Sarah Patterson, MD

Experience and Current Work

Dr. Patterson is a rheumatology physician scientist in the UCSF Department of Medicine and a member of the research faculty at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health. She pursued her undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned her MD from UCSF. She continued her training at UCSF by completing an Internal Medicine residency, rheumatology fellowship, and postdoctoral research fellowship in Integrative Health. She joined the UCSF Rheumatology Division faculty in 2019 and became a UCSF Osher Center core research faculty member in 2022.

Dr. Patterson’s research aims to advance the understanding and management of rheumatic diseases by determining the impact of lifestyle factors—including physical activity, nutrition, and stress management—on disease outcomes. She has completed multiple studies investigating the effects of stress, stress resilience, and physical activity on inflammatory pathways and clinical outcomes in people living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). She is the principle investigator for a pilot study testing the feasibility and acceptability of a mindfulness-based intervention for people living with RA. She is committed to translating her research into improvements in patient-centered rheumatology care, and to that end her work also examines effective applications of integrative health approaches in rheumatology.

In her clinical work, Dr. Patterson specializes in SLE and combining evidence-based integrative health approaches with standard of care disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs). She established one of the first university-based integrative rheumatology clinics, which is based at the UCSF Osher Center. She provides direct patient care in the UCSF Lupus Clinic, the UCSF Osher Center Clinic, and in the UCSF hospital when she is attending on the inpatient rheumatology consult service.

Personal Statement and Approach

As a rheumatologist, I have been reminded in almost every clinical encounter of the need for personalized medical care that addresses each patient’s individual goals and challenges to living with chronic disease. This understanding has led me to develop an integrative rheumatology practice that combines biomedicine with treatment approaches from other healing traditions to achieve more optimal health for people with autoimmune conditions.