A doctor who started dressing up as a homeless man to help treat people living on the streets has become the subject of a new short film. Dr Jim Withers is known in Pittsburgh as the ‘street doctor’ and has treated around 1,200 people every year since he started pounding the streets in 1992. He no longer wears the disguise he wore in his early days and is welcomed with open arms in places where he was once shunned. ‘Literally, I started dressing like a homeless person and sneaking out at night with a guy who used to be homeless,’ Mr Withers told The Huffington Post. ’The first thing that hit me was the number of people squirreled away under bridges and campsites. ‘As I began to look at the medical issues, I began to realise there were people with bad wounds, unhealed ulcers, cancers and all kinds of things that weren’t being addressed.’ Filmmaker Julie Sokolow followed Mr Withers and his team of volunteers for two days and captured their work in a film that premiered on the website NationSwell last week. Since 1992 Mr Withers’s nightly service has evolved into the non-profit initiative Operation Safety Net and has become one of the nation’s first full-time street medicine programmes. More than 90 countries have since developed similar units. Source
