If South Toledo physician Dr. Anthony Atkins could issue prescriptions for what really ails many of his teen patients, he would not be scribbling out the typical remedies. His pad would read something like this:
“Pull up your damn pants, son.”
“Young ladies, keep your legs closed and don’t give it up so quickly.”
“What in the *$&^ are you doing with a gun?!”
Since that may fall beyond the purview of a typical physician’s advice— the Doc created his own conduit for those messages, communicated through hip-hop, recruiting rappers from cities like Detroit and New York to record songs to his lyrics, rooted deep in Atkins’ medical experience, where the term “at-risk” refers to a deadly virus instead of a socio-economic designation. The 57-year-old physician-activist from the west side of Detroit served in the U.S. Air Force before graduating from medical school at Ohio State University, and has since spent his career passionately influencing youth on the perils of being uninformed and uneducated.
Real problems, real music
A long-time practitioner in Toledo and Lima, Atkins sees patients with an array of challenging medical concerns, everything from a 15-year-old boy’s emergency-room visit caused by gun violence, to an office visit where a sexually transmitted disease is diagnosed in, yes, a 7-year-old girl.
“That’s when I went on a rampage,” Dr. Atkins said. “I’m talking to kids in the ER, ‘how old are you? Sixteen? How many baby-daddies do you have? Three? Where the f**k are they? That’s when I started Lifestoryz.”
Atkins created Lifestoryz, a self-produced, positive-message-focused hip-hop initiative designed to make teenagers comfortable with their life decisions, rather than just blindly and recklessly making choices that lead to lifetime consequences. And by consequences, Atkins means death, jail and unwanted pregnancy.
Lifestoryz: State of Emergency, a 16-track, 2005 CD release, gained instant credibility due to the popularity of its message and delivery quality. This translated to public speaking opportunities and presentations at area schools for Atkins. The video for State of Emergency went viral across YouTube.com. The group would eventually open for Grammy-winning hip-hop and R&B artist Common.
Getting to the point
And while that was a great boost for Lifestoryz, for Atkins, the message needs to be told repeatedly, on a daily basis.
“It’s what I do. I just talk straight up. Just stop being stupid,” said the physician, who is more comfortable in his Timberlands and skull cap than anything else. “This is how parents are dumb. They come to me, angry, saying ‘I don’t think my daughter needs to be seeing pictures of penises with sores on them.’”
“‘Oh really?’ I say to them. ‘OK. How old is your daughter? Thirteen? What’s her name? Tanya? What I can’t say [due to the Federal Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act], but I would love to say is, ‘Your daughter came to my clinic last week and was treated for gonorrhea. So, I guess she is doing more than just ‘seeing’ that imagery from me,” Atkins explained.
“With prevention, I come down harder on the girls, because they are usually the ones stuck with the baby,” Atkins said. “Let’s just be honest. That’s how it happens.”
Atkins is passionate and firm with his disdain for reckless sexual activity, involvement with violence and crime, and a general sense of learned helplessness he sees in the Toledo and Lima communities. Frankly, he’s tired of it. Lifestoryz designated a galvanized pipeline of positive communication to young people through hip-hop. Now, Atkins continues to stress the rigors of prevention and common sense.
“To the females, I say ‘leave open your brains and your books,” Atkins said. “To the males, black and Hispanic: Stop drawing negative attention to yourself. You are emulating the wrong people.”
“I am about prevention,” he said. “Where are Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson when the prevention rally is going on? You don’t need a big rally or march after the fact. Open sores on the genitals of 11-year-old girls. Where is the rally to prevent that?”
Dr. Anthony Atkins is a family practice physician. He sees patients at Primary Care Network, 1421 S. Reynolds in South Toledo, 419-725-6290; He also works out of Northwest Ohio Urgent Care, 1015 Conant St., Maumee, 419-891-0525. Lifestoryz tracks are available at
myspace.com/lifestoryz.
