Dr. Rachel Bedard
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Like, you are sort of interacting on the streets and on the subways, et cetera.
You know, and because of the density, people are just on top of each other much more.
My life certainly feels extremely stratified for lots of reasons, but I think I like living here because it feels as though humanity is in continuity with itself in a way that in some other parts of the country or other very wealthy cities, you can be completely sort of cloistered off
That having been said, yes, my clinical work puts me in not just contact with, but I think just an extremely intimate relationship with people whose lives are really, really difficult in ways that my life has never been.
And gives me a different sort of level of insight into what it's like to live in those circumstances.
Like my patients, their experience of the weather is really different than my experience of the weather because they are exposed to the elements in ways that I am not with fewer ways to protect themselves, ranging from like they come to the clinic and they don't have a coat and they don't have gloves and it's really cold outside or it's really hot outside and they don't necessarily have a place to take care of themselves.
And so, like, that's a really different way to be in a body in the same spaces that I'm in my body in, if that makes sense.
I, so I had gone into medicine because I wanted to do sort of social medicine, like social justice work through medicine.
And it wasn't totally obvious how to do that.
And I sort of very luckily by chance ended up in this job at a fellowship at Rikers where my job was to take care of older people who were incarcerated in the New York City jail system.
And I loved that job so much.
Rikers is a wild place because it is, it's an island, as you know.
Yeah, so Rikers Island is an island off of Queens.
It is connected to Queens via this long bridge.
There's security at the front of the bridge and on the other side.
You can only drive on the island.