Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
[Music] so [Music] me [Music] uh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you are in the world it’s Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman with Relationship Matters. I hope everyone is having a beautiful morning, afternoon, or evening. I’m here in Chicago, right outside of Chicago, and it was a beautiful day today. It’s still nice and sunny and it’s in the 70s and we love it, we are loving it.
Well, I think the last episode, the last show, I had stepped off of my soapbox and you know I’m stepping back on it. And why? Because the COVID numbers are rising again and today on the news now there are two more variants. People, please, please wear your mask, please wear your mask. But we can stop this. I know we’re tired of the mask, we’re tired of covering, but in order for us to get over this, to get past this, we have to help ourselves. So I’m not going to stay on my soapbox long, but I’m still wearing my mask and I’ve gotten both of my boosters. There are so many people now, my friends, who are coming down with it because they’re not wearing their mask. You know, and I understand, I hate it, but protect yourself and protect others.
Now, you know I’m talking about medical things and guess what? Today I have on my show Dr. Asante Dickson. He has so much value to bring us, he has so much sports to talk about, and I want to get right to it. So I don’t want to talk a whole lot, but before I do, I want to thank everyone who I had told about my husband’s health issues. He’s doing so much better, so I want to thank all of you for your prayers and your support.
So let’s bring on Dr. Asante Dickson. Hello, hello! How are you, Dr. Dickson?
Asante Dickson
Good evening! Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m doing fine.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Wonderful, wonderful! So you call yourself the medical education whisperer. Where did you come up with that?
Asante Dickson
I come up with a lot of things. My brain is always working. The medical education whisperer was something that I kind of came to after giving a couple decades worth of lectures. My lecture variation is pretty wide, but one thing that is very common is that throughout my lectures, whether I’m speaking didactically about hardcore medicine or I’m speaking to the general public about cognitive or non-cognitive issues, I’m always infusing my lectures with messages that the audience can understand and relate to. So it just kind of made me think, you know, somebody’s always kind of like, you know, something’s confusing, but somebody just whispers in your ear, you know, that sounds confusing, but really what it is is this, okay? That’s what I try to do in many of my lectures and talks.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, and I also read that you said you were hip-hop inspired. What does that mean?
Asante Dickson
So that is absolutely true. I am originally from New York, grew up most of my life in Long Island. For those of you not familiar with New York anatomy, the five boroughs and then there are the suburbs adjacent, so there’s Long Island to the right of Queens. I didn’t live very far from Queens, and you can imagine in New York, hip-hop, especially in the 80s and the 90s when I was growing up, hip-hop was king. It was everywhere, and New York was in charge. There was no California or Southern or Midwest; New York was running everything. I think the message and the culture was intercalated, it was really woven into my genes where the music and the delivery and the messaging, I basically took that and transposed it into motivation to push towards my educational dreams.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh, alrighty! So we know you’re a medical doctor, and I know you are, hey let me get this right, a neuroradiologist, correct? What is a neuroradiologist?
Asante Dickson
A neuroradiologist is a physician that specializes in treating and diagnosing diseases in the central nervous system. So that would be the brain and the spine. We use imaging to see, and with that visualization, we diagnose abnormalities and diseases. But we also use that imaging to treat abnormalities in images. So for example, if you’ve had an MRI of the brain or a CT of the brain, we would be the doctors to interpret those images and give the diagnosis and tell your doctor what the problem is. I also do what’s called interventional, which is we do procedures. For example, this week we had a patient that we were looking for an aneurysm. What I do is I have the patient on the table, I put a needle in the groin, and then through the needle access, I put a catheter in the groin and in that artery, I float my catheter all the way up through your groin, through your belly, through your chest, past your heart, excuse me, up through your neck, up into your brain. Then I use the catheter to inject a medication in your brain, and I have a huge machine that rotates around you, and I essentially create pictures of your vessels in your brain and I can look for things. It’s pretty incredible.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
It sounds incredible! It also sounds, you know, I’m going, uh, when you go through the groin. I used to, one of my former careers, I worked in a cardiac catheterization lab.
