Dale A. Matthews MD, FACP

Dr. Matthews practices general internal medicine in McLean, Virginia, and is a staff physician in the Primary Care Division of the Virginia Hospital Center Physician Group (Arlington, VA). He conducts research and lectures nationally and internationally on the doctor-patient relationship and the psychological and spiritual dimensions of medicine, including the role of faith, religion, and prayer in clinical care and healing. He has served on the general internal medicine faculty at three medical schools: Yale University, the University of Connecticut, and Georgetown University. He also teaches continuing medical education courses for the Continuing Medical Education, Inc. University at Sea program. He is the author of The Faith Factor: Proof of the Healing Power of Prayer (Viking, 1998).

Dr. Matthews is a cum laude graduate of Princeton University (AB, 1976), where he majored in Romance Languages and Literature with a special concentration in European Civilization. He graduated from Duke University School of Medicine in 1980 and completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the University of Connecticut in Farmington in 1983. In the same year, he was named a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at Yale University School of Medicine. At Yale, he studied clinical epidemiology and began his research career by examining patients' perceptions of physician performance in the hospital and outpatient setting.

He joined the faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington in 1985 as an Assistant Professor of Medicine. He was a co-founder of the Connecticut Chronic Fatigue Study, one of the first major longitudinal studies of this perplexing condition.  In 1989, he has named the George Morris Piersol Teaching and Research Scholar of the American College of Physicians.

In 1991, he accepted a position as Chief of Internal Medicine at the Minirth-Meier and Byrd Clinic in Arlington, VA. This position offered him an opportunity to integrate his religious faith with his skills in internal medicine and psychiatry and to develop his research interest in the spiritual aspects of medicine.

In 1993, he joined the faculty of Georgetown University School of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, where he continued to expand his clinical, teaching, and research interests. In the same year, he was named a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. In 1997, he received an Exemplary Paper in Humility Theology Award from the John Templeton Foundation.

From 1999 to 2012, he practiced general internal medicine in Washington, DC, and in 2012, he moved his practice to McLean, Virginia, and joined the Primary Care Division of Virginia Hospital Center. He has received the Vitals Patients’ Choice Awards yearly from 2008-13 and  Most Compassionate Doctor recognition in 2012. He has been named a Washington, DC-Baltimore-Northern Virginia Super Doctor yearly from 2011-13.