Doctor tells woman her back pain is caused by “ghetto booty”

A middle-aged Tennessee woman wants an apology from a doctor who used ghetto slang to explain the cause of her lower back pain. In an interview with CBS affiliate WERG in Memphis, Terry Ragland, 55, said she went to see Dr. Timothy Sweo in April for treatment of severe lower back pain. “It’s one of those things where my hip seems to slip, like it’s slipping out of place a little bit. It’s painful when you get up to go walk it kind of slips, you know,” said Ragland, explaining her painful condition. Dr. Sweo examined Ragland and diagnosed her with Lumbar Lordosis, a painful inward curvature of the lower spine that causes the tailbone to protrude outward. “He said ‘I know what the problem is. It’s ghetto booty,’” said Ragland. “I think I blacked out after he said ‘ghetto booty,’” she recalled.

Ragland said she complained to an office manager who apologized for the doctor. A few weeks later, Ragland received a letter from Dr. Sweo himself explaining his intentions. In the letter, which was meant to be apologetic, the doctor, who is Caucasian, said he was using ghetto speak to explain Ragland’s diagnosis. “I was trying to take a technical conversation regarding your lower back and make it less technical,” Dr. Sweo wrote to Ragland, who is black. “It says to me that he doubts what type of intellect I have, how intelligent I am to be able to understand what he conveys to me in a medical term,” Ragland told News Channel 3 in Memphis. Dr. Sweo declined to be interviewed by WREG. But he did admit telling Ragland she had a ghetto booty.

From WREG:

“What I was trying to explain to that patient is that she has lumbar lordosis, which is a fancy name for the curve of the lower spine that makes the buttocks protrude more. In trying to explain that I said that she had ghetto booty and she didn’t like that apparently. That was my attempt to explain why she had the back problem. It wasn’t the whole problem but it was part of it and she got upset about it,” said Sweo by phone. “You cannot cure lumbar lordosis.”