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Care Beyond Healing

Amanda Sedlacek portrait

Dr. Sedlacek, our board-certified palliative medicine specialist at Yankton Medical Clinic, was featured on the cover of the April/May issue of MED Magazine sharing her passion for palliative care, while exploring the intricacies of palliative care and why it is so valuable to terminally ill patients and their families.

Amanda Sedlacek’s passion for palliative medicine has its roots in her childhood on a farm in Tabor, South Dakota.

“It is a place where people tend to take care of family as they age,” she says. As a child, Sedlacek spent time helping to care for her aging grandmother who passed away when she was in first grade.

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“I stayed home with my grandmother sometimes. I did things like help comb her hair,” remembers Sedlacek, whose mother was a nurse. “My family had to deal with some really hard end-of-life issues and I remember watching how my grandmother changed as a person as she became ill.”

The experience ultimately drew Dr. Sedlacek to internal medicine where she saw a chance to care for “the whole person and the whole body”, both in and out of the hospital. She earned her DO from Des Moines University of Osteopathic Medicine and completed her residency in Internal Medicine at St. Joseph Warren Hospital in Youngstown, Ohio.

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“After my first year of training, one of our program directors told me he thought I would enjoy hospice medicine,” she says. Within a month of working with hospice inpatients in Youngstown, Sedlacek’s mind was made up. She completed a fellowship in Palliative and Hospice Medicine at Summa Health in Akron, Ohio and moved back to South Dakota last summer with her growing family. She now works at Yankton Medical Clinic where palliative medicine makes up about half of her internal medicine practice.

“I feel like it is the greatest blessing to take care of people at the end of life,” she says. “It is a time of very raw human emotions. Not just grief and sadness, but also a lot of love. I feel fortunate that I can help people go through this.”

Read more here: https://www.midwestmedicaledition.com/2020/03/26/304622/care-beyond-healing

Also, read more from a follow-up article in May 2020: https://www.midwestmedicaledition.com/2020/05/20/310089/supporting-patients-and-providers-from-a-distance