Donald I. Abrams MD

Donald I. Abrams, M.D. is an integrative oncologist at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine and Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. He was Chief of Hematology-Oncology at Zuckerberg San Francisco General from 2003-2017. He graduated from Brown University in 1972 and from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1977. After completing an Internal Medicine residency at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco, he became a fellow in Hematology-Oncology at UCSF in 1980.

During his fellowship, Dr. Abrams spent eight months working in the retrovirology laboratory of Harold Varmus, M.D. during the time that the first cases of AIDS were being diagnosed. He subsequently returned to the clinical arena where he was one of the original clinicians/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, medical cannabis, and distant healing. He is considered to be a pioneer in the investigation of inhaled cannabis, having conducted studies funded by the NIH and the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.

His interest in botanical therapies led him to complete a two-year Fellowship in the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in December 2004. He co-edited the Oxford University Press textbook in Integrative Oncology with Andrew Weil, M.D. Dr. Abrams is a long-time member of the NCI PDQ Integrative, Alternative and Complementary Therapies Editorial Board and a past President of the Society of Integrative Oncology.