Dr. Pantelick is a board certified internal medicine physician. She is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and completed her internal medicine residency at St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ. She is Board Certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine. Dr. Pantelick is a faculty member of the Department of Internal Medicine at St. Francis Hospital in Trenton, NJ, where she teaches residents and medical students. She recently joined an integrative and functional medical practice called Signature Health Solutions in Dayton, NJ. Dr. Pantelick volunteers with The Suppers Programs at the Trenton Farmer’s Market, where she helps educate market shoppers about the value of the whole foods lifestyle.
Dr. Pantelick has a broad range of experience from hospital-based, acute care medicine, complex, chronic disease management and more recently, wellness medicine. Being an advocate for a food-based solution for food and lifestyle-based health problems made Dr. Pantelick a natural medical partner to Suppers. Her reputation for fiercely defending the importance of listening to patient’s stories and her desire to help patients become their own health advocates, her frustration with how undervalued nutrition and wellness concepts are in conventional medicine and her direct observation of how powerful whole foods eating can be in reversing chronic fatigue, pain, and disease became a daily nudge for her to spend more of her working week learning wellness models instead of feeling stuck in the sick-care model she has been trained in.
Dr. Pantelick sees the dichotomy between the end-stage diseases of lives lived without the benefits of nutrition education and access to clean food sources. Trying to teach people about healthy food when they live in a food desert is frustrating, but it also feels arrogant. It is hard to feel you are able to make any change stuck between a rock and a hard place. As a lifelong believer that “food matters,” discovering Dor Mullen and her Suppers community was like finally finding a pocket of oxygen in the smog-filled corridors of hospital medicine with its bad food, pharma-filled treatment plans and blank stares when talking about wellness and nutritional deficiencies. While she loves being a doctor and loves teaching people how to advocate for themselves in the healthcare system, the reality of the options available to the urban poor is discouraging. Supporting community agriculture and helping build the ecosystems of whole-food thinking is what makes volunteering with Suppers exciting. With whole food in hand, the possibilities are inspiring.