Ten years ago, Dr. Gary Bloch examined dozens of the city’s poor on the lawn before Queen’s Park, and prescribed them money.
Amid the political theatre, he was filling out vague provincial “special diet” forms, which — once in the hands of the patients’ caseworkers — would bump their miserly $500 monthly welfare payments by as much as $250.
“That lit a light bulb — that we could directly intervene in poverty,” says Bloch. “That informed everything that’s come afterwards.”
The provincial government tightened the wording on the forms a year later, requiring doctors to diagnose patients with specific diseases to qualify for the “special diet” money. Bloch and his colleagues with the newly formed Health Providers Against Poverty wound down their massive “hunger clinics.”
They’d made their point: poverty made people sick.
At the time, Bloch was a 30-year-old doctor, treating homeless people in city shelters and drop-in programs. Most of his patients were in terrible shape. He offers an example: a man who’d lived on the street half his life. He had diabetes, had suffered strokes and multiple head injuries, and was an alcoholic. “He was just 42, but he had the body of a 75-year-old, and his brain was veering towards dementia,” says Bloch.
Was he to blame for his current condition? Why didn’t he get a job and cut out the booze? That’s our culture’s predominant view on both poverty and health. But Bloch understood that poverty was like smog — it insidiously causes illness.
[For more of this story, written by Catherine Porter, go to http://www.thestar.com/news/in...mp;mc_eid=24028e2469]
Comments (0)