Tadeusz Witkowski
Tadeusz Witkowski, MD
Attending Physician
NYC Health + Hospitals/Gotham Health, Cumberland
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A Doctor for the Polish Community
Practicing medicine in a small city hospital in Poland in the 1980s left Dr. Tadeusz Witkowski unfulfilled and restless. It was a time of political repression and limited resources, but eventually he managed to join the wave of Polish immigration to the United States at the end of the Soviet era.
Arriving in Brooklyn with almost no English in 1990, he worked construction until he could speak the language well enough to get a job as a substitute high school biology teacher and volunteer at a city hospital while preparing for his licensing exams.
Decades later, Dr. Witkowski is a treasure to the large Polish-American community in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. As an internist at NYC Health + Hospitals/Gotham Health, Cumberland and the primary physician at its busy Greenpoint clinic, he speaks Polish with most of his patients. “Sometimes they have a medical problem and they don’t have insurance and they don’t know where to go,” he says. “So, it’s a lot of satisfaction helping them. Even when they move away to Queens or Long Island, they still come to see me. I have a couple of patients in New Jersey.”
“Dr. Witkowski is the kind of physician who just shows up and does the work,” said Dr. Adrienne McMillan, the deputy chief medical officer of Gotham Health. “He’s a team player and a teacher – both formally for years with the internal medicine residents from Woodhull Hospital and informally to the nursing and clerical staff on his team.”
Dr. Witkowski cares for his patients “with a firm yet compassionate hand,” Dr. McMillan says. Case in point: Like most primary care physicians, Dr. Witkowski sometimes has to get after patients to follow doctor’s orders. “If they have high blood pressure and they don’t take their medication or an abnormal mammogram and they don’t go for a biopsy, I need to convince them why it’s necessary. Sometimes you can explain it and sometimes you have to scare them. Everybody is different.”
The lesson, he says: “Know your patients.”