Asante Dickson
Exactly! And I know they would go from the groin to the heart and then measure, you know, what was going on in the heart. So essentially it is the same thing they did in cardiac cath when you were working there. The only difference is when they went around the arch into the heart, I would make a right turn and go up into your neck, but it’s the exact same approach. So we can go through your groin; we can also go through your arm.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh really? Okay, so tell me, give me your journey. How did you, why did you become interested in medicine? Just give me the journey from the start to where you are now.
Asante Dickson
I am a child of immigrants. My parents and family are from Trinidad and Tobago, an island right off the coast of northern Venezuela. It is an English-speaking island; they speak a dialect of English. Fun fact, historical fact, although it’s not really that fun, but it’s true, which is Trinidad and Tobago, of all the Caribbean islands, changed hands the most. In other words, between England, Portugal, Spain, everybody had a piece of that island for a short period of time, and for that reason, there is a large mixture of people there—Afro-descendants, Spanish, Indian, you name it, we have those mixes of people in Trinidad and Tobago.
I think simultaneously that immigrant background in New York led to a serious focus on academics. My parents were educators, and they basically had a no-nonsense approach to school. School was the only thing they were interested in hearing about. Growing up in New York, I’m a New Yorker, right? So what were we doing as kids? We would play basketball, we would play soccer, play baseball like every other kid, but we did a lot of hip-hop. You know, you’d be out there battling and rapping outside of school or in the classroom, and it was very hard for me to come home and tell my parents, you know, “Oh, let me tell you about this rhyme I wrote.” You know, my mother would be absolutely unimpressed. Right? There was nothing impressive to her about any rhyme or coming home and saying, “Oh, I made the varsity or the junior varsity football team.” That was kind of like, “Oh, that’s nice, that’s nice, but how did you do on the last math test?”
So I kind of grew up in a house where education was always center, and I think that definitely played a role in my focus because in order to survive and not, you know, get my teeth knocked out, you had to perform. That was the beginning of the academic drive. The beginning of the drive to medicine came because I have two uncles who were from Trinidad, but one went to Howard and the other went to school in England, and they were kind of the pillars of the family. They were physicians, and your audience may or may not know, it’s very common in immigrant families outside of the U.S. being a physician is a big deal. You know, it’s a big deal. Excuse me, you know, if you’re a physician in the West Indies, you know, people give you a lot of respect.
So my uncles were very much so respected in our family, and I think that I always looked at them as paragons of the life that I thought that I wanted to live. So I embarked on this journey towards medical education. In school, I was always a good student. I thought actually school was relatively easy, and I say relatively because, you know, there were classes that were very tough and gave me a lot of trouble. But I think from elementary to junior high to high school, if I studied, I was likely going to get a good grade. So what I learned is if you put in the time, you would get a good grade.
Now that would change later on as you got into college, but I can say that in my pre-collegiate days, I definitely had an association between effort and outcome. Towards my end of high school, I made the decision to pursue college. I wanted to go to an Ivy League school. My cousin was a freshman at Cornell University, and because she was a freshman at Cornell, my attention was drawn towards her and that school. So when I went up to Cornell for what we called minority hosting weekend, which was a weekend they had, I don’t know if they still have it, but at that time, you would bring all students from all over, predominantly the tri-state area, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and those students would come to Cornell for a weekend to be introduced to what campus life was like and to get a feel as to what Cornell was like.
That particular weekend I went, they had a concert there, and the concert had A Tribe Called Quest and Busta Rhymes. So when I went up there and saw A Tribe Called Quest and Busta Rhymes performing that weekend, I was like, “There’s no other school to go to. If this is what college is going to be like, I’m going to Cornell and I’m going right now.” So Cornell was my number one pick.
Cornell was a very difficult school, and that was when I realized that this association between effort and outcome wasn’t holding true anymore. And why? Because you were now in an environment where everybody was coming from good high schools and came out with excellent grades and excellent stick-to-itiveness, if you will, with some smart kids up there. So now you being regular smart didn’t cut it anymore. That’s when I really started to learn about competition and curves and learning about nuanced skills and nuanced strategies to be educationally successful.
