Eighty-year-old Mohamed Abdi suffered a fall outside of his Minneapolis home last week and ended up at Hennepin County Medical Center for severe pain from his neck down to his legs and knees.
“As I was walking, I just lost control,” Mohamed said in Somali. “The walker that I had in my hands ended up hitting me in the head.”
Mohamed relayed his condition in his native language to Muhiyadin Aden, an emergency department physician assistant. And in turn, Muhiyadin was able to inform him that imaging showed no severe damage to his head.
Muhiyadin, 43, known among his colleagues as “Mo,” started as an interpreter at the hospital in downtown Minneapolis. But following a desire to do more, he became a physician assistant, hoping to bridge the language gap between Somali patients and their health care providers while dampening hesitancy in the community about seeking care.
“There’s only a handful of doctors and physician assistants from Somalia that can speak their language, that come from their community, that know their struggle and background,” he said. “There are some who are hesitant about Western medicine, and when they see someone from their community providing that care, they are a little more at ease.”
A desire to do more
Muhiyadin immigrated to the United States from Somalia in 1999 at 17 years old, enrolling at a high school in the Rochester area. He later moved an hour north to attend the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus, where he studied political science.
While working towards medical school, he got a job as a nursing assistant at a nearby clinic. The clinic often asked for his help translating for Somali patients at the clinic.
“I thought it was a really cool job, and I was helping patients,” he said. “There are patients that are always in need of interpreters, and providers would use me all the time.”
After graduation, Muhiyadin began his career as a Somali interpreter at HCMC. He started as a casual interpreter and worked his way up to head of the hospital’s entire interpreter services department, overseeing 120 interpreters and a budget of $10 million.
For a time, working as an interpreter while managing the department fulfilled his desire to help patients. But ultimately, he hit a wall with how effective he could be.
“Patients were asking me, ‘Should I get this surgery?,’ or, ‘My doctor is telling me to have my gallbladder removed, should I do that?’ And I wasn’t able to say either way because [interpreters] aren’t allowed to give medical advice,” Muhiyadin said. “That’s when I realized maybe I should actually go back and get a medical degree of some sort so I can help treat people, take care of patients and give them feedback.”
The epiphany prompted him to go back to school and enroll at Augsburg University’s physician assistant program in 2022. There, he learned how to provide a wide range of care under the supervision of a physician, including performing patient exams, prescribing medications, advising patients on preventive care, and ordering lab tests and imaging like x-rays. Two years later, he returned to HCMC in his new role.
“This is a hospital that serves people that are underserved … 20% to 30% of the patients that we see here have limited English proficiency,” he said. “That’s a huge challenge to provide care for those patients, but I think they do the best they can, and that’s why I came back.”
Hesitancy with Western medicine
Muhiyadin said other factors that prompted his career change were a desire to address hesitancy among Somali patients to seek care or undergo medical procedures, and an interest in using the trust he had cultivated with Somali patients to reassure them during visits.
Distrust in Western medicine among members of Somali communities remains somewhat prevalent, according to a 2023 report from researchers at the Universities of Michigan and Illinois at Chicago. That includes skepticism of vaccines fueled by misinformation that there is a link between vaccinations and autism. Those concerns led to measles outbreaks in Minnesota’s Somali community in 2017 and 2024.
Muhiyadin said patients often asked him if treatments were safe, and even if doctors wanted to harvest their organs.
He recalled an instance during his time as an interpreter where a child needed to have a piece of his small intestine removed after a bike accident. The child’s mother, who only spoke Somali, was hesitant to allow the doctors to take her son into the operating room alone, insisting that she go with him.
Only after Muhiyadin explained to her why she could not join her son did she relent, but only on the condition that Muhiyadin join her son in her place.
“At the time, I thought, ‘I don’t know why you trust me so much; I’m not a trained surgeon, I’m just an interpreter,’” he said. “But that made me think: maybe I should be a provider and help these patients out more because of that trust.”
Back at the HCMC emergency department, Muhiyadin asked Mohamed to take deep breaths as he used a stethoscope to listen to Mohamed’s lungs, then his heart. Muhiyadin then locked hands with Mohamed and helped the 80-year-old man sit up to test his strength.
Coming from the same community as Somali patients like Mohamed and speaking a shared language has helped Muhiyadin establish connections that ease the difficulties of his job.
“As soon as I walk into the room, they smile and there’s a connection right away without saying anything,” Muhiyadin said. “In medicine, if you don’t make a connection with patients, it makes it harder, so when they see me … I can see the relief in their faces.”
