Dr. Sunil Kumar Aggarwal was born and raised in Muskogee, Oklahoma and is also an Overseas Citizen of India.  He holds a B.S. in chemistry, B.A. in philosophy, a minor in religious studies, a Ph.D. in medical geography, and a Doctorate of Medicine (M.D.).  He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and graduate studies at the University of Washington.  He completed an internship in Internal Medicine at Virginia Mason Medical Center, residency in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at NYU Medical Center, and clinical fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health-Clinical Center Pain and Palliative Care Service.

He currently serves as an Integrative Pain, Palliative Care, Hospice, and Rehabilitation Medicine Physician in private practice at SageMED (Bellevue, WA) and as an on-call MultiCare Physician and Associate Medical Director of MultiCare Hospice (Tacoma, WA).  He is board-certified in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Hospice and Palliative Medicine.  He has Affiliated Professor or Clinical Faculty Appointments with the MultiCare Institute of Research and Innovation, the National Family Medicine Residency, University of Washington Geography Department, and University of Washington School of Medicine Rehabilitation Medicine Department.  He is an Associate Member of the New York Academy of Medicine and the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the National Cancer Institute’s PDQ Cancer CAM information summary on cannabis and cannabinoids.   He has over two dozen peer-reviewed publications which have been cited 446 times (Google Scholar).  Sunil’s dissertation, “The medical geography of cannabinoid botanicals in Washington state: Access, delivery, and distress”, received NIH first-issued Certificates of Confidentiality.  He led the AMA to call in 2009 for a review of marijuana scheduling. More about his work can be found on his website www.cannabinologist.org.  He has basic language competency in Hindi and Punjabi.

Specializations within Palliative Care:

• Rehabilitation – Restoring function through pain and symptom management, supporting adaptation, and quality of life optimization
• Medical Cannabinologic Care Integration – Including Complementary and Integrative Health approaches, pharmaceutical sparing, and empiric treatment trials for palliation and disease modification
• Directly Observed Therapy

Other areas of interest: psychedelic integrative medicine; spirituality in medicine; cross-cultural medicine; social medicine; palliation of existential anxiety.