Elisha Waldman MD

Elisha Waldman, MD, was born in New York City and raised in Connecticut. After earning a BA in Religious Studies at Yale University he received his MD in Tel Aviv followed by training in pediatrics at Mount Sinai Medical Center and Pediatric Hematology-Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. After several years practicing pediatric oncology at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, Israel, Dr. Waldman returned to the U.S. to complete a fellowship in Pediatric Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston.

He has worked in pediatric palliative care in Jerusalem and at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and is currently a pediatric palliative care physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where he lives with his wife and two young sons. His major interests include spirituality and suffering in the context of pediatric palliative care, on which he has spoken and published widely. More recently he has developed an interest in the potential role of psychedelic therapies in addressing suffering, and he is a graduate of the CIIS (California Institute of Integral Studies) course in psychedelic therapy and research. 

Dr. Waldman is active in the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, where he currently serves on the Board as a Director at Large and was previously elected an emerging leader in palliative care.

He has published in the medical literature as well as in national media outlets, and he is the associate editor for pediatric content at the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management. He is a co-editor of and a contributor to the recently released Field Manual for Palliative Care in Humanitarian Crises (Oxford U Press,2020) which won a British Medical Association award. He is also the author of the nonfiction book, This Narrow Space, about his experiences working in the Middle East (published by Random House). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, the Hill, and elsewhere.