E-mail a friendDr. Keith Black
airdate March 24, 2009
Dr. Keith Black chairs the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center's neurosurgery department, where he combines cutting-edge research and a busy surgical practice. Internationally renowned, he's credited with performing the first outpatient brain surgery and for pioneering research that concentrates chemotherapy directly on brain tumors. The Tuskegee, AL native published his first scientific paper at age 17 and, in an accelerated program, earned both his undergrad and medical degrees in six years. Brain Surgeon is his first book.
Noted neurosurgeon comments on the link between cell phone usage and brain cancer. (2:02)
Full interview. (14:06)
Dr. Keith Black
Tavis: Dr. Keith Black is the chairman of the department of neurosurgery and director of the Maxine Dunitz Neurological Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center here in L.A., of course. He's also the author of the acclaimed new book, "Brain Surgeon: A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles." Dr. Black, nice to have you on the program.
Dr. Keith Black: Thank you, Tavis. Great to be here.
Tavis: Good to see you. No, thanks for the righteous work, and I mean that, that you are doing.
Black: Thank you.
Tavis: Yeah. You were saying to me before we came on - I don't know how much you can say on TV - but you just got back from Africa?
Black: Just got back from Gabon. I was taking care of the first lady of Gabon, yes.
Tavis: When you said that to me it made me think - and you actually talk about this in the text - here you are, flying back into L.A., treating the first lady of a nation in part because they know who you are and the gift that God has blessed you with relative to the brain, but also because as first lady I assume they can afford it.
Talk to me about the people that get a chance to get access to these hands I'm staring at because they can afford it versus those who need it.
Black: Tavis, that's one of the real challenges, and we talk about that in one of the chapters in the book, called "The Doctor's Dilemma." As a physician, my oath, my mission is to take care of patients that need my services. So we try to take care of patients that have critical needs.
Not only have I taken care of the first lady of a country in Africa, but one of the people that we've also treated has been a young boy from Ethiopia who had no funds that we brought over to Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles and took care of free of charge. So we try to take care of all patients.
Tavis: You say in the book - and I'm not quoting it but I'm paraphrasing - you suggest in the text that the brain is a piece of God's artwork and that every time you get a chance to operate on a brain it makes you more spiritual.
Black: Right.
Tavis: Explain what you mean by that.
Black: Well, Tavis, one of the things that I say is that if you want to understand an artist, you study his art. If you want to understand God, you study nature because nature is the artwork of God. And there's nothing more incredible in the universe that I know of that I have ever imagined than the human brain.
So when I'm operating on the human brain, what I'm looking at, what I'm working with, at least from my perspective, is the artwork of God. And so it gives me, at least in my mind, insight into God, and it makes me feel more spiritual.
Tavis: Talk to me about the role that faith plays. There are always these conversations I find myself in, at least with physicians, about the role of faith versus science. How do you juxtapose those things, faith and science, faith and medicine?
Black: Well, I can tell you that faith and belief is very important for patients. There's one patient that we talk about in the book, Scott Urdman (sp), who had brain tumors in the brain - multiple brain tumors - was given a diagnosis of six months to live. We did a very aggressive approach with him, including operating, when it was really outside of the envelope of medical care at the time.
And he's still alive and doing great now some 14 years later. He also happens to be a minister, and he had a lot of faith in his ability to heal and he had a lot of people that supported him. And that is a very important symbiotic relationship that I see all the time in my patients - their ability to sort of believe in God, their ability to believe and their ability to heal.
And that is an important component of our ability as physicians to integrate in our science and art of medicine to help them heal.
Tavis: One of the things you talk about in the book that I was pleased to see, because you talk about it very courageously, and that is - and very honestly, I should say - that is this notion that a lot of what you do, by your own admission, is buying people more time.
When you're inside the brain and you've got these tumors and other issues that you're dealing with, you know when you see people every day what the prognosis is, what the rough estimate is of how long they're going to be around, and you go in and you do the work anyway, because it's really about buying them more time.
Talk to me about that, what the value of that is, how you navigate that personally, when you know that all you're really doing here is giving somebody a few more months, maybe a year or so.
Black: Well, it's interesting, Tavis. About half of the patients we operate on have benign tumors and we can cure those with surgery a lot of times. The other half of the patients that I treat have malignant tumors - cancer within the brain - and surgery alone, and even with radiation and chemotherapy, is not always curative.
The most aggressive tumor, called a grade IV glioma, the median prognosis is about 15 months, with standard care, and we can sometimes extend life a year or two, maybe three years, with aggressive treatment.
But one of the things that I've learned from watching my patients, and they are the real heroes in my book and that's one of the reasons I wrote the book, is to really tell their story and their heroic way of approaching their illness, when you give someone a year to live, six months to live, two years to live, they live that year in a very different way than someone who's not ill.
And one of the things that I've learned from my patients, and it's one of the most important lessons that I've learned in life, is that you can live a lifetime in a year. You learn to sit back and smell the roses, you have interactions with your loved ones, you interact with your son or your daughter and you tell them things that you want them to learn out of life.
You tell your wife or your husband things that are important to say that we normally don't say. So these patients are really the most special gift that I've seen in that they teach us to live a lifetime in the time that they have.
