Medical Murmurs Podcast

Family and Community Medicine Physician and Associate Professor at Penn, Dr. Judy Chertok in Ep. 11 of Medical Murmurs Podcast. Throughout her career she has been involved in providing care for those who are struggling. In medical school she co-founded a medical clinic for  homeless people  in Harlem, New York. Now she spends part of each week running a clinic for people with opioid addiction and opioid use disorder. She talks about some miraculous outcomes with the clinic’s team approach and suboxone.  “He’s living on the streets, he has Hepatitis C, he uses IV heroin every couple of hours. He’s really struggling . . . and now he is housed, in a relationship, he has a new job, he has a child. His life has been completely transformed.” 

For Chertok, medicine is all about the relationships, and that is what drew her to family and community medicine. Chertok talks about the remarkable continuity across generations in family practice. “I did have a patient who I followed for seven years, and during this time I have cared for her children as well. And then when her child got pregnant, her child during the pregnancy as well as her granddaughter. So I take care of three generations of this family as well as actually my patient's mother often gets admitted to the hospital where I work. So I take care of her as well. So four generations of a family that I know really well. . . and unfortunately my patient, um, had an event where she ended up in the intensive care unit. And I was there with her family at the bedside the night before they withdrew care and I was at her funeral with her family after she passed.”