Dr. Olumide Adeyemi

I am a cardiologist in Atlanta and a long-time advocate for preventive cardiovascular screening in Black men. I trained at academic medical centers in the U.S. after medical school in Nigeria, and I have been in practice for twenty-six years. The reason I do mentor work on this platform is that the cardiovascular outcomes for Black men in the West remain significantly worse than the population average, and the gap is largely explained by gaps in preventive care that brothers can close if they have the right information and the right relationships.

Let me name what this is and what it is not. This is consultative mentorship. I am not your cardiologist. I cannot prescribe for you, order tests on you, or take over your care. What I can do is take a small number of brothers per month — six to eight active — and provide consultation on what screening you should be asking for, what questions you should be asking your primary care doctor or your own cardiologist, and how to interpret what you are being told within the broader picture of cardiac prevention for Black men.

Most brothers who come to me are in their forties or fifties and have had something on a recent physical that has raised a flag — a blood pressure reading, a cholesterol panel, a family history that has just become relevant because a sibling or parent had a cardiac event. They are scared. They want to do the right thing. They are not sure what the right thing is. The medical conversation they had with their primary care physician was, in many cases, compressed — fifteen minutes, hurried, lots of information they did not have time to process.

What I do in the consultation is slow the information down. We go through the numbers — what they mean, what the targets should be, what the evidence is for the various interventions that might be discussed. We go through the screening you should be asking for and at what age intervals — the lipid panel with the more advanced markers, the coronary-artery-calcium score for the right patients, the cardiac stress testing question, the broader question of whether you should be seeing a cardiologist directly. We talk about the lifestyle evidence base — the parts that are strong, the parts that are overstated, the parts that are still being worked out.

We talk about medications when they are on the table. I can explain how the major drug classes work, what the evidence base is, what the side-effect profiles look like, what the genetic and demographic patterns are that suggest some agents work better than others in our patient population. I do not prescribe, I do not adjust regimens, I do not order labs. I do help brothers understand what their actual clinician is recommending so they can have a more informed conversation.

My consultation rate is one hundred fifty dollars per hour. I do a free thirty-minute first call to decide whether the mentor work is useful for your situation. Many brothers can do their work through their existing clinical relationships if those clinicians have time to slow down and explain. For brothers whose clinicians do not have that time, or whose clinicians have given short shrift to the preventive conversation, the consultation work can be valuable.

I will not work with brothers in active cardiac emergencies — call 911 or go to the emergency room. I will not work with brothers whose primary cardiologist has provided a recommendation I disagree with — that is a clinical disagreement between physicians and I will not insert myself into your care from the outside. I will work with brothers in the broad middle ground of preventive cardiology, where good information and the right questions can change the trajectory of the next twenty or thirty years of your cardiac health.

If you are considering reaching out, write to me with a brief summary of where you are — age, current numbers if you have them, what brought you to this. I read every note. I respond within a week. The work of staying ahead of cardiac disease is real work, and it is the work that prevents the phone call from your primary care doctor that starts with 'we need to talk about your results.'