More than 300 UCLA health care providers treat the homeless at Care Harbor free clinic

For Dr. Patrick Dowling, volunteering at the 2019Care Harbor free clinic for people who are uninsured or who lack access to health care is a sharp break from his norm of treating people at UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica.This atypical setting on the front lines of health care for the most vulnerable, sometimes results in unorthodox treatments.Dowling and other care givers at the annual clinic held at The Reef in downtown Los Angeles noticed that although the 60-year-old man they were treating said he had given himself insulin prior to his arrival at the clinic, his blood sugar level had fallen too low.Typically, physicians would have injected the patient with glucose to bring up his blood sugar, saidDowling, chair offamily medicine at UCLA.“We didn’t have that available, so what we did do is we started giving him some orange juice,” he said, adding that the juice didn’t bring the man’s blood sugar back to normal.When the juice didn ’t raise the man’s blood sugar, Dowling gave him a can of Dr. Pepper that he had on hand. That worked. It was an unusual treatment for an unusual day because, for the first time, the Care Harbor organizers devoted the entire first day of the three-day clinic to caring for the city ’s homeless. About 1,000 people were transported from homeless shelters to the clinic for physical, dental and vision care.“L.A. is the capital of homelessness, so we have a lot of people who are sleeping out in the streets with nowhere to go,” Dowl...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news