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Michael S. Goldstein, PhD, is a professor of public health (community health sciences) and sociology, and UCLA’s associate vice-provost in charge of the Healthy Campus Initiative. He has also served the campus as interim vice provost for graduate education and dean of the graduate division.A faculty associate at the Center, Goldstein was co-principal investigator and program director of CHIS-CAM, an NCI-funded follow-up study to the 2001 California Health Interview Survey that examines use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) among California adults, particularly those with cancer and other chronic illnesses. At UCLA, he teaches graduate courses on complementary and alternative medicine, self-help and self-care.Goldstein’s published research on CAM spans 30 years.During the late 1980s his research examined factors that led conventionally trained physicians to become involved with CAM. In the early 1990s, Goldstein spent two years conducting research at The Wellness Community, a support center for people with cancer that is receptive to many forms of CAM. In the mid-1990s, he was among the very first researchers supported by the Office of Alternative Medicine for his study of patient satisfaction with homeopathic treatment. More recently, he collaborated on a study to compare the impact of treatment confidence on pain and disability among patients with low-back pain treated by either physicians or chiropractors.  His current work deals with the potential for CAM providers to assume a greater role in the provision  of primary care in the nation’s health care system.

Goldstein is the author of two books: The Health Movement: Promoting Fitness in America (Macmillan 1992), and Alternative Health Care: Medicine, Miracle, or Mirage(Temple Univ. 1999). Both strive to understand changes in the way people seek to prevent and respond to serious illnesses, like cancer, as part of broader social and cultural changes in American society.

Goldstein received his doctorate from Brown University and has conducted research on a wide array of topics dealing with the behavior of people with chronic illness.