Tavis: You mentioned cancer, that so many people have cancer in the brain and you operate on them, of course, all the time. I'm not asking you, nor would you anyway, knowing as you do, violate any patient confidences, but I happen to have been a friend, as you know, of Johnnie Cochran, and Johnnie Cochran was obviously one of your dear friends.
And we know, because we've all read this, Johnnie Cochran, one of your more famous patients. Johnnie said to me, and I know others he said the same thing to so I'm not, again, violating any confidences here, Johnnie believed, or at least wrestled with, whether or not one of the reasons why he contracted what he had to deal with in his own brain, which obviously killed him eventually, was talking on his cell phone too much.
He wondered whether or not he contracted what he contracted from talking on his cell phone too much. I know you've been asked this before, I suspect, at least. Tell me, again, not about Johnnie per se but what you make of people who feel that cell phones can cause brain cancer.
Black: Well obviously it's a very important topic and it's a very important issue just because of the widespread use of cell phones and in particular the number of children and young people that use cell phones now a lot.
What we do know about cell phones is that there have been some important studies that have shown that the use of cell phones for very long periods of time, greater than 10 years, can increase the risk of developing brain cancer by two and a half fold - more than 250 percent.
Now, there have also been other studies to show that there's no correlation with cell phones and the development of brain cancer. But one of the things that concerns me is that if you take someone who's smoking cigarettes and starts smoking cigarettes at 12, you don't expect them to develop lung cancer at 22. You expect them to develop lung cancer at 42.
When you have an environmental toxin it takes 20, 30 years to develop a cancer, usually, from that toxin. We've only had studies on the use of cell phones and brain cancer for 10 years, so we don't know what the impact of the use of cell phones will be over 20, 30, 40 years, particularly on our children, who are starting to use cell phones as early as seven and eight years old. And we also know that a young brain is much more susceptible to the dangers of cell phones.
Tavis: Can I ask Dr. Keith Black how he uses the cell phone that I assume he has?
Black: I always use an ear piece, Tavis. I always use - I use an ear piece. The microwave radiation is the (unintelligible) of the distance you have the cell phone from your brain. So if you actually read the insert in your cell phone, it'll say keep the cell phone a certain distance from your head when you use it. The farther you keep it away, the less microwave radiation, so keep an ear piece so you keep it away from the brain.
Tavis: You were mentioning kids a moment ago, and again, back to the text. What's cool about the book is that you weave in - as you said earlier, you want to tell the stories of your patients, but you weave in those stories with your own, and brain surgery is such a serious conversation and such a serious topic, and yet there's some humor in the book for people like me, at least.
Because when you get a chance to read about what you were doing as a kid, (laughter) it's funny. I'll let you tell it - dissecting - anaesthetizing and dissecting frogs when you were a kid?
Black: Yeah.
Tavis: Tell me about this.
Black: Well, I'll tell you, Tavis -
Tavis: Was there nothing else to do in Alabama?
Black: There's not a lot to do in Alabama. (Laughter) But for as long as I can remember I've had a fascination with science. I loved trying to understand the process of life; I love science and the whole process of science. So I would get a frog and I'd learn that if you put some alcohol over the nose with a cotton swab you could anaesthetize it.
And I would take my brother's biology book, which had very great graphics, and I would try to correlate the anatomy in the frog as I would dissect it with this anatomy book and look at the beating heart and so forth.
But one of the things about that, and I really go over that in the book, is that my parents were the ultimate educators and my father, when he observed me doing that, went out and got me a turkey heart so I could sort of dissect the chambers of that, and then ultimately went to the slaughterhouse and got me a cow heart to cultivate my interest in science and medicine.
And I think it's important for parents to support and cultivate interests that their kids show and to allow them to really flourish and be the best that they can be. I would not be here, I think, without the support of two very, very strong parents that recognized my interest in science and allowed me to cultivate that.
Tavis: One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show was to be able for you to tell these stories, and those of us who operate inside of a certain community in this city revel in your humanity and revel in your accomplishment and the gift that God has blessed you with. But it's always cool to have a national TV show to let other people - indeed, kids - see that not only can you be president but you can be a neurosurgeon as well, which raises for me this exit question - whether or not you are at all concerned about the fact that in too many communities of color there is not the focus placed on math and on science.
And so having more people who look like Keith Black, who's having the kind of impact he has, may not be a thing of the future if we don't start to take math and science and those kinds of subjects more seriously. And I'm not going to lie about it - I was not a great math or science student.
Black: Well, Tavis, ultimately you want kids to have options. You want them to find what they love to do and to be able to sort of develop those talents. We all are not going to be president; we're all not going to be Barack, and we're all not going to be -
Tavis: Keith Black.
Black: - Kobe Bryant. I think too much emphasis sometimes is put on athletic achievement, being a rap artist. One of the reasons I wrote this book was just to show that there were other opportunities. And you're absolutely right - math and science is where the opportunities are going to be over the next decades, and for me there's been nothing more rewarding than being a scientist, making discoveries, trying to find cures for disorders that affect the human brain, and being able to operate on the brain, which is as close as I can come to the most amazing structure within the universe.
Tavis: His name, Dr. Keith Black. His new book, "Brain Surgeon: A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles," a read I highly recommend. Dr. Black, nice to have you on the program.
Black: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: Thanks again for your work.
Black: Thank you very much.
Tavis: Appreciate it.
Back to March 24, 2009