David M. Steinhorn, MD Biography

Dr. Steinhorn is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Medical School with post-graduate training in Pediatric Hepatology and Critical Care. He was a Bioethics consultant under Arthur Caplan, PhD, at the University of Minnesota Hospitals and Clinics where he was an attending physician in Pediatric Critical Care. Following relocation to the Children’s Hospital of Buffalo in 1991, Dr. Steinhorn undertook post-doctoral clinical training in Hospice and Palliative Care under Dr. Robert Milch. At that time, Dr. Steinhorn became the first medical director and assisted in creating the Essential Care Program at Children’s Hospital of Buffalo. From 1999 until 2012, he was a Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and served as Medical Director of the Palliative Care Program at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago.

Dr. Steinhorn was the Medical Director for the Children’s Memorial Hospital Integrative Medicine Initiative for seven years which undertook research on complementary medicine in children.  Dr. Steinhorn served on the Executive Committee and was a founding member of the AAP’s Section on Hospice and Palliative Medicine. He was on the medical advisory board of Almost Home Kids, a transitional care facility in Naperville, Il., and was the advisor to the Greater Illinois Pediatric Palliative Care Coalition. Dr. Steinhorn has additional training in energy medicine, yoga, meditation, and shamanism. He has studied with teachers from the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, the Four Winds Society, and Dr. Carl Greer.  He is certified by the American Academy of Pediatrics in Critical Care and Hospice and Palliative Medicine.  Prior to his current position as Medical Director of the PANDA Palliative Care Program and an ICU and Hospice Physician at Children’s National Health Center, in Washington D.C., Dr. Steinhorn was the Medical Director of the George Mark Children’s House in San Leandro, CA and a PICU attending at UC Davis Medical Center. George Mark was established in 2004 and is the first freestanding children’s hospice in the United States.

Above all else, Dr. Steinhorn’s professional and personal passion is to find ways of alleviating suffering wherever it may occur and to help patients, families and healthcare providers discover meaning in all of life’s experiences.