Dr. Frita McRae Fisher stands at the intersection of cutting-edge nephrology and cultural wisdom, medical authority and digital influence. As the founder of Midtown Atlanta Nephrology and a triple board-certified physician, she brings her expertise to more than 830,000 YouTube subscribers, breaking down complex health issues with clarity and compassion.
A graduate of Meharry Medical College with training from Georgetown and Emory, Dr. Fisher is a leading voice on Black health disparities, particularly in hypertension and kidney disease. She has seen the healthcare gap firsthand—from dialysis centers disproportionately filled with Black patients to transplant lists where they are underrepresented—and has made bridging it her mission.
Through clinical excellence, cultural competency, and digital reach, she is redefining medical leadership. The author of Under Pressure: A Guide to Controlling High Blood Pressure and a trusted expert on major news networks, she blends Western medicine with holistic approaches, honoring both pharmaceutical advances and ancestral remedies to foster real, community-centered healing.
What are the leading causes of health issues in our community, particularly regarding kidney function?
The book I wrote “Under Pressure, A Guide to Controlling High Blood Pressure” – as black people, we are disproportionately affected by high blood pressure, and according to the CDC, about half of the adults in the United States have high blood pressure. Most do not have it under control, and we know that high blood pressure is a leading cause of heart disease strokes.
It’s the second leading cause of kidney disease, and I am a board certified kidney doctor. A great number of the patients I see on dialysis – their kidney failure could have been prevented had they had their blood pressure under control. If you have hypertension, you are under pressure because it’s a ticking time bomb for your health.
What steps can we take to control our pressure?
The first thing we need to do is know our numbers. A lot of my patients say ‘My pressure runs high, but that’s normal for me.’ They say ‘Oh yeah, it’s 150 over 100. I don’t feel any symptoms. I’m fine.’ The problem with high blood pressure is that it’s a silent killer. You can be running around with dangerously high levels of blood pressure.
Meanwhile your brain is being affected, your heart is being affected, all of your organs are being affected, your kidneys are being affected, so the first step is to know your numbers. Understand the definition of hypertension, which has changed somewhat recently.
If your blood pressure is 130 for that top number systolic over 80 for the bottom number either, or if it’s 130 or higher for the systolic, or if it’s 80 or higher for the diastolic, the bottom number that’s hypertension. It used to not be that. If you have hypertension, you absolutely want to get it under control.
Yes, there are medicines, and I definitely prescribe medicines. There’s also a lot of lifestyle changes that can help. You can lower your blood pressure naturally, in a lot of ways.
What are two easy methods to reduce blood pressure that families can try?
Slow, deep breathing. I was telling a patient in my office today who’s experiencing a lot of stress. Her heart rate goes up, her blood pressure goes up. She’s doing a million things at once, but for slow, deep breathing, and there are different methods. One is alternate nose breathing, and probably the easiest is just take a deep breath in for 4 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds, and then exhale for 4 seconds.
What happens when you do slow, deep breathing is that you activate your parasympathetic nervous system, and the slow, deep breathing causes your heart rate to slow down. It causes your blood vessels to dilate or get bigger. It causes the blood pressure to decrease. It seems pretty simple, because it is. Try slow, deep breathing for one or two minutes. Do your blood pressure before and after it will go down.
Now eating a variety of foods that are good for blood pressure will take time. In my experience eating beets or juicing beets very effective for lowering blood pressure. There’s a great beet juice I have a recipe for on my Instagram, Facebook, and all social media platforms @dr.frita. I got it from my little baby cousin Shantae.
It’s beets, apples, cucumbers, ginger, and what the beets do in particular the beetroot they have nitrates which your body converts to nitric oxide. The nitric oxide causes your blood vessels to dilate, which makes the blood pressure low. When I first started doing it in my juicer I had like 2 liters in one day, and I fortunately do not have a diagnosis of high blood pressure.
When I went to see patients that day I was feeling a little lightheaded. My office manager checked my blood pressure. My blood pressure was too low, and I was annoyed with myself for drinking too much beet juice, but I was also excited.
If this makes my blood pressure too low, then for people who have hypertension, it’s one more way to lower your blood pressure naturally.
