About
Dr. Andrew Shulman
A physician-scientist and pediatric rheumatologist writing about pain and the illnesses that resist simple explanation.
About Dr. Shulman
Andrew Shulman, MD, PhD, is a pediatric rheumatologist, physician-scientist, and author. He serves as Division Chief and Medical Director of Pediatric Rheumatology at Rady Children’s Health Orange County (formerly CHOC) and cares for children and teens with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, as well as chronic pain that does not always fit a clear diagnosis. As an author, he writes about what those conditions reveal: how the body and brain produce pain, why it can be so hard to measure, and what it takes to keep living fully when there is no clear cure.
His work draws on an uncommon combination: the training of a physician-scientist, the daily clinical experience of a pediatric rheumatologist, and personal experience with a chronic health condition. He understands chronic pain from both perspectives: as a bedside physician and as a patient on the exam table.
Where Medicine Meets Uncertainty
Pain is one of the most common reasons families seek medical care and one of the hardest experiences to measure. For a child living with chronic pain and for the parents beside them, the search for answers can be long and confusing, especially when tests come back normal even though the symptoms are real. Dr. Shulman thrives in that difficult space. He treats children and teens with pediatric chronic pain, pain amplification syndromes, complex regional pain syndrome, dysautonomia and POTS, juvenile arthritis, lupus, dermatomyositis, and other rheumatologic conditions. Colleagues refer patients whose pain does not follow a pattern.
His conviction, in the clinic and on the page, is that an accurate diagnosis is essential yet rarely sufficient. Improving a child’s health often depends as much on listening to the patient and understanding the family’s unique circumstances as on naming the disease.
A Physician-Scientist's Training
Dr. Shulman earned his bachelor’s degree in Biochemical Sciences, magna cum laude, from Harvard College, with wide-ranging interests spanning molecular biology and the humanities. He completed his MD and a PhD in cell regulation at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where his doctoral work, conducted in the laboratory of his late friend and mentor, David Mangelsdorf, a pioneer in molecular pharmacology, examined how nuclear receptors communicate at the molecular level. That first-author research was published in Cell.
He trained in pediatrics through the Boston Combined Residency Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and completed his pediatric rheumatology fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and UT Southwestern, with postdoctoral research in the laboratories of Laurie Glimcher and Virginia Pascual along the way. He is board certified in pediatrics and pediatric rheumatology.
From Shulman’s perspective, after years of writing about the work, he describes medicine as less an art than a craft: a particular kind of problem-solving at the intersection of what is known, what is needed, and what is possible. He has found that the most important questions are rarely the easiest to answer.
Clinical Leadership
At Rady Children’s Health Orange County, Dr. Shulman leads the Division of Pediatric Rheumatology and serves as a Health Sciences Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of California, Irvine. His research has continued throughout his clinical years, driven by the need to develop better, more targeted treatments for children with rare autoinflammatory diseases. His work has appeared in Cell, the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Communications, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Arthritis & Rheumatology, among other journals.
Writing Beyond the Exam Room
Dr. Shulman’s writing brings the clinic’s work into a broader conversation about chronic pain, medical uncertainty, and the stories that shape how illness is understood. He is the author of the forthcoming Cramp: A Doctor’s Notes on Pain, a work of narrative nonfiction. Its heart lies in the stories of his young patients and in his own honest, human accounts of what it means
to live with pain that can be named but not always explained.
His earlier writing, including the blog Left on Longwood, addressed similar questions: how doctors and patients understand one another, the significance of a patient’s social circumstances alongside diagnoses, and the importance of being believed when experiencing chronic pain.
A Voice for Patients, Parents, and the People Who Care for Them
He writes and speaks for patients and parents, physicians and researchers, and journalists and readers drawn to the harder questions of medicine: how pain is understood, how it is communicated, and how families keep going when the body does not cooperate. His writing explores themes that touch on medical uncertainty, Long COVID and post-viral illness, and what it means to live with a chronic condition that has no easy answers. At the center of it all is a simple conviction: pain is real, even when it is hard to explain, and every patient’s story deserves to be heard.
Beyond Medicine
Dr. Shulman resides in Orange County with his wife and two daughters. As a lifelong athlete, he now uses endurance training to manage his neuromuscular condition and meet the physical demands of daily life, work, and active parenting. He is an avid reader, sports enthusiast, and supporter of his daughters’ athletic pursuits, approaching life and storytelling with resilience and a positive mindset.