Thanks so much for all your hard work-its really making a difference!

On behalf of the DWW communications team, I would like to thank you for your feedback on this article and others. Our core mission is to provide assistance from one member of this community to another, and thus transparency regarding our actions and programs is of utmost importance. We value all participation in open forum discussions, and no comment goes unheard. You have raised many pertinent concerns, all of which we will take into consideration as we continue our work as medical aid, friends, and advocates of our unhoused neighbors.

Doctors Without Walls- Santa Barbara Street Medicine Communications Team

So, seriously, before enumerating my points of critique, which I hope will be taken as thoughtful and constructive by at least some readers, I want to thank you for your intervention and go on record that, overall, the community is lucky to have an operable street medicine team. If I often make points from a specific critical perspective the hope is that ultimately the system will be rationalized and improved on a more basic humanitarian level than if I just provide the uncritical cheerleading that one of my friends, or former friends, urges upon me as the sole permissible commentary with regard to the sainted ranks of DWW. I nevertheless feel it is important not to allow myself to be muzzled. I have watched too many strong advocates and activists die while raging against the public health machine’s clay feet of well-intended error. I feel it is necessary to publicly press what IMHO are important points; to fail to do so would be to dishonor those fallen comrades who have taught me that Big Pharma and Big Public Health are not a hierarchy before which the individual must scrape and bow and obey without questions. This is America.

So, my critique follows, and, whatever anyone else thinks, my conscience is at peace before my God.

(1) The article creates an incorrect impression of the incidence and prevalence of the outbreak. The outbreak did not extend to the entire “homeless community” of IV but rather only to certain persons who were unfortunately sharing certain locations and commodities. It was not a generalized epidemic, as suggested by your wording. I have in my capacity of advocate interacted with numerous unhoused persons in IV who were not affected. With empathy and compassion for those who were affected, I need to correct the record and point out that many persons who observed more careful practices and were more selective in various respects, were not impacted.

(2)My second point is actually praise with regard to this article, which is an improvement over previous DWW/Prystowski projects. It is a positive development that, this time around, you anonymized the photo of the person being treated. I do hope that this trend continues and that you obtain a signed photo release or documented informed consent if in the future you run “patient” photos on this webpage, or in DWW slide shows.

(3)I take issue with the statement “We (the housed and the sheltered) tend not to get body lice since we bath every day, change our clothes every day, and live a much more clean, healthy, and stable lifestyle.” For one thing, not all readers of the DWW are housed; you chauvinistically assume that homeless people are quasi-literate and that your readers are all housed persons.

(4) Regarding that same statement, you assume that all housed and sheltered live a more healthy lifestyle. That is patent nonsense. There are more alcholic and drug addicted housed than unhoused; many of the unsheltered refuse to stay in shelters to avoid unhealthy lifestyles and vvectors such as violent behaviors, second hand cigarette smoke and those obnoxious sneezing coughing behaviors which so often go unchallenged by shelter staff.