up to then demonizing people

for needing a leg up.

I don't know what happened, but.

Yeah, it allowed us, and I do think a lot of it had to do with drugs, but it allowed

us to start labeling people and that label kind of limiting their upward mobility.

But I was lucky.

Came before that time.

Yes.

And more than lucky, why medicine, Dr. Rosley, why did you decide to go to medical school?

Well, you know, I've always loved science.

So the two options that I was looking at as a high school student was medicine or teaching.

And I, unfortunately, I'm able to do both.

I, in fact, I started off as a middle school teacher in the Detroit public schools when

the opportunity returned for me to apply to medical school.

And so I left my teaching job to go to medical school.

I was also seeing that you went through the National Teachers Corps, yes, a federal program

that allowed you to then earn a degree and not have all of this, you know, it's like

the programs aren't available to a lot of young people or they're not even promoted

to them.

There's like the vocational educational programs aren't as plentiful as they once were,

where students had opportunities to go into automotive aviation, you know, so many different

ways that they could earn a living and have a life.

You had this program that allowed you to do that without having to incur all of this

debt that is settling so many.

Absolutely.

And you know, that debt, certainly at the time that I was going through higher education.

Fundamentally, we didn't have student loans.

There was no money available, you know, so I worked my way through undergrad with school.

I worked 20 hours a week, 10 hours went to pay tuition and the other 10 hours got me

back and forth to school.

So as you're navigating this life, your sisters doing something else over here was, was

it looked down upon at the time, because you know, now she's international superstar.

But at the time, we all like, what is she doing over here with this music stuff and this

very gordy guy?

What is happening?

Well, you know, at that time, every teenager had a group they were singing with on the

front porch, right?

Nobody really ever expected her to be successful.

Every gordy was a phenomenon that allowed a whole bunch of people to move ahead in the

music world.

But I can remember my father's telling her, if you want to sing, why don't you get some

lessons?

And I can also remember the first time she went on tour, my mother traveled with them because

they were young girls and they needed to have a shaperone so she traveled with them much

of the first couple of years that they were on tour around the country in buses.

It was amazing.

We're talking about Diana Ross and we're speaking with Dr. Barbara Ross Lee, the first woman

to serve as a dean of US medical school in her own right or force of nature.

Would you're the baby sister?

No, not the baby sister.

I'm the oldest sister.

Are you the oldest?

I'm the oldest.

Okay.

I'm the oldest of six and I'm number one.

Okay.

I'm just number two.

Okay.

Number one.

I'm number one.

Diana's number two.

And I'll tell you a secret.

You and your listeners a secret if you promise to never tell Diana.

Okay.

As the oldest child in the family, I was responsible for watching out for every other of my brothers

and sisters.

Okay.

So I tell people all the time that if it wasn't for me, she never would have been successful.

I was the one that made that happen.

So don't tell her.

I told you that.

I won't say a word.

It makes sense, you know, none of us get anywhere without the people that came before

us.

And that's the one that took on all of the, I mean, but I even think about you with the

ambition to be a doctor, you know, in a time when there weren't any other people coming

from your neighborhood doing that.

So who was your model?

Did you have a doctor model or somebody that inspired you to say, I can do that?

Where'd you get the notion that you could do that?

Yeah.

I didn't have a doctor model.

I had never seen a black physician, male or female.

I had, however, when I had my first child, I did have a black female obstetrician.

That was the first and only black female that I had.

And of course, I didn't go to medical school until after I had children, I had two babies

when I started medical school.

So I had her model, her name is Ethlene Crockett.

I had her model quite frankly as to how important you can be as a physician in a minority community.

As I'm thinking about now, I was talking to a couple of doctor friends of mine.

They said it's a lot harder to become a doctor now.

Maybe not when you were coming up, you know, but there was a period of time when there

was a lot of, you know, programs for people who wanted to become doctors in the 90s in

the early 2000s.

And now they make it harder and harder.

How important is it?

We're in a space now where everyone's being sued for even having programs to pay difference

and give more opportunities to people because there's a lack of doctors from different cultures

and backgrounds, particularly in a black community.

Kids need to see black people.

You went to Wayne State.

I remember having this conversation with Keith Ellison, who also went to Wayne State and

grew up in Detroit and talked about his dad being a doctor, a physician in a all black

neighborhood.

He would park his Cadillac in his beautiful car in the driveway.

The kids would come and shovel and they would shovel his four boys.

And he talked about the importance of seeing that black doctor every day in the neighborhood.

So that's something.

Well, you just need to know that I've been in medicine a long time and I certainly gained

admission before anything like affirmative action.

There was no affirmative action.

I happened to have spent two years after I graduated from Wayne State with my bachelor's

in biology and chemistry as a laboratory tech at an osteopathic hospital.

And so when they were starting to move ahead and open the first public osteopathic college

in the state of Michigan, the owner of that hospital got in touch with them and said,

give the girl a chance.

And that's how I got in.

