Michigan Senate hopeful El-Sayed calls himself a ‘physician’ but has little history treating patients

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for years has publicly said he’s a physician — but there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s had no experience as a licensed medical doctor.

This April, he gave an interview to a local TV journalist where he talked up his credentials as a physician multiple times. In March, he told a group of Teamsters nurses that he had “been in enough codes to watch who really does the work” and said that same month on a podcast that “I’ve been a doctor my whole career.”

His LinkedIn profile currently says he’s a “physician,” and late last month he called himself “a physician and epidemiologist” at a Council of Baptist Pastors debate in Detroit.

But according to a review of Michigan and New York state medical records, he’s never been granted a medical license in those states. El-Sayed’s hands-on experience treating patients appears to be a short clinical rotation called a sub-internship at a small hospital in Manhattan for four weeks at the end of medical school, he told a podcast in 2022, where he said his “job was to be the, like, worst doctor on the team” and he was “cosplaying a doctor.”

“The perception in Michigan is that he is, at least at one point in his life, a licensed physician,” said Chris Dewitt, an unaligned Democratic strategist based in Michigan. “That apparently is not the case, and it blows up a big part of his campaign.”

There’s no doubt that El-Sayed has top-notch medical credentials. He attended the University of Michigan Medical School and ended up receiving his medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has a doctorate in public health from Oxford University and worked as an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia for a year before moving to Detroit to be executive director and health officer of the Detroit Health Department.

“He has earned the right to be called ‘doctor’ twice over,” El-Sayed spokesperson Roxie Richner said in a statement. Richner didn’t respond to questions about his use of the word “physician.” El-Sayed has said in the past that he decided not to practice medicine after treating a patient during medical school and decided he wanted to address systemic issues, instead of individual patients.

But his history of suggesting to voters that he served as a practicing physician — with examples stretching back almost a decade — has muddled his personal history, adding confusion to his otherwise impressive achievements. In 2018, when El-Sayed was running for governor of Michigan, Crain’s Detroit Business published a story that also examined his claims of being a physician but not having a license to practice medicine in Michigan.

“I think there’s a lot of ways that one serves as a physician. And I think the work that I have done and I continue to do is true to the core and the ethos of medicine,” El-Sayed told Crain’s Detroit Business at the time. “And when I took my Hippocratic Oath, that is still an oath that I use to guide my work today. I’m a physician because I have an MD, but I’m also a physician because of the work that I’ve dedicated my career to.”

Yet El-Sayed has made his medical credentials a key part of his appeal on this campaign, often highlighting his background in medicine and as a physician — or not correcting people when they mention it. When Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared with El-Sayed last year at a Medicare town hall, the Vermont independent stopped to remind the livestreamed audience why he was backing El-Sayed: “there are no people in the Democratic caucus who are physicians,” he said. Abdul sat silently by and didn’t correct him.

To some in Michigan’s political establishment, his claims are misleading.

“It’s a weird thing to hang your hat on in terms of a biographical detail if you never actually practiced medicine,” said Adrian Hemond, a Democrat who is CEO of Lansing-based political consulting firm Grassroots Midwest.

“It’s not as though he hasn’t done anything with all of the fancy education that he got like running public health programming for Wayne County and for the city of Detroit. And so maybe you would lean into that, as opposed to giving people the impression that you may have practiced medicine before,” Hemond said.

Richner, El-Sayed’s spokesperson, said the Senate hopeful has two doctorates and has spent his career improving health care for Michiganders, including being a top champion of Medicare for All. His campaign pointed to a story he’s repeatedly told about why he wanted to work in public health and not practice medicine: When he was doing his sub-internship, he treated a homeless woman for a host of issues, including a head injury, AIDS and alcohol addiction. After she was discharged from the hospital, he ran into her sleeping on the subway and then realized that his calling was not to practice medicine, but instead to break the poverty cycle so there would be fewer patients like his last patient.

“Rather than this being a gotcha attack, this is Dr. El-Sayed’s origin story — one that Michiganders are familiar with,” Richner said.

Polls currently show a three-way primary contest between El-Sayed, Rep. Haley Stevens and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow — with El-Sayed rising, a move that has alarmed some moderate Democrats because of some of his more progressive views on defunding the police and his controversial appearance with the left-leaning Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

El-Sayed has also touted being a “physician” in at least two instances when he was in New York even though New York state law prohibits people from using the title “physician” if one is not licensed. At one conference in 2015 in New York City that he was slated to speak at, his bio said he was “a public health physician and epidemiologist.” In a 2012 op-ed he wrote, he called himself “a social epidemiologist and physician” who was studying at Columbia.

In 2018, he dressed up in a white doctor coat in an ad for his campaign for governor, and also used a photo of himself in the same garb last June for a fundraising pitch.

El-Sayed’s publisher’s description of his 2020 book, titled “Healing Politics,” said El-Sayed was a physician who “could heal the sick.” In 2024, he said “many of my doctor friends” call him a “self-hating doctor” because “the way that we tend to operate tends not to put our patients first.”

“I think it does matter for voters that he hasn’t really practiced medicine, but it’s part of a broader pattern of him doing a job and not sticking around very long,” said Joe DiSano, a Michigan Democratic consultant not affiliated with any campaign in the race. “If you’re gonna claim that you’re a doctor, you should have the practical experience of seeing patients on a regular basis.”