Dr. Lulu

THE STORY

Making Room for the Truth: Dr. Lulu on Safety, Trust, and the Space Between Doctor and Patient

"How can you still create safety in the room? How can you still make that patient feel like they are everything, and that you only have eyes for them so that when they leave, even if they don't take the prescription, they still feel better."

That's the question Dr. Lulu has spent her career on, and the one she's bringing to TEDxUnityPark 2026.

Dr. Lulu (Uchenna Umeh, MD) is a pediatrician, physician educator, bestselling author, and the founder of Dr. Lulu's Pride Corner. She created the frameworks First, Do No Further Harm and Bias Begins at Home. At this year's TEDxUnityPark, her talk "It Takes Two: Partnership and Trust in Medicine" asks something every one of us has felt from the exam table: do you trust your doctor enough to tell the whole truth? It sounds small. It might be the whole thing.

"The most important thing a doctor brings into the exam room is not knowledge, it is the ability to create enough safety for the patient to tell the truth."

"I'm a pediatrician, semi-retired at this point after 35 plus years of seeing patients," she said during TEDxUnityPark Media Day. She didn't set out to become a voice for anything. "When I decided to become a physician, I never thought I was going to be doing this work. I just wanted to work with children and take care of kids."

As a Black queer immigrant physician and the mother of a transgender young adult, she brings lived experience into the room along with the medical degree.

Then there's the part of medicine most patients never hear about. "Most people do not know that we lose about 400 physicians every year to suicide," she says.

"There was a time when physicians were like gods, right? We thought we were close to God, but now we know that we are human."

What keeps a doctor in the work, she says, is simple. "It's when we have a patient that comes back and says, doc, thank you. Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for being a good doctor to me."

Dr. Lulu decided to teach what it takes to earn that.

In practice, she kept seeing the same gap. "Patients often withhold critical information," as she puts it, "not because they are unwilling to share it, but because they do not feel safe enough to do so."

As she sees it, trust "is not a byproduct of care." It is "the foundation of care."

None of this is easy. "It's hard, but it's doable even in a system that's coming for you," she said at Media Day. "The most sacred space to be is still the one that is held between the physician and their patient."

This will be her fourth TEDx stage, after TEDxAlief, TEDxFaurotPark and TEDxSUNYUpstate. But spend a few minutes with her and the titles fall away. Halfway through her interview, Evan stopped to tell her she was doing exactly what she was describing. She was.

TEDxUnityPark's 2026 theme is Multiply, and the way we think about it, you multiply your reach through your relationships. Dr. Lulu has known that for a long time. "No doctor has one patient," she says. "We have many patients, hundreds of patients, sometimes thousands of patients." Every visit that goes right travels home with a family.

South Carolina isn't new to her. She spent 15 years of her adult life in the state. "Greenville is clean," she remembers. "We just felt like it was welcoming. It was open and airy."

"I believe this idea has implications far beyond medicine,"* as she puts it, *"offering lessons for anyone seeking to build trust, strengthen relationships, and create communities where people feel safe enough to be honest."

What many don't know about Dr. Lulu is that she'd rather stand. "My standing energy is my energy. I don't like to sit," she told us, while we made her sit anyway. Ask her about joy and she'll gently correct you. "Believe it or not, my preferred term is contentment," she said. "I think joy and happiness is overrated."

She'll take the small wins, too. "Even a teenager who comes in and shrugs all the time and grunts all the time, they still give me a high five, and they still kind of give me a thumbs up on their way out."

We think this talk is for anyone who has ever sat on crinkly paper and kept the real question to themselves, and for every doctor who has wondered if the work is still worth it.

"If you just allow yourself to see the other person as a deserving human being, honestly, the rest is history."