Donald Abrams, M.D.

Donald I. Abrams, MD, is chief of Hematology–Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital, and is an integrative oncologist at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine and Professor of Clinical Medicine at UCSF. He graduated from Brown University and Stanford University School of Medicine. After completing an internal medicine residency at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco, he became a fellow in hematology–oncology at the UCSF Cancer Research Institute in 1980. During his fellowship, Dr. Abrams spent eight months working in the retrovirology laboratory of Harold Varmus, MD, during the time that the first cases of AIDS were being diagnosed. In the clinical arena, he was one of the original clinician/investigators to recognize many of the early AIDS-related conditions. He conducted numerous clinical trials investigating conventional as well as complementary therapies in patients with HIV, including therapeutic touch, traditional Chinese medicine interventions, medicinal mushrooms, and medical marijuana.

His interest in botanical therapies led him to pursue the two-year fellowship in the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. His passion involves nutrition and cancer. Dr. Abrams has been providing integrative medicine consultation to people living with and beyond cancer at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. He co-edited the Oxford University Press textbook Integrative Oncology with Dr. Andrew Weil. Dr. Abrams is a member of the NCI PDQ CAM Editorial Board. He was President of the Society of Integrative Oncology in 2010.