Caring for people in times of need isn’t just part of Jeff Pitcher’s job; it was instilled in him at a young age.
The local doctor’s parents worked for the Salvation Army, a job that saw the family move to various locations.
“We always had a desire to help people,” said Pitcher, a family doctor with a practice in Cumberland Beach.
He was born in Vancouver and moved with his parents to Orillia when he was in Grade 3. He attended Harriett Todd Public School and Twin Lakes Secondary School before the family moved to Toronto, where he finished his last two years of high school.
He had an interest in health care and medicine while in secondary school and he took on a co-op placement in the radiology department at Orillia Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital (OSMH).
“It piqued my interest,” he said. “I could combine my passion for helping people with my passion for science.”
So, he pursued it further. Pitcher completed his undergrad at Western University before attending medical school at McMaster.
Through his residency with the University of Toronto, he was stationed at Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket.
He returned to Orillia in 2011 to start a practice in the area, but not before he put his passion for assisting others to use in some of the worst disasters and situations in recent history.
As a volunteer with the Salvation Army, he was part of a group that went to Ground Zero a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City. The response team’s role was to provide food as well as mental health support.
It was rewarding but difficult.
“The amount of destruction was shocking,” he said, adding bodies were still being recovered from the site where the World Trade Center buildings fell. “Whenever someone was found in the debris, the whole site would stop and they would honour that person.”
Pitcher found himself back in the United States — this time in Louisiana and Mississippi — with the Salvation Army right after Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005. He and the team were helping people with shelter, food and counselling.
“There were people that never left their homes, and died when the water levels rose,” he said. “People lost their houses, their jobs. They lost everything.”
It was a scene of “utter devastation,” he recalled.
“It was like a bulldozer had gone through and destroyed everything.”
He also spent time at a nursing station in Nunavut, where he provided care to patients, and worked on tuberculosis control among Toronto’s homeless population.
Closer to home, and more recently, he and the Salvation Army team helped out in Haliburton in response to flooding.
Now a father of three, the 40-year-old doctor doesn’t take part as often with disaster response, though his desire to help others has not waned.
The COVID-19 pandemic is proof.
In March 2020, not long after the pandemic was declared, there was a lack of testing happening, so Pitcher created a Facebook group: the Orillia and Area COVID-19 Group.
He began by posting a “symptom survey” to get an idea of how many people locally were experiencing respiratory issues.
“If they started to go up, we knew we may have had an outbreak of COVID,” he said.
During early lockdowns, the number of symptoms reported went down significantly.
“It showed how that isolation made a big difference,” he said.
As testing ramped up, Pitcher stopped with the symptom surveys, and the Facebook group “became more of an educational thing.”
“There’s so much research and medical information out there,” he said. “I was trying to educate people about what was true and what was false.”
Now, with restrictions easing and less information being released about cases — including those in schools — he continues to post regularly to the page.
“It’s more important than ever to have the data when cases start to go up,” he said, noting the “sheer number of (Omicron variant) cases led to more people getting sick.”
He has worked with OSMH and the hospital in Bracebridge and has seen the effects. He had never seen the number of people with COVID-19 coming into the hospital as high as it was in January.
“It was mainly unvaccinated people who were coming in very sick,” he said.
One of his goals with his Facebook page is to provide accurate information, which he feels is lacking among some news outlets, websites, and podcasts featuring “false preachers.”
“It’s frustrating when people are misled,” he said. “In the medical field, we’re about evidence-based practice.”
Pitcher urges those who are either anti-vaccine or simply unsure about COVID-19 vaccines to talk to a doctor.
“As a physician, we like to educate people about what they can do to be healthy,” he said. “Vaccines are very effective and extremely safe. Third doses are needed to have full protection against severe illness — hospitalization and death.”
He isn’t sure how long he’ll keep the page going. In fact, he thought there might not have been a need for it to continue at one point.
“Naively, I was hopeful the pandemic would be done before Delta came, so the amount of posts went down. Next thing you know, Delta came and then Omicron came,” he said. “I’ll keep the Facebook page running for as long as it takes to continue to educate people about how they can stay safe.”
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