Should doctors check your electric bill?

Fifteen years ago, Dr. Megan Tschudy didn’t want to know whether her patients had enough food. It’s not that she didn’t care: As a pediatrician working at a health clinic in East Baltimore, a part of town battered by decades of poverty and crime, she knew that undernourishment was probably connected to a whole host of health problems in the kids she was seeing. But as a pediatrician, she also knew there was nothing she could do about it. The problem might lie with school lunches, or neglect at home, or even an unpaid gas bill – all of which were miles from anything a doctor could treat.