Unfortunately, I learned it the hard way by falling in the bottom of the class in certain classes. Some of the science classes in particular were extremely difficult and very tough because there were so many kids. I can remember being in biochemistry, biology, chemistry classes where I was sitting in the balcony, and there must have been easily 500, 600 people in the class. So, excuse me, you can imagine that being in a class with 500 or 600 students, you’re kind of lost in a sea of bodies, and the professor is like down all the way at the bottom of the lecture room, and you can barely make out his face because you’re so far back.
You know, this really put the onus on you as the student to figure out what you’re going to be doing and how you were going to perform.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So let me ask you a question. What made you want to go into medicine?
Asante Dickson
I think it was the combination of my own interest in science, and I did very well in science in high school. Science was a very strong subject for me, but also my uncles, them being the family pillars, and they got a lot of attention in my family. So naturally, I kind of always saw them as, “Alright, well that’s something that I want to do because they do it,” which is something that happens a lot to human beings, which is you tend to gravitate towards things that you know. So if your family is in education, it’s a good chance you may go towards something educational. If your family is in business or entrepreneurship, it’s a good chance you’re going to go towards that. Why? Because you go towards what you know.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, and why did you choose neuroradiology?
Asante Dickson
So after Cornell, I went to Georgetown Medical School. I went to internship at Georgetown, I did one year of radiology at Howard, I did three years of radiology at Stony Brook Winthrop University in Long Island, and then it was time to choose a fellowship. Honestly, they said neuro was the hardest specialty to get into, and I don’t think I particularly had an affinity towards it. I just heard somebody say the hardest fellowship to get into is neuro, and I said, “Alright, well that’s what it’s going to be,” because I think in me I’ve got this competitive streak and what we call in medicine kind of like a gunner. I’m not a super gunner, but I am very competitive, and I think that’s what made me say I’m going to go towards neuro.
So, excuse me, not only did I go towards neuro, but I really positioned myself to get into the top neuroradiology program, and at the time, the top neuroradiology programs were Harvard and Stanford, and I got into Stanford, and I chose Stanford to do my two years of neuroradiology training.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, wow! You know what? I’m just going to say this: you just look so young, look like you maybe should talk to like 21, 22, and I’m listening to you, and I’m like, “Oh my goodness gracious, you know, he’s only 20, maybe 25, and how did he do all this?” But I think it’s just wonderful.
So this is Relationship Matters. How did your different relationships assist you in where you are today? I know you talked about your family, your uncles, but were there any other relationships outside of your family?
Asante Dickson
Sure! One thing I learned from my father: my father was a relationship king. My father was a champion networker, even though he probably never looked at it as networking. He was just a very social man, and I get my networking skill from him. I learned very early, even though I early didn’t know what I was doing, but I talked to a lot of different people. I was never shy, so even as a kid, if I talked to you, I talked to you, and I remembered the conversation I had with you. If later on, even if it was something like, “Oh, I need a red crayon,” I remember who last month said they had a box of red crayons.
So, excuse me, even as a kid, I followed my father’s footsteps in assessing where value is in people. I think that I’ll give you another example outside of my family. I can remember a woman who used to, in high school, she took her own car, it was a van, and that’s how I’m dating myself because people don’t even have vans anymore. It was a big van, and she would go around every Saturday and Sunday morning starting at like four o’clock in the morning and pick up all these kids to take them to an indoor tennis center to teach tennis.
Because, you know, we’re in New York, right? So we don’t have a lot of outdoor tennis; it’s winter most of the time, so indoor tennis is pretty big and it’s very expensive. So you can imagine between 6 AM and 8 AM, that’s probably the only time that she could get because it’s probably the cheapest time because nobody really wants to play tennis between 6 and 8 AM for the most part.
I remember her because I looked at the way she was giving of herself. I don’t think anybody paid her. I mean, most of the kids were, we were kids, we didn’t have any money to give her. She filled up her own tank, she drove around because she had a mission to expose young kids, most of us were black or Latino, to a game that she thought taught discipline and it gave people the opportunity to get scholarships to go to college.