That was it.

I was there.

I saw something.

So the work that you do now, bringing equity, health equity, is there something we can

do in the community to help foster more doctors and are there programs that we should be

paying attention to, are there programs that we can be helping to fund?

Yeah, you know, becoming a physician is a long process and it doesn't just start when

you get into college.

It starts early.

And the community needs to attach, engage with high school, even as early as elementary

school.

You can't be what you can't see.

So we need to start that process really early to let our children know that they have value

and that they can aspire to be whatever it is they want to be and that we are there to

cover their backs.

And so yes, it's still a difficult process, mostly because we lose students and there's

such structural and systemic barriers against minorities in their K-12 system that might

strategy is to align myself with these schools, both K-12 as well as undergraduate.

And have those kids be involved, very similar to the National Teacher Corps?

Have those kids be involved and focused on and do whatever is necessary to motivate them

to know that they can be whatever it is they want to be?

Dr. Barbara Ross Lee, she's here, you lived through the civil rights movement, again, become

a doctor in a time when very few women, very few black people were even considering that

as a path that you were able to do that out of the projects of Detroit, Michigan.

Where are we today with all that you've seen?

Are you optimistic, hopeful or sad and if you're sad, are there solutions that you see that

we can implement?

I'm very optimistic, but I think that we need to tap into the power of our communities

to make the next step.

We tend to think you got one or two people in there out there and they're going to make

it happen.

No, you can't make it without that attachment to the community.

We have power in our community and we're going to put that power into action, particularly

for me around the health issues, health inequities and disparities.

Is it osteopathic?

Yes.

That's bone stuff, right?

That's bone stuff?

No.

No, it's not bone.

What is osteo?

Because I think of the bone density issues with osteoporosis and...

Absolutely.

To some extent, the name is a little bit unfortunate, but that's the legacy of the profession.

Ossiaopathic medicine and alopathic medicine create, produce all the physicians in this

country.

Ossiaopathic physicians are DOs and alopathic physicians are MDs and essentially they're

the same thing.

Although osteopathic medicine practices with a holistic philosophy, all osteopathic physicians

are trained to use their hands to communicate with the patients, to diagnose conditions.

Most DOs have really good hands and, of course, the osteo, to treat neuromuscular skeletal

conditions.

So we can do all of those things as well as have the equal training and licensure as MDs.

So right now, if you run into a DO in the hospital, part of the reason that you will know

it's a DO is because he or she is perceived as being a more caring physician.

That's that holistic hand-touching part of what we are and what we do.

Are you still practicing Dr. Ross?

Not anymore.

Okay, because you had your own practice for a number of years in Detroit.

Yes, I practiced for 10 years in Detroit and then I decided and I was recruited to join

the medical school at Michigan State.

And I thought that was the perfect opportunity that I would be in a position to train their

students to treat, to work and provide care in communities like mine.

And from that point on, I just kept going, going, going, you know.

What's the biggest hole right now in medicine as it relates to both equity and healthcare?

What do you think is missing right now?

I think that we could improve on our teaching of equity issues and how it affects not

just individuals but communities.

We tend to, we're in an era where we use acronyms for almost everything and we overutilize

words to the point where we no longer even can relate to the intent for the words to

begin with.

One of the areas that I have a concern about us, we always talk about the social determinants

of health.

You ask any physician if they know all about it, but then ask them what does that mean?

And so we've gotten used to using terms so much that we no longer can relate to what

they were intended to do.

And I think that's something that's really important in medical and health professional

education right now.

One way to do that is to better connect our future clinicians, whether they're physicians,

nurses, physical therapists.

We've got to better connect them with the communities that they serve.

And that starts with the medical schools themselves.

Dr. Barbara Ross Lee, what happened in your household that produced you and a Diana Ross?

What was going on?

Tell us about your mother and father.

It's all about family.

It's all about family and it's not that we had an easy time of it.

My mother was hospitalized for a year with tuberculosis.

But her sisters took her five kids and kept them until she was released from the hospital.

And her other sister was always there for us to make sure we had everything we needed.

It's all about family.

And that tradition is still with us today.

I would tell anybody if it was not for my family, I could not have gone to medical school.

They were there taking care of my kids when I was in a classroom studying medicine, you

know.

It's all about family.

So I will just say we have a family that I can be proud of.

And it's like my sister's song ain't no mountain high enough, okay.

I know if anybody in the family needs me, I'm there.

And because they know that we will support one another, they try to be independent on

their own.

And so they don't use up their support system.

I love it.

I'm so, again, honored that I get to sit with people like you, you know, some would just

focus on one thing.

But to your point, we are some total of all the people that are poured into our lives.

You know, you just don't become great.

Sometimes there's a lot of trauma too.

And how we navigate that trauma, I think, equal parts.

Also the pressure.

Yeah.

But you're never alone.

You're never alone.

And that's the important thing.

You may be out there by yourself, but you're not alone.

Isn't that awesome?

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Till next time.