Break it down: Drop guns, wear condoms

Ohio family physician Anthony Atkins, MD, has turned to hip-hop music to reach adolescents with important messages about safer sex, self respect, and prevention of violence.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Feb. 11, 2008.

Anthony Atkins, MD, a family physician working in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Lima, Ohio, wanted a way to reach the young African-American males who came to his office with bullet wounds and the 13-year-old girls arriving for prenatal care. He also wanted to find a way to reduce the number of adolescents he saw who had not just one sexually transmitted disease, but multiple types simultaneously.

And then he settled on music.

"These kids listen to hip-hop. They vibe to that. I needed to find a rapper and write out what I saw in a way that the kids would listen," said the staff physician at the Lima Community Health Center.

So, even though he prefers jazz, the 49-year-old doctor started writing lyrics for hip-hop songs and turned them over to local rappers as well as those from Detroit, Chicago and New York. They refined the songs to make them even more relevant for the audience Dr. Atkins wanted to reach.

"They said, 'You're old school, but we know what you're trying to say.' They made it flow better. They made it rhyme," he said.

The result is "LifeStoryz: State of Emergency," a 16-track compact disc that is probably one of the few, if not only, hip-hop releases with a physician credited on the cover. He hands it out to patients or refers them to his MySpace page where four of the songs are posted. He and his rappers also performed at the local high school in September 2006 with the support of the county health department.

"Adolescents think they're bulletproof and invincible. Dr. Atkins makes them stop and think, and he's found a way to do it through music," said Becky Dershem, a nurse practitioner and director of nursing for the Allen County Health Dept. in Lima. "The patients love him, and teenagers respect him a great deal. He's been a real asset to our community."