I was kind of the outlier, honestly, because I was kind of like I played because I just liked it and I liked to hang around the other kids, but I really wasn’t depending on tennis to get me into school. I actually kept that quiet because a lot of the other kids were, you know, looking, you know, needed that opportunity to get to pay for school. But I bring you back to the reason I bring her up because this isn’t a relationship that I made with her where my time watching her played a role in the physician that I am today, which is to understand that you work for the prize, you work for the mission, and you don’t need people to tell you you’re good. You don’t need people to tell you, you know, “I like you,” and “I think you’re cute,” or that you’re tall or that you’re fast or that you’re whatever it is.
I think what I did was I watched people, and I watched that woman for years, and that relationship that I had with her, even though it was from afar, even if it was sitting in a chair behind her as she drove, you know, sleepy herself at 5:30 in the morning, was a relationship that I used to really hone my own presentation and my own personality.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, so Dr. Dickson, I’m going to just take a quick, quick, quick, quick, quick break here, and when we come back, you said I read something where you talked about the United States medical system, and that’s all I’m going to say because when we come back, I want you to say exactly what I read, and then I want you to tell the audience why you think that. Okay? So don’t go away. We’ll be right back.
[Music]
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So we are back with Dr. Asante Dickson. Now, Dr. Dickson, yeah, go ahead, tell us about the medical system, the United States medical system, and what you think about it.
Asante Dickson
Okay, well that’s a huge lift, but I will say that I believe that the United States medical system is the best medical system in the world. The factors I use to make that statement would be technologically, we are likely overall, and I say overall meaning availability of technology is pretty widespread. I know there are deficits and I know there are inequities, but technology has always been a strength of the U.S. medical system. Access, I would say I’d give a six out of ten for access, but I think the capitalistic drive behind the U.S. medical system also produces a significant amount of physicians per year. Because there is money in education, unfortunately, or fortunately, medical schools have really blossomed over the past decades, and as a result, the competition, which is always good, has led to very well-trained physicians.
It is not uncommon for physicians in other countries to want to come to the U.S. to train, whether it’s medical school or postgraduate, because the U.S. system is viewed as the crème de la crème of medical education. I say viewed because we all know that, you know, perception and view isn’t necessarily reality, but that’s the perception. Like anything else, there are demerits and there are holes in the U.S. medical system. One of the greatest disappointments in the medical system is that it mirrors and has mirrored the societal norms of the United States, which is to deliver care inequitably based on socioeconomic status, based on gender, and based on race.
I think if people hear that and they say, “Excuse me,” if they say, “Oh man, this guy with the race business,” listen, all I got to tell you is that whether you love it or hate it, if the system is based on race, which our system was always based on race from the inception of this country, if the system was based on economic disenfranchisement of people regardless of race, then you can’t be shocked if your medical system and your banking system and all your systems are demonstrating inequity based on race and based on economic inequality regardless of race. We can’t be shocked.
So as a person of color, particularly after George Floyd, we have a lot more visibility of the inequity in health care outcomes and treatment of people of color versus majority people. Where does this bother me? It bothers me not only in the realization that there is inequity, but it also bothers me as a physician because my training is not to give care based on race. My training is not to give care based on gender. Excuse me, my training is not to give care based on whether somebody comes from a poor neighborhood or a rich neighborhood.
So when we hear about these inequities, it really bothers me because I say, “Well, how are doctors able to engage in inequitable care even though there is no real over-training to do so?” And the answer is, yeah, the training isn’t necessarily overt, but people are people, right? If you’re a person that happens to be a doctor and you’re a person that does not like women or you don’t respect women, then just because you’re a doctor doesn’t mean all of a sudden you’re going to give equitable care to men and women. If you have an issue with women, then because you’re a doctor, you’re likely going to give care that is unequal and that disadvantages women, right?
And schools really haven’t dealt with that bias that exists within doctors because they are merely vehicles through which care is delivered, and their personalities, their upbringing, and their biases play a huge role into the type of care that they provide. So speaking of relationships, one of the things that I always talk about is regardless of race, when you go to the hospital, you need to have a relationship, an advocate. The hospital is working in your best interest, but a hospital is a system, and you can be easily lost in that system.
