Homeless Clinic Offers Alternative Care for Alternative Lifestyles

The streets are rough. It’s still early on Tuesday evening, but 19-year-old Melanie Renecker is already tired. She walks into the Homeless Youth Clinic, complaining of ailments and discomforts.

Like other drop-in free health clinics, this one has a physician. Unlike most others, this one also provides alternative medical care--and claims to be the country’s first to offer both for homeless youth.

Alternative care includes acupuncture, which uses needles to treat pain and illness, and naturopathic medicine, which favors such natural agents as herbs, light, heat, water, massage--not drugs or surgery.

Renecker will eventually see an acupuncturist.

Such nontraditional services are available in collaboration with students and physicians of Bastyr University, the nation’s leading naturopathic medicine school, and the Northwest Institute of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, both of Seattle.

Renecker started visiting the clinic a few months ago for stress, menstrual problems and other ailments. With a prescription for traditional medication in hand, she’ll turn to acupuncture for help with stress.

“The very first time I was kind of skeptical about it. This is just a bunch of needles. But it’s pretty relaxing,” she says. “There’s a noticeable difference. My weeks go by a little bit easier. I’m not so agitated. I’m not so grumpy, not so emotional.”

She’s a believer. Paul Barry, coordinator of the clinic, is looking for others like Renecker, who left her family home in Spokane four years ago.

But they are not easy to reach. “Many of the youth we serve are mistrustful of institutions and have alternative lifestyles,” Barry says. “We respect this, and wanted to offer them choices.”

So, two evenings each week, the clinic offers what Barry calls one-stop shopping. The acupuncturist is available Tuesday and Thursday, the naturopathic physician Thursday only.

Despite the small staff, the clinic offers primary medical care, pregnancy tests, mental health counseling, testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and counseling for substance abuse. “The idea is to offer as much as we can on-site because it’s really hard for them to get it anywhere else,” Barry says.

The clinic is as eclectic as its approach. The two-story building once served as a fire station and police precinct house for the city’s Wallingford neighborhood.

From this base, Barry concentrates on providing quality care. “I want them to have the same kind of experience when they come in here as they would if they were going to a private clinic where they were paying,” he says.

He also concentrates on treating the youths nonjudgmentally. “We have a lot of young people come in here and say they get locked out and have nowhere to go,” he says, “except for here, where they feel they’re taken care of and respected.”

With federal, state and city funds, the clinic targets youths from ages 12 to 25. Up to three dozen patients pass through on a typical night. Most walk in, but some are picked up by a van service. “These young people have chaotic, unpredictable lives. If they show up, they will be seen,” Barry says.

Andrew Parkinson, the clinic’s naturopathic practitioner, lists the most typical troubles: not enough food, too many allergies. Some ailments, of course, are peculiar to street life: muscular-skeletal complaints from sleeping outdoors, on a hard floor, without a bed. “They’re more likely to be fatigued, more likely to end up with a respiratory infection,” Parkinson says. “It’s the hard, cold reality of sidewalks and streets.”

Acupuncturist Sachiko Nakano sees those who want to stop smoking, drug cravings, eating disorders, depression, insomnia, anxiety, stress or neck, shoulder and back pain.

Nakano hopes to see some patients more than once, and often she does. “Under the circumstances they’re going through, we understand it’s really an unstable situation.”

Mark Bruback, 22, homeless on and off for two years, came to the clinic last winter for treatment of depression.

“A lot of the doctors were kind of on the Western kick of, ‘If you’ve got a problem, you can take these antidepressant medicines and such,’ ” says Bruback, who preferred to consult a naturopath.

Parkinson advises him to alter his diet. To calm Bruback’s nerves, he provides vitamins and a tincture of botanical medicine--melissa, catnip, fenugreek and St. John’s wort.

Brooke Ury, 21 and on her own for four years, also receives acupuncture as treatment for stress, depression and stomach problems linked to an eating disorder.

“I was kinda scared the first time I got it because of the needles and everything,” she says, “but it was the most calming feeling.”

Renecker, who will sleep in a 1973 GMC mini-schoolbus tonight, plans to spread the word.

“I’m glad that it does give you the choice,” she says. “The fact that this clinic offers it is real good.”

Such word of mouth draws patients. And, on the street, word gets around fast. From 1995 to 1996, the clinic as a whole saw a 70% jump in the number of patients. Many came from the nearby University District, where street teens hang out.

Barry, the clinic’s coordinator, doesn’t expect those numbers to drop. On any given night, he says, between 500 and 1,500 kids are sleeping on the streets of Seattle. But it’s not that reality that most frustrates him.

For Barry, the hardest part is not knowing where the homeless go once they leave the clinic. “You don’t know if they’re reunited with their families or they’ve become victims of homicide or they’ve ended up in California.”

He wants them all back. “They’re very mistrustful of adults and formal systems. To just come in through the door is a big step.”

‘I was kinda scared the first time I got it because of the needles and everything, but it was the most calming feeling.’