By Jennifer Porter Gore, Word in Black
In January 2023, Dr. Leo Moore, a physician in Los Angeles, was prepped and ready to go for a routine elective surgical procedure. Pre-surgery tests on his blood, his heart and his chest were all normal, so the surgical team wheeled him into the operating room.
Moore almost didn’t come out alive. As the procedure began, his heart suddenly stopped beating. It took doctors, working frantically, nearly 10 minutes to restart his heart.
“I experienced cardiac arrest for 9 minutes and 25 seconds,” says Moore, who survived despite being clinically dead. “The surgeon didn’t think I was going to make it. The [intensive care unit] physician stated that he’d never seen anyone come to the ICU after [having] that procedure.”
Moore, who fully recovered after just a few days, has made the most of his second chance, treating HIV-positive patients and incorporating holistic medicine into his practice. His latest step on that journey is focused on helping Black men live longer by improving their health at every stage of life.
“The Men’s Preventive Health Guide — What to Check, When to Check It, and Why It Matters,” helps Black men take care of themselves with recommended health screenings, medical treatments and other elements of preventative care. The concise, easy-to-read chapters are centered on each decade of life, from “Men in their 20s” to “Men 70 and Older.” There’s also a chapter titled “Special Populations.”
“I have seen so many black men dying early, and wanted to create a tool that men can use to go to their doctor and feel confident knowing what screenings and vaccinations and important topics to discuss with their doctor,” Moore says.
The data back him up: U.S. life expectancy has improved slightly since the pandemic, but American men on average still die at just over 78 years old, roughly two years earlier than women. Meanwhile, life expectancy for Black people is around 66 years for men and 78 years for women, compared with 78 years for white men and about 80 years for white women.
Having seen friends, patients and family members — including his father and grandfather — die prematurely, the seeds had been planted for Moore’s book for some time. But they took root last year, when an audience member approached him after he delivered a presentation on age-based preventative care at a men’s health summit in Palm Springs.
“He said, ‘Dr. Moore, this is really helpful, but I wish I had a way to take this with me. I want more detail, and I want to have something that I can take with me to my doctor,’” Moore recalled. “And said, ‘I can create that.’”
Not long after the Palm Springs summit, Moore began drafting the framework of the book, starting with what young Black men need to know to take care of themselves. Then, he added a chapter for middle-aged men and others.
The book is also designed to be portable: Men can take it with them during healthcare visits and use it as a guide for treatment, as well as the vaccinations they need and conversations to have with their caregivers. The book also has a helpful checklist at the end of each chapter.
Having survived death, writing a book seemed like a logical step for Moore, who comes from a family of caregivers. While he knew he wanted to practice medicine, he wanted to break long-standing family trends.
“I wanted to become a doctor because there were no doctors in my family,” he says. “My mom is a nurse. My grandmother’s a nurse. My aunt is a nurse, and the men are all preachers.”
At 5 years old, Moore says, he decided “we have too many nurses in this family. We need at least one doctor. And, at age 25, I became a doctor.”
Trained as an internist at the Morehouse School of Medicine Moore practices lifestyle medicine, HIV medicine and internal medicine and is based in Los Angeles. In a city where fame and celebrity are relatively common, Moore is probably the only person alive who can say they have been named the “Ultimate Men’s Health Guy” after being dead for almost 10 minutes.
In fact, Moore, who works out regularly, was back in the gym not long after his heart stopped on the operating table.
“After the cardiac arrest, my body was still pretty conditioned and within a few days, I returned to lifting light weights,” Moore adds.