It is easier to have a friend or a colleague or somebody, a neighbor, who can sit with you, ask questions, review medications with you, talk to the doctors and the nurses because just as your relationship with them is important for your own safety, physicians and medical providers also respect people who have relationships. If you’re by yourself and there is nobody else with you, there may be, whether it be subconscious or not, I’m not arguing, but you may be left out to dry more because they know there’s no backup, right?
And so relationships go both ways, and I think people need to understand that the system of medicine is a system that is under tremendous pressure to produce profit. And so what you have is you have physicians such as myself and of all races, this is not just black or white, there are many countless physicians out there who want to give everybody the best care they can, but they’re trapped against this dichotomous existence of I want to give my patient the most time, listen to them, talk to them, but in order to make money to keep the lights on, they got to push the patients through and get on to the next patient.
That leaves us with a lot of stress because, you know, you want to give more, but you can’t because you’ve got volume, and you’ve got to push your volume through. These types of monetary pressures unfortunately impact people of color more, and that is because if I shorten my stays, if I shorten my consultations, if I shorten my listening, if I shorten my speaking, the patient who has greater adversity in their social determinants of health—how long it took them to get there, by what route did they get there, do they have money to cover their medications, do they have insurance, is there a family member with them—those individuals, unfortunately, will have probably worse outcomes because their care has been shortened because they’ve got such a weak background before they even step into medical care.
So if you shorten your time with each physician, with each patient, and you’re pushing patients through in order to keep productivity high, the patients with more money, they will survive that shortening, that truncation. The poorer patients, the more disenfranchised patients, they will suffer adversely.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Wow, yes, yes! And you know, I was thinking, I’ve had so many careers in my life, and I work, I’m not going to say the name of the hospital, but I worked at this particular hospital, and I was a unit manager. But they had a wing on the floor of this hospital where the more affluent or the rich patients were, and on that wing, the floor was carpeted, and the care was, I mean, they didn’t have to push, you know, the little button by the bed to call the nurse or the doctor; they would be right there, right there, right there, right there.
So yes, I see exactly what you’re talking about. And when you said access, I thought about that too, and you mentioned also about insurance, and that’s the first thing when you go in for care is, “Do you have insurance?” That’s right. And so my husband had very, very good insurance when he was working, and he was a cancer patient, and once they found out about this particular insurance that he had, oh my God, it was like, “Oh!” It was like racist. Oh my God! You know, I mean, he got everything, including a nurse that would come by the house and give him this shot that he needed, and this shot would get $3,400 a pop, and I’m like, “You mean you’re going to come by the house?” I mean, it was so different from someone who I know that did not have really good insurance, so to speak, and she told me she felt just like she was on an assembly line, you know.
Asante Dickson
It’s very interesting because something I don’t get, Americans are very savvy when it comes to smelling out the business aspect of, you know, inexperience. You know, if we go into a restaurant, you know, we’ll say, “Oh, this is nice, oh, this is nice,” and they’d be like, “Yeah, well, they’re just selling that because they just want to make more money.” Okay, you go to a football game or a basketball game, you’ll be like, “Oh, this is great, my team, rah-rah-rah,” but if you pay $30 for parking, they’ll be like, “Oh man, you know, they’re just trying to get our money, and you know, the owners of this team, you know, this guy’s a billionaire, you know, what does he need with blah blah blah blah.”
But somehow when it comes to medical care, Americans have blinders on, and they kind of forget that medicine is a business. In order to keep the lights on and give you the service that you need in our capitalist system, you have to collect revenue. You either collect revenue from the patient, or you collect revenue from the insurance system, or you collect revenue from the state, or all three. And without that revenue, the hospital can’t thrive. But somehow, I think it may have been through the glorification of medicine in early TV shows, in my opinion, you know, it kind of made Americans think that, you know, doctors are different, they’re doing this for the love of the game, and if you want to pay them in sheep and if you want to pay them in cloth, they’ll accept that.
