Dean Ornish
American physician and photographer (1953- )

Dean Michael Ornish (born July 16, 1953) is an American physician and researcher. He is the president and founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The author of Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Eat More, Weigh Less and The Spectrum, he advocates for diet and lifestyle changes he believes can treat and prevent heart disease.
Personal life
Ornish was born on July 16, 1953, in Dallas, Texas. He is of Jewish heritage. After graduating from Dallas's Hillcrest High School, he studied humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, graduating in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, as the school's valedictorian. He attended medical school at the Baylor College of Medicine, graduating in 1980 with a Doctor of Medicine degree. He completed a medical internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital (1981–1984), and was a Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Career
Ornish takes a lifestyle-driven approach to the control of coronary artery disease (CAD) and other chronic diseases.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1181109. VIAF identifies the subject as 37018559. The Library of Congress control number is n82002062. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1975, 1980 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dean Ornish” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.