Marisa Prelack is a pediatric neurologist with the Division of Neurology at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, with a particular focus on the care of children with epilepsy.

“[I see] absolutely crazy things. A lot of patients ask me why I went into this field and I tell them, well, I get to be a detective. I get to play with kids and I got to reassure or try to reassure parents.”

We talk cases. A boy with temporal lobe seizures experiencing the sensation of deja vu. A child with“Alice in Wonderland” syndrome who thinks she is shrinking. The toll that headaches can take on a child and their family. What it’s like to support a family as a child gradually loses neurologic function.

Family and Community Medicine Physician and Associate Professor at Penn, Dr. Judy Chertok in Ep 12 of Medical Murmurs Podcast, Medical Student Edition. Dr. Chertok talks about the richness of relationships in Family Practice, and how that drew her to the specialty. She was interested in many more specialized areas during medical school, but ultimately wanted the variety and flexibility that Family Medicine offered.

“I think in family medicine you have to be comfortable with ambiguity. You have to be comfortable, not necessarily knowing everything at that moment, being comfortable looking things up, being comfortable asking questions of colleagues, of specialists,of all kinds of people. And I think you have to really thrive on the variety and the unpredictability. And other than that, the qualities of a great family doctor I think are interpersonal skills. I think at the end of the day, much of what we do does come down to interpersonal skills.”

“When we look at applicants, we are really interested in people who have a commitment to service. . . .people who have had those experiences, people who've worked in free clinics or had other sorts of service oriented things. And so I think as a medical student, if you're interested in primary care, getting involved in those primary care experiences during medical school and first of all try it on for size, making sure that's something that you like.”

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.”