PC Profile: Jeremy Dubin OPC '89

Seeing the Person Behind the Diagnosis: How Quaker Values Guided Dr. Jeremy Dubin OPC ’89, DO, FASAM to Addiction Medicine

What happens after Penn Charter? We asked alumni to reflect on the moments, mentors, and experiences that shaped their paths—and how those lessons continue to guide them today.

Q: What is your current employment, education program or passion project?

A: I am an osteopathic physician and an addiction medicine physician and educator. My career has centered on people who are often misunderstood, stigmatized, marginalized, or simply overlooked. I have spent years working at the intersection of medicine, mental health, addiction, education, advocacy and public awareness. I have taught others, worked to change how people understand substance use disorders and mental illness, and helped build educational programs.

Q: Do you have a favorite PC memory?

A: I spent my entire K–12 education at Penn Charter. At the time, of course, I experienced it as a student: classes, teachers, friends, sports, mistakes, growing up. In many ways, my memories are less important than how Penn Charter stayed with me. As I enter this next chapter of my life—one in which I have an increasingly large platform to teach, speak, advocate and hopefully affect change—I find myself returning to the values I first encountered there. 

Q: How did your experience at PC prepare you for your personal and professional life?

A: The Quaker tradition of questioning, reflection, equality, community, and seeking truth was not something I simply learned about intellectually. It became part of the framework through which I learned to see the world. There was an expectation that you would think for yourself, but also that you would listen to others, and that you could disagree without demeaning people, that every person had inherent worth. 

Those ideas became particularly important when I entered medicine. Medicine can be hierarchical and transactional. It can reduce people to diagnoses, charts, lab values, insurance classifications and outcomes. Addiction medicine has taught me, perhaps more than anything else, how dangerous that reduction can be. That instinct—to look past the label and see the person—is deeply connected to the education I received growing up.

Q: What person, course, or experience most influenced you while at PC?

A: I remember teachers who saw something in me before I knew what it was. I remember the feeling of being part of a community. I remember learning that there could be more than one right way to look at a problem. I remember being encouraged to question rather than simply accept. And I remember, even if I couldn’t have articulated it then, the idea that how we treat one another matters.

Penn Charter gave me a place where questioning was encouraged and where the individual mattered. It gave me a community that taught me that your voice matters, but that it matters even more when you use it for something beyond yourself. My career has taught me that change rarely happens because one person has the perfect answer. It happens because people are willing to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, bring others into the conversation, and persist when the easier choice would be to walk away. That, too, feels very Penn Charter.

Connect with Jeremy Dubin OPC '89 through Fight the Stigma Colorado - a nonprofit organization he co-founded.