Last Updated: Dec 9, 2022
James Miller M.D. is a pediatrician with the Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh, but beyond that, he is active in street medicine in his community, serving as the lead clinician for the street medicine team with Allegheny Health Network’s Urban Health & Street Medicine program.
The definition of street medicine is the direct delivery of care on the street to people living on the street. The program works at the intersection of homelessness, substance abuse, and untreated mental illness. It operates on a team-based approach.
Dr. Miller tells his team that when they go out to meet people, they “leave their white coats behind”.
“We meet them where they are. We go out there as humans. Someone who is living on the street, isn’t looking for a doctor off the bat. Their looking for a connection first,” he said. “I come with my humanity and my relationship efforts and keep my experience with medicine on the side.”
Growing up in Reading, PA, Dr. Miller says he was exposed to poverty and inequity at an early age.
“All my friends would talk about leaving Reading, but my inclination wasn’t to leave but to stay. Either in Reading or a similar city, I knew I wanted to give back because there is a need.”
His faith is a big part of who he is and why he does this.
As a young man in college, Dr. Miller was attending a religious activity at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. praying for justice and justice reform from which he called a “powerful” experience.
Afterward, he walked with his friends to a Starbucks and passed by three people who were panhandling, and everyone in his group looked the other way.
“After we passed the last person, it hit me what just happened. And I had this moment of ‘this is hypocritical, what am I doing?’ and on the way back we stopped and talked to each one of them. And I was young, I didn’t know what I was doing but I had this feeling of not being able to look away.”
During the surge of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was part of a community-wide effort to develop a “Safe Haven Hotel”, an initiative from the Allegheny County, to provide an isolation and quarantine facility for vulnerable residents who had no place else to stay.
Reminding him of why he got into medicine in the first place, Dr. Miller says his work in street medicine really grounds him.
“What I found is the practice of medicine sometimes can occur in a bubble. As physicians we can get stuck in an office mode with the white coats on,” he said. “This reminds me of the humanism of medicine which is why I got into medicine in the first place. It makes me a better doctor all around”
Dr. Miller says the other side of street medicine is taking their experiences back to the health care system as an overall educational tool.
He said, “You don’t have to do street medicine to do what we’re doing. The primary context of medicine is seeing someone and hearing them and understanding their background and where they come from. The social history of medicine is not just there to complete a check box. It’s a core part of what medicine is.”