Theresa Cheng, MD, JD, a civil rights attorney and an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine, brings a uniquely powerful perspective to the bedside — one shaped by her unwavering commitment to equity, advocacy, and humanistic care.
The recipient of the 2025 Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award, Dr. Cheng reflects on her dual training, global advocacy work, and how her dedication to treating the whole person informs her practice in the emergency department. In this Q&A with the UC San Francisco Department of Emergency Medicine, she shares why humanistic medicine is more urgent than ever — and how emergency physicians can meet patients not just in crisis, but in their full complexity.
How would you describe your care philosophy?
I trained at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, whose care philosophy — the needs of the patient come first — became my own core clinical tenet of practice. As we get older, and we experience more health challenges in our lives and those of our loved ones, the idea of the patient, specifically that there is a whole person in front of us, becomes more magnified for us. It can be easy to forget that, particularly in the emergency department, where other needs press upon us, like trying to see and triage many people in a short amount of time.
My care philosophy focuses on trying to address my patient holistically, as a person, as a human, and that comes with their flaws and their beauty at the same time, whether it be homelessness, addiction, or other social needs that have directly influenced why they came into the emergency department.
What does humanistic medicine mean to you, and why is it so important in emergency medicine?
Emergency medicine drew me in because we treat all comers. That every person deserves care and medical attention is a really beautiful sentiment. There are so many different reasons why I love emergency medicine, but I love the fact that the emergency department really is the nexus between the community and the health care system. We are privileged enough to see not only medical emergencies, but also social emergencies, which are becoming more and more commonplace as our social safety nets are disintegrating. When I was a resident in Los Angeles, I had a family of six come into my emergency room because they were just evicted and were now homeless. They didn't know where else to go, so they came to the emergency department.
We always say that physicians in the health care settings can only account for 20% of someone's wellbeing or health outcomes; 80% is attributable to what we call upstream factors. These can be reasons or characteristics that exist outside of the health care setting, such as where they live, what types of food they eat, and what their school systems are like. There are all these other factors that really account for 80% of what the patient’s health outcome is going to be.
We in emergency medicine have such privileged moments where we're seeing people on some of their worst days. Sometimes, it's because of health outcomes, sometimes it's because of social factors, sometimes it's because of fear for a loved one. We have this moment to really impact them in an extremely vulnerable time. So, the emergency department becomes this place of vulnerability and hopefully of hope, where we could leverage this moment to improve a part of that 80% — one of the upstream factors that led them to come to the emergency department that day.
Your journey to medicine is anything but conventional — you’re not only a doctor but also a human and civil rights lawyer. What inspired you to pursue both fields?
I'm a big believer that you can't always plan out your life. Pivoting is a natural part of your life journey, and it makes life even richer and fuller. In college or even in med school, I certainly couldn’t have predicted where I am now. I started med school not knowing what I was really doing besides vaguely wanting to be a doctor. The free clinic where I was working was just a few blocks away from these two ivory spears [representing the Mayo Clinic]. And I remember being frustrated because the patients seeing me couldn't go to the Mayo Clinic, which was just a few blocks away, and I didn't know why. What system was dictating the care I could give or the care my patients could seek? What are the policies and guides in place? I wanted to better understand these systems, which is what inspired me to go to law school.
I was naturally drawn to international law because so much of international law is steeped in human rights standards and human rights law, and seeing sort of these aspirational — or, at a bare minimum, ethical and human rights goals — that countries should at least at a bare minimum subscribe to. This gives us a universal understanding and covenant to work toward; it gives us a belief system.
Are you currently engaged in any advocacy or research focused on advancing humanistic medicine?
I view my work and research in academics through more of an advocate’s or a civil rights lawyer’s lens than the traditional researcher or clinician’s. Most of the research or advocacy I do looks at the life cycle of migration patterns from the beginning to the end. So, for example, when people are evicted, forced off, or displaced from their land; the challenges on their migration journey; and then how they settle or aren't settled in the country where they immigrate.
I'm doing on-the-ground advocacy around the U.S.-Mexico-California border, and within the corners of our country. One of my research projects is in Tanzania, where I was invited by the Maasai tribe — an indigenous tribe in Kenya and Tanzania that has been increasingly evicted from their ancestral lands, even though they're a pastoralist tribe. As a result, their livestock are dying, and now, their people are dying. This study on the modern-day health challenges these indigenous pastoralists and nomadic people face allows me to reflect on the importance of social safety nets as society evolves and grows.
On the other end of this “migration life cycle,” I’m researching the prevalence and clinical significance of civil legal needs amongst our ED patients at Zuckerberg San Francisco General. Clinicians don’t realize that so much of the upstream factors affecting people coming into the ED are centered around the civil legal system. For example, whether people have access to food stamps or are facing eviction from their homes. These are often adjudicated in the courtroom. We are missing a major opportunity to help connect people to services they so desperately need to survive, especially as social safety nets are disintegrating.
What does receiving the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award mean to you?
I just feel very privileged to be honored and to also call myself faculty at UCSF. And I hope emergency physicians can continue to lean into humanistic care, that we really treat the person in front of us and get creative in the ways we can support the patient in front of us, especially in times when we're faced with increasingly dehumanizing policies and practices around the world.
Zuckerberg San Francisco General is one of the main reasons why I choose to continue working at UCSF. The hospital, its people, and the patients are what really encourage me to show up to work, day after day; as a safety net hospital, it treats many people who otherwise would not get care.