Catherine I. Brophy, MD

Dr. Cathy Brophy formed Dunkirk Family Practice with Dr. Joyce Owens in 1997 because she wanted to practice family medicine with a focus on family. In her ideal world, she gets to treat her patients like family and strives to do that in her own practice, something she could not have done in most medical offices. She loves all aspects of family medicine, from taking care of the newborns to doing house calls to see how her elderly patients are managing.

As a teenager, Dr. Brophy became very ill and was under the care of her pediatrician for a number of months. It was during that time that she came to recognize and appreciate the compassion her doctor had for her and her family and she decided at that time that she wanted to become a doctor. Her initial plan was to go into pediatrics, but every rotation in medical school offered some new fascinating aspect of medicine. It wasn’t until her family medicine rotation that she found her specialty. “I even loved my surgery and shock trauma rotations, but what I really liked was going back to talk with the families. So when I got to family medicine, I realized that I had finally found a place where I could really do it all!”

Dr. Brophy has a very strong sense of community. “We live here. We love it here. It is our home.” And that sense of community was returned to them when their building burned to the ground in the summer of 2016. “I heard about the fire from my mechanic, not the alarm company. And the community really came out for us. We were back up and running (in the old location) in two days! That was amazing!”

Like her colleagues, Dr. Brophy thrives in seeing a variety of patients every day: a well-child visit in the morning followed by a Medicare Wellness Visit followed by acute care visits for colds and flu. “That’s a good day! I like it all. That’s why I went into family medicine.”