Department of Medicine

Richard Schweitzer

Richard Schweitzer, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Medicine who joined the University of California, San Diego's Dermatology faculty after 25 years of clinical teaching at Los Angeles County- University of Southern California Medical Center and private practice in Los Angeles.

Dr. Schweitzer is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and began his training in Internal Medicine, followed by military service in Panama. His interest in tropical skin disease, civic action in the delivery of medical care, and the role of language and its musical culture in the bond of physicians and patients led to a Dermatology residency at USC.

On completion of residency training, he worked in the Northeast of Brazil as Dermatologist on Project Hope. Health care delivery to those neediest and the goal of teaching and sharing education with Brazilian colleagues became a career objective. For Dr. Schweitzer, the Portuguese of Brazil and the joys of Brazilian music became "the continuing music of my hemispheres."

Clinical faculty work at USC continued Dr. Schweitzer's interest in the immune response as it unfolded in the study of Leprosy as a model of infectious granulomatous disease. Advances in the understanding of cutaneous lymphocye function provided a new basis for a long professional and personal interest in Psoriasis.

A continuing theme in the teaching of residents and students has been the language of compassion and practical patient education in the care of people with skin disease. Human connection and the valuable role of the physician's total medical knowledge in this regard is his sense of the "music" shared by patients when the physician's conscious "ear" has been properly nurtured.