Well, that may have been the case back in the day, but most doctors in the United States are not accepting sheep and pigs anymore for payment, although I’m sure there are some that will take, you know, non-cash items because they may be working in areas where people are extremely poor, remote, and by no means am I saying that doesn’t exist because I’m sure it does.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Yeah, yeah, yeah! And when you talk about relationships, I always think that if you can, you need to form a relationship with your doctor. And when I say a relationship, I mean not just based on your medical needs, right? But with my doctor, I know about her kids, you know? I know when she was putting, had to put in a new driveway in her house, and you know, around her house, and when I go in, I ask her, you know, like, “How are your sons?” You know, well, I know one of them wanted to go to college and the other one wanted to be a musician. What’s going on with that? You know? And so it makes me feel that she’s not just looking at me as, you know, what I’m saying, like she’s got to look on the computer to see who I am, you know what I’m saying?
And I know that she can’t talk with me for an hour, right? You know what I’m saying? Because I know she’s, you know, she’s got another patient. But I, but I think that I’m fortunate and blessed in this because I have some, I have good insurance, you know what I’m saying? But then with someone who doesn’t have insurance and doesn’t have a doctor, so to speak, and they have to go through the emergency room for care, yeah, you know, I know that they’re treated differently. When my, the last time my husband had to go to the ER, and we flashed the insurance card, there were people who were still sitting there, you know, and they looked at us because, you know, they called his name right, and it’s like, “Wait a minute, I’ve been sitting here for however long.”
So it is a difference as far as access, and personally, I think, I can’t remember the country, but I guess they would call it socialism where, you know, no matter who you are, you get the best of medical care.
Asante Dickson
Well, what is also interesting is that I’m willing to bet that if we walked around to all 350 million people in the United States and said, “Do you want a socialist system where everybody pays into the system and everybody can get care?” I would tell you the vast majority of Americans would probably say no.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So why do you say that?
Asante Dickson
Because American culture is very individual. American culture is not a group-type culture. It becomes “we” when we need to fight somebody, like conflict we become “we,” but when it comes to, “I will pay for you, so I’m going to work five days a week, 12 hours a day, you’re going to work one day a week, but my money covers you,” that is difficult for the American psyche.
Even if people are mortgaging their homes to pay for their bills, it is difficult. It also kind of runs into the American kind of like pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of mentality, which is work harder, maybe you’ll get insurance if you work harder, or, you know, but I’m not giving two dollars to you for you to sit back and not work as hard because I’m giving you two dollars to supplement your medical care. This is just my feeling.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, okay.
Asante Dickson
That’s just my feeling. I think that that capitalistic nature of medicine, even though it eats us up, is still a part of who we are, and it’s kind of like we’ll go down swinging to protect it because we want to be able to say that I’m not putting my money towards somebody else who’s going to mooch off of me.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, all right. We had a question that came in. It says, “If it is in your power, what would you tell the new physicians to interact with their patients?”
Asante Dickson
Well, it is within my power for two reasons. One, I work with medical students and residents all the time, and two, I do have a company that what we do is we actually focus on the training of new physicians. I can tell you what I focus on is humanism. The days of choosing who’s going to be a physician, a good physician, based on who got a 98 versus a 92, those days are slowly changing because we’re realizing that the person who got a 98, they may be smart, but they may have no bedside manner, they may have no interpersonal skills, they may have no emotional intelligence, and those are the type of doctors that I think the American public wants more interaction, as you stated.
They want to be able to talk to somebody who can actually say, “Oh, my kids are this,” and “Oh, how are you doing?” or “Oh, did you hear what’s going on in the news last night?” as opposed to the old school doctors that tend to be trained kind of like, “I don’t talk to you, you don’t talk to me, I tell you what to do, you do what I say.” Right? And if you question me, I will be insulted.
Now, there are different levels of questioning, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I get questions, I get patients that I believe are a little over the top with the questioning, like, you know, if they ask me, you know, “Do they want to see my medical degree?” and, you know, they get into questions like that, sometimes I’m just kind of like, you know, come on, I mean, we’re in the middle of a hospital here, you know, I don’t have a medical degree on me, right?
But I think that the new doctors need to learn humility, and that’s who I’m interested in. I’m not interested in, you know, the person who only can get 100 but can’t make eye contact with you. I don’t want that doctor anymore.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Okay, so now is that a school? Let me see, I know, so what’s the name of your organization?
