Quintessentially Speaking Episode 3 is out now, and this one is for every Black man who has been putting off a doctor’s appointment.
Hosts Eric Keith and Jonathan Wells sit down with Dr. Brian Nwannunu, one of the few Black orthopedic surgeons and joint replacement specialists in the country, for a conversation that moves from rapid-fire medical questions to the personal cost of becoming a physician, the state of Black men’s relationship with healthcare, and what it actually takes to build the kind of life Dr. Nwannunu has built.
The episode is available now on all major podcast platforms. Here is a preview of what it covers.
Dr. Nwannunu is Nigerian-American, one of five siblings in a household that became a landing point for extended family arriving from Nigeria. By elementary school, he was helping administer asthma treatments to a cousin. He attended a health professions magnet high school in Dallas, went to Morehouse College for pre-med, and then navigated medical school, residency, and a fellowship in joint replacement, a process that took over a decade and placed him wherever the match system sent him, regardless of relationships, family events, or the life happening around him.
His account of what that cost him is one of the most honest parts of the episode. Relationships that could have become marriages that did not survive the schedule. Weddings and baby showers he could not attend. Years of delayed financial stability while peers in corporate America were hitting managerial roles and buying houses.
“If it’s for money, fame, adoration, it’s gonna be a lot of years. You don’t get that. So you got to really look into yourself and see why you’re doing it,” Nwannunu shares.
His answer to why he did it goes back to age four. Before he could articulate the word properly, he told his parents he was going to be a physician. They did not take him seriously. He did not stop saying it.
The episode opens with Eric making the direct statement: Black men need a primary care physician, and too many do not have one. Dr. Nwannunu does not argue with the premise. He addresses it from the inside, as someone in the medical field who understands the systemic barriers, the cultural resistance, and the specific way that mistrust of the healthcare system has been earned through generations of documented mistreatment.
The conversation about what it means to be one of the few Black orthopedic surgeons in the country runs through the entire episode. Dr. Nwannunu talks about representation, about what it means for a Black patient to walk into an exam room and see a doctor who looks like them, and about the specific work that goes into getting there when the path is not designed with you in mind.
Quintessentially Speaking was built for conversations like this one. Not the version of wellness content that treats Black men as a marketing demographic. The version that sits across from a Morehouse-educated, Kappa Alpha Psi member, orthopedic surgeon who grew up in a Nigerian-American household in Dallas, and asks him the questions that actually matter: What does this cost? What do people ignore? What does a Black man need to understand about his own body that the system is not telling him?
Episode 4 of Quintessentially Speaking is available now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listen to the full episode.
Photo Credit: Otis Clayborne
