
Jeffrey Hom is the medical officer for science and policy in the Substance Use Services section of the San Francisco Department of Public Health and practices at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. He advises on equity-driven, population-level strategies to reduce the harms of risky substance use and provides clinical care through the county's opioid treatment and buprenorphine telehealth programs. Board-certified in internal medicine and public health, Dr. Hom previously led the Division of Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction in the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and served as a policy advisor during the city's COVID-19 response. His recent work includes "The Impact of News Photographs on Drug-Related Stigma: A Randomized Message Testing Experiment in a National Sample of US Adults." More information about his work can be found on LinkedIn.
Well before I was a physician, I was an art history major at Bowdoin College. Beneath towering pine trees, I spent much of my time in dim lecture rooms off the quad and in the quiet galleries of Maine’s art museums, studying paintings, sculptures, and photographs to understand not just what was being portrayed, but also what they revealed about the people, places, ideas, and defining events of their time. …
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“Help me stop doing this.”
Mr. G was a 55-year-old homeless man who uttered these words to us during his fifth hospitalization for problems related to his alcohol use: intoxication, falls, and alcohol withdrawal. He was on a downward spiral through the hospital’s revolving door and felt helpless. As a medical team, we felt helpless too. We did not know how to address his real problem—his cycle of addiction.
Hospitalized patients like …
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