Dr. Dean Ornish

Dean Ornish, M.D., is known as “the father of lifestyle medicine.” He is also founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF and at UCSD. He received his M.D. from the Baylor College of Medicine, was a clinical fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School, and completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He earned a B.A. in Humanities summa cum laude from the University of Texas in Austin, where he gave the baccalaureate address. For over 47 years, he has directed clinical research demonstrating, for the first time, that comprehensive lifestyle changes may begin to reverse even severe coronary heart disease, without drugs or surgery. Medicare created a new benefit category, “intensive cardiac rehabilitation,” to cover this program, which is now being reimbursed when offered virtually. He directed the first randomized trial demonstrating that comprehensive lifestyle changes may slow, stop or reverse the progression of early-stage prostate cancer. His research showed that comprehensive lifestyle changes affect gene expression, “turning on” disease-preventing genes and “turning off” genes that promote cancer and heart disease, as well as the first controlled study showing that these lifestyle changes may begin to reverse cellular aging by lengthening telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes which regulate aging (in collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Nobel Laureate). He recently directed the first randomized controlled trial showing that lifestyle changes may often reverse the progression of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.