Lonnie Zeltzer, MD

Lonnie Zeltzer, MD, is a distinguished professor of pediatrics, anesthesiology, psychiatry, and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and director of the UCLA Pediatric Pain and Palliative Care Program. She is a co-author of the Institute of Medicine’s report on Transforming Pain in America and is a member of the national steering committee assigned to provide directions for pain research at NIH. She has received, among other awards, a Mayday Pain and Policy Fellowship and the 2005 Jeffrey Lawson Award for Advocacy in Children’s Pain Relief from the American Pain Society (APS). Her UCLA integrative pediatric pain program received a 2009 Clinical Centers of Excellence in Pain Management Award from APS and a 2012 award from the Southern California Cancer Pain Initiative. She is also a member of the national Autism Think Tank. Her research includes yoga, mindfulness, hypnotherapy, and other self-help interventions, including mobile technologies, to help children and adolescents who have chronic pain, as well as understanding pain mechanisms in irritable bowel syndrome, cancer, sickle cell disease, headaches, dysmenorrhea, and other conditions.

She has over 350 research publications on childhood pain and complementary therapies, has written more than 80 chapters, and published her first book for parents on chronic pain in childhood (HarperCollins, 2005) and her second book for parents on chronic pain in children and young adults (Shilysca Press, 2016). She is active in advocacy for pain care and research and is a steering committee member of PAINS, a pain policy group set up under the National Center for Practical Bioethics at the University of Kansas. She is also a member of the steering committee of the National Pain Strategy Board, set up under the Affordable Care Act to guide the NIH on pain research priorities, and of the FDA Committee on Analgesia and Anesthesia. She is dedicated to improving pain for young people in the US. You can see a list of her NCBI articles here.