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Before Offering Treatment, Good Doctors Need to Further Study Family Homelessness
My excitement soared, seeing that a team of medical doctors from Harvard tackled the topic of family homelessness in the latest issue of JAMA Pediatrics, Housing Instability and Homelessness — An Undertreated Pediatric Chronic Condition. The good doctors (the docs), however, significantly missed the diagnosis and treatment.
Their initial description of housing instability and homelessness as experienced by families started out on target.
“Housing instability should be considered a chronic illness, even in pediatrics, because of its detrimental effects on health and need for ongoing medical attention.”
DEFINITION OF HOMELESSNESS
But then they plunged into the morass of definitions of homelessness. HUD’s narrow definition points to about 500,000 identified as homeless (an inaccurate interpretation of their still inaccurate census). The…