For anyone who goes on my Youtube channel where we’re up to over 830,000 subscribers, I have a video top 10 exercises for lowering your blood pressure the natural way. I’ve done the research.
It covers over 270 different scientific studies that were done systematically to look at blood pressure with exercise, and I go over the top 10 best ways to lower your blood pressure naturally with exercise, and I also have all kinds of recipes. I have a video on the top 10 best drinks and juices to lower blood pressure. I practice integrative medicine.
I do prescribe medicines when necessary. If someone walks in my office, the blood pressure of 200 over 110, we’re not drinking beet juice right away. We’re doing medicine, but I’m going to give you the information on the exercise on the slow, deep breathing on the meditation on the Yoga, and we practice in an integrated fashion.
Why are women, particularly black women, affected by heart disease and kidney disease, and why aren’t they paying attention to these issues?
With women, black women in particular, I’m talking to the black women I see in my office, the black women in my family, talking to myself. One of my good friends has a T-shirt company Power in Black Tees Regina, and one of the T-shirts is ‘I’ll take care of it.’ A lot of black women feel like they have to be super women.
They’re the ones who have to make sure that their husbands or partners are taken care of. They have to make sure that their parents are going to their doctors. They have to make sure that the children are being fed and clothed, whether the children’s fathers in the picture or not.
Black women a lot of times, this is a generalization, but in a lot of cases black women feel like they have to do it and make it look easy. One of the biggest compliments and insults to black women is ‘oh gosh! You can handle anything.’ But no, really, black women cannot handle anything, because what happens when you’re being a superwoman is that you’re having stress.
If you are stressed that causes cortisol, the stress hormone to be released and cortisol causes blood vessels to tighten blood pressure to be high, and so many black women are disproportionately affected with hypertension, which is a leading cause of heart disease. What really is messed up is that when we think about the typical symptoms of heart disease, we think chest pain, maybe my left arm hurts.
But there are atypical symptoms, symptoms that don’t meet that norm, and many women, black women included, will get atypical symptoms like nausea, stomach pain, maybe even back pain, and that can be a heart attack. But you can imagine for a superwoman who does not have time to be sick, she might ignore it. And so that leads to a lot of health disparities in black women in particular.
Why are you so committed to changing health outcomes in the black community?
I am committed because there are different avenues where I could have a little more sleep and a little less stress.
But I know that as a people, black people in particular, there have been just so many places where we’ve gotten the short end of the stick, not to mention, if we want to go to our history, for those of us who are descendants of enslaved people who were brought here against our will to build a land and build wealth that we got no chance to have.
And then, as soon as we get a little bit ahead, Tulsa, Rosewood, you name it than, being shot down. I mentioned these things because they cause generational trauma, health disparities, wealth disparities. When you look at so many of the chronic diseases, be it prostate cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, obesity, black people are disproportionately affected.
When it came time for me to choose my specialty when I was in residency, when I would go to the dialysis clinics, I would find that they were disproportionately filled with black people. But then, when I would go to the transplant centers where people were receiving these life saving kidney transplants, almost no black people, disproportionately filled with white people. I’m like, Wait a minute, there’s a gap.
I learned that the number, the top 2 causes of kidney failure were diabetes and high blood pressure. 2 perfectly preventable things. This is an education situation. This is a health care insurance disparity situation. I felt like I had a voice where I could educate people and do it in a way that’s not condescending.
When people are looking at a person who looks like them, and then I go back to my own personal history, personal family history. My grandma had 16 children, my mother’s mother, and took care of them, and she used what we would now call holistic medicine.
When I look at the way medicine is practiced now, a lot of patients are turned off by physicians, because physicians will talk down to them and say, ‘no, that’s not going to work. Beets don’t work, garlic doesn’t work. We don’t have any huge, randomized, controlled trials,’ but you’re never going to have a huge trial for garlic, because a pharmaceutical company is not going to pay for that.
A lot of my history is rooted in holistic medicine. I did the formal medicine training at Meharry Medical College, Georgetown, Emory. I have the traditional western part, and I feel like I’m able to integrate in a way that’s really helpful. I feel like I have a voice that people hear, and they understand that I care, and that is genuine. You just can’t really get that a whole lot of places. So I’m dedicated.
