Dean-David Schillinger is an American general internist and former Chief of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). In 2006, he founded the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, whose mission is to advance health in poor communities. His research focuses on health communication for vulnerable populations, and the prevention and control of type 2 diabetes.
Schillinger has advocated for increasing awareness and prevention of type 2 diabetes, and became a vocal proponent for the successful passage of a sugary drink tax in the cities of Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco, California. In 2019, Schillinger was appointed as co-chair of the General Populations Prevention Sub-Committee of the congressionally-chartered National Clinical Care Commission.
Medical training
Schillinger attended Brown University, where he studied Russian Language & Literature, and obtained his medical degree in 1991 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He performed his residency training in Internal Medicine at UCSF. He served as Chief Medical Resident at San Francisco General Hospital before joining the faculty there.
Early career and research
Schillinger has led a number of studies exploring the impact of limited health literacy on prevention and control of diabetes and heart disease. His research helped to demonstrate that different levels of health literacy affects diabetes control, complications and overall death rates. Schillinger has sought to improve provider-patient communication by demonstrating the effectiveness of tools such as “the teach-back method” and the benefits of visual forms of communication with respect to the quality and safety of medical care. His research to expand the construct of Precision Medicine to include Precision Communication was published in Science. He also developed the first framework (SPHERE) to characterize the varied effects of social media on public health.
He co-authored and edited the medical textbook, Medical Care of Vulnerable and Underserved Patients, and co-directs an international course on this topic for healthcare providers. The patient self-management book he co-authored and developed in collaboration with diabetes patients has been distributed by the American College of Physicians to over 1 million individuals.
Public health advocacy
Schillinger served as one of 12 non-federal members of the National Clinical Care Commission, charged with making recommendations to Congress about how federal agencies can be leveraged and coordinated to prevent and control diabetes. In 2021, he helped author its final report in which he argued that diabetes be addressed not only as a biomedical problem, but also as a societal one. The report made transformative recommendations to Congress for an all-of-government approach to preventing and controlling diabetes.
Schillinger is a longtime advocate for the public health regulation of sugary drinks. In 2016, he served as the scientific expert for the City and County of San Francisco in defense of a lawsuit filed in federal court by the American Beverage Association for an injunction against the city's ordinance to mandate health warning notices on billboards advertising sugary drinks. As a result, the first sugary drink warning label law in the world was set to go into effect July 25, 2016. However, in 2017, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the beverage industry's request to block the warning labels, rested on an assessment that the warning notice was too large, not absence of disease causation. The city recently reinstated the ordinance with a smaller-sized warning notice.
Industry conflicts of interest in nutritional science and policy were also the subject of two Schillinger authored articles. The first demonstrated that sugar-sweetened beverage companies funded nearly every clinical study that concludes that their products do not cause diabetes or obesity. The second revealed the ways in which scientists funded by the International Life Sciences Institute – which is financed by fast food and chemical industries – used questionable methods to draw conclusions that national and international dietary guidelines to limit added sugar intake are not based in sound science. The controversy surrounding this conflict of interest was the subject of an investigative journalism piece in The Atlantic Monthly. Schillinger's research team demonstrated that the sugary drink tax in Berkeley, California resulted in nearly a 50% reduction over three years in the consumption of sugary drinks, relative to changes in consumption in neighboring non-taxed cities.