Street Medicine Institute founder Jim Withers used to start his day by rubbing dirt on his body and coffee grounds in his hair to fit in with the homeless population he served and address their negative perceptions of health care providers. As part of his project Operation Safety Net, Withers provided health care and other services to homeless individuals living in the streets of Pittsburgh, Pa., and under its bridges, he said in a lecture in the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center on Friday afternoon.
Withers described his efforts to pioneer a movement to provide health care services to homeless populations in the keynote address of the "Monstrous Octopus: The Tentacles of Poverty" symposium. He argued that the health care industry must be flexible and respond to each patient's specific living situation.
In 1992, Withers began visiting homeless communities in Pittsburgh to learn about the conditions they faced and to develop a more effective method to treating illness than typical hospitals could provide. To gain the trust of the communities, Withers relied on the knowledge of formerly homeless individuals. Taking into consideration homeless individuals' negative attitudes about doctors, Withers altered his physical appearance to fit in better with these communities when making "house calls to the homeless," he said.
Through his interactions with the city's homeless community, Withers realized that many treatment options offered by emergency room doctors did not adequately serve displaced individuals' needs.
The American health care system is not user-friendly, and does not offer many possibilities for patients that "don't fit into the box," he said.
It is important for health care providers to acknowledge patients' living situations when deciding on treatment and developing discharge plans, according to Withers.
"The reality that a person lives in is so fundamental to health and to healing," he said.
In addition to providing medical care, Operation Safety Net works to rehabilitate homeless individuals by integrating them into the community. Through grants and donations, the organization has housed over 900 chronically homeless people in apartments in the last nine years, and over 80 percent of them have remained in their new homes, Withers said.
Withers said he initially thought that his organization was the only one of its kind, but discovered that there are groups around the country and world with similar missions to Operation Safety Net.
In 2005, Withers and other street medicine practitioners established the International Street Medicine Symposium to increase awareness of the health issues that many homeless populations face and to provide practitioners with an opportunity to share best practices, he said. The Street Medicine Institute was founded in 2008.
Zach Martinez '13, who attended the lecture, interned with the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program and found it interesting to learn about a different city's solution.
"One of the responsibilities of an organization like this is to make the case to the rest of society that what they're doing is important and beneficial," Martinez said.
Domestic and sexual violence is one of the main reasons women and children are homeless, according Kate Rohdenburg, program manager of WISE, a nonprofit organization that provides advocacy and education to individuals affected by domestic and sexual violence in the Upper Valley. Along with other representatives from a number of local organizations, Rohdenburg displayed information about resources available in the Upper Valley to attendees after the lecture.
The variety of organizations represented at the symposium demonstrates that a number of different issues are rooted in poverty and that there are a variety of ways to combat them, Rohdenburg said.
The poverty symposium, held from Jan. 30 to Feb. 2, included movie screenings, a letterpress workshop with printmaker and social justice advocate Amos Kennedy and a conversation with photojournalist and inaugural Roth Distinguished Scholar James Nachtwey '70. The symposium also provided opportunities for students to meet with founders of a student-run health clinic in Beijing and attend sessions related to different aspects of poverty.
The symposium's title comes from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1964 Nobel Laureate lecture, in which he compared poverty to "a monstrous octopus [that] projects its nagging, prehensile tentacles in lands and villages all over the world," according to the event's website.
The symposium was organized by the Geisel School of Medicine chapter of Physicians for Human Rights, the Tuck School of Business' Center for Business and Society and the College's Nathan Smith Society.