Asante Dickson
We are called Ascension Medical Educators, and we are a customized academic educational business firm where we support undergraduate students who are looking to get into medical school, and we support medical students and residents and practicing physicians. We serve everybody, but we have a specialty with underrepresented students. We are two black men who are the owners and founders of this company, and if there’s one thing we know, that is how does the underrepresented mind work in higher education. So we focus on that; it’s a specialty, but we have students of all backgrounds, from, you know, no money to, you know, parents buying jets.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Oh my God, that is wonderful! That is so wonderful! I love to put my hand on my heart; that’s just amazing. Much, much needed work you do.
So now if people want to get in contact with you, you’re on Instagram, so you can go to Instagram and look for Asante Dickson, or excuse me, you can also find him on LinkedIn, Asante Dickson. Easy, yeah, now that’s very easy, people. Yes, that’s very easy; it’s his name.
So we’ve got maybe a couple of minutes, so is there just something you would like to leave my audience with on relationships?
Asante Dickson
Yeah, I want to leave the audience with the idea that, you know, relationships are a part of your development. Who you talk to, who you don’t talk to, who you choose to ignore, who you choose to listen to, who you choose to associate with, hang out with, talk to on the phone or text, all of those things play a huge role in what direction you are likely to go, whether it be professional relationships or personal relationships. You are the master of your ship.
If you are attracting people that don’t have a good heart or don’t have a good soul, if you attract or you’re attracted to people that you’ve seen abusing other people, and I don’t necessarily mean physically, but yet you still associate with those people, just like the American medical system, you can’t start with slavery and then be shocked that there’s disparate treatment among races in the medical system. Right? You can’t be shocked that now you’ve found yourself in a quandary dealing with certain individuals in your career, in your job, in your marriage.
If you started off chasing individuals that you’ve seen abuse other people, right? So honestly, I say you can’t blame anybody but yourself, and we’ve all been there. This is not something unique to you. I have made that error and had to sit there eventually when the bottom dropped out and been like, “I ain’t got nobody to blame but me.”
Yeah, I’d like to blame somebody, but the truth is I can’t. I’m here because I followed something that I needed in that person that I didn’t really assess properly as to how I needed to achieve it, and now I’m in trouble. So I say when you associate with people, when you choose who you want to emulate, you use what you know of yourself. What type of personality do you have? What type of strength do you have? What type of weakness do you have? And you use those, and you put it together to see whether this individual or these individuals will overlap and support that.
If those individuals don’t support you in your direction and in your mission, it’s likely a relationship that, yeah, you can keep, you know, dab it a little bit here, dab it a little bit there, but you may not want to put too much behind it because it’s not really aligned. And you know, I’m being generic because I think each individual listening can take that and put it to their respective situation because I think it works whether you’re talking about your man, your woman, your wife, your child, your boss, your employees, the man at the bus stop. Right? There are certain people that you need to go towards, and there are certain people that you just need to be cordial, “Hi, hi,” and then turn around and walk away, right? Because it’s not for you.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
You know, I love those words. I really do. And I just want to put a comment that came on from Gwendolyn Dunbar. She said this was very informative, and she’s very proud to hear that you’re giving back to the community and also recognizing the fact of racism.
Dr. Dickson, thank you so much! You have given us so much value, and I really appreciate you coming on and being my guest finally.
Asante Dickson
Yeah, I know, I’m sorry!
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
No, no, no, no, no! But I really want to thank you for coming on. This has been extremely informative, extremely interesting, and I just want to say again, I love the work that you’re doing. I hope I never have to really see you professionally.
Asante Dickson
Yeah, now you won’t, but I remind seeing you socially.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
So you have a beautiful, blessed rest of your day.
Asante Dickson
And you as well! Thank you so much! I’ve enjoyed this time, and I think the work you’re doing is very important, which is spreading the word and opening people’s minds to make decisions as to where they want to go.
Dr. Janice Hooker Fortman
Thank you so much, Dr. Dickson! See you next time! Ciao!
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