The Washington, D.C., jail has big metal doors that slam shut. It looks and feels like a jail. But down a hall in the medical wing, past an inmate muttering about suicide, there's a room that looks like an ordinary doctor's office.
"OK, deep breaths in and out for me," Dr. Reggie Egins says to his patient, Sean Horn, an inmate in his 40s. They talk about how his weight has changed in his six weeks in jail, how his medications are working out and whether he's noticed anything different about his vision. Egins schedules an ophthalmology appointment for Horn.
Horn says before he arrived here, things were not looking good.
"I looked real bad. I was homeless, for one, and not taking my medicine," says Horn, who has depression, high blood pressure and gout, among other things.
When he was out on the streets, Horn says, it was hard for him to get his medications or to see a doctor. So he just didn't. He got sicker and sicker.
"I had two heart attacks and my gout flared up a whole lot of times when I was out there," he says.
[For more of this story, written by Rae Ellen Bichell, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...gs-multiple-benefits]
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