Last Updated: Dec 9, 2022
When choosing a family physician, most people want to feel safe and comfortable with someone who they can be honest with, without judgement.
Which is why Dr. Adam Lake, a family physician with Penn Medicine Lancaster General Health, has focused his expertise on largely stigmatized areas of the community with LGBTQ+ identifying patients, those living with HIV/AIDs, and patients battling with addiction and/or recovery.
“I find myself more and more drawn to people with stigmatized conditions. Whether it’s with HIV or addiction or the LGBTQ + population, being able to earn somebody’s trust and to be able to talk with them about what’s really going on gives me a lot of joy in medicine.”
He is also the managing physician at the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Clinic in Lancaster, a federally funded clinic that provides care, treatment, and support to those living with HIV/AIDS.
Born and raised in Lancaster County, Dr. Lake attended his undergraduate studies at Grinnell College in Iowa, majoring in biochemistry and linguistics before attending medical school at Temple University.
After only a year, he took a break from school to travel to central and south America where he did various work on farms, something familiar to him from his work on organic farms growing up in Lancaster County.
“I had experience working on organic farms in Lancaster County, but of course this was a totally different environment. Some of the people I was living with and working with were very intelligent, but they would be completely illiterate. So, I would have to learn from someone, without books, which is the opposite of what they teach you in medicine,” he said.
During his time in central and south America, Dr. Lake always found himself experiencing the health care system, where there would usually be a doctor available for each patient but not the resources around to treat that patient. When he returned to Philadelphia to continue medical school at Temple University, he saw the differences in the U.S. health systems, where the resources were available but not to everyone.
He began doing a lot of volunteering with Prevention Point in Philadelphia, a nonprofit public health organization providing harm reduction services in Eastern Pennsylvania.
“That’s really how I got interested in all of this,” Dr. Lake said. “When you’re around marginalized populations, sometimes there is a lot of intersectionality. Someone could be homeless and injecting drugs and all of that may have cascaded because the person came out at home and their parents kicked them out. A spiral happens and those stigmas pile up.”
Bringing him back to Lancaster County, Dr. Lake completed his residency with Lancaster General Hospital, knowing he wanted to focus on HIV training and infectious diseases.
“A lot of these populations, the LGBTQ population in particular, it’s a group that we are very familiar with when working with HIV. There are a lot of folks in that community that are also living with HIV; and it’s a large community, it’s not just a couple of people.” He said, “I started offering gender affirming hormone therapy and didn’t advertise this at all, I think I let one or two counselors know I was open to offering care and before I knew it, I was doing multiple intakes a week and quickly sold out my panel. The need is out there.”
All of that said, Dr. Lake says that being a family physician whose expertise with stigmatized populations, doesn’t look too different than a regular physician visit but with more of an awareness and appreciation for the nuances of the community and being able to ask about it.
“It comes down to comfort with the population, knowing what to ask and do it without blushing. If I can talk about anal sex about someone and keep a normal face, that is going to be a different interaction for them than someone who isn’t comfortable.”
“I think when you’re a family doctor and you go into practice you encounter the community you’re serving. So, I’m serving this community that is living with HIV, a lot of people identify as LGBTQ, and there is a lot of addiction and recovery and so this is just what family medicine looks like when I’m practicing,” he said. “You just start knowing more about it because it’s part of the community.”
Dr. Lake continues his passion for stigmatized and marginalized populations in advocating for larger health care systems to adopt self-sustaining programs that aim to reach out and serve the community in need.
“It’s doable and even more so than regular primary care. These are populations you can serve – that are not just underserved but unserved – and make it financially sustainable for the system and the community, we could really move forward in progress.”