Current leadership
Faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Medical Director of Behavioral Health Services at Providence Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.
About Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv
Science, story, and the deeper conditions of healing.
Jeff is a physician, psychiatrist, theologian, and bestselling author whose work asks a deceptively simple question: what can people who recover against the odds teach us about becoming well?
A wider view of medicine
Healing is more than the reduction of symptoms.
Jeffrey Rediger, MD, MDiv, is a licensed physician and psychiatrist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He is Medical Director of Behavioral Health Services at Providence Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital in Sonoma County, California.
For more than two decades, his clinical leadership and research have brought medicine, psychiatry, trauma, spirituality, and the lived experience of patients into the same conversation.
The inquiry
Medicine studies disease. Jeff chose to study recovery.
In 2002, shortly after joining Harvard Medical School and becoming Medical Director of McLean Hospital Southeast, Jeff began investigating people who had recovered from illnesses considered incurable or fatal.
He reviewed medical records, interviewed patients, and looked beyond easy explanations. Over time, a deeper pattern emerged: nutrition, immunity, and the stress response mattered, but the most profound changes often involved identity, relationships, meaning, and a person’s experience of their own value.
His work does not treat remarkable recovery as a promise. It treats it as evidence worthy of serious attention.
An unusual path
From rural Indiana to medicine, theology, and Harvard.
Jeff grew up on a farm in rural Indiana in a family shaped by Amish and Western ranching traditions. His childhood also exposed him early to the distance between what people say is true and what is emotionally true.
Education became a way forward. Before training as a physician and psychiatrist, he earned a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, focusing on theology and the philosophy of science. That background still informs his insistence that rigorous science and the deepest questions of human meaning do not need to be kept apart.
A non-pathologizing approach
Care built around what is right about the person.
Jeff describes himself as a responsible antipsychiatrist: a physician who values medical science and psychiatry while recognizing how often people feel reduced to diagnoses, symptoms, and compliance.
His work seeks the story and intelligence beneath a symptom. Rather than overly medicalizing human problems of living, he wants people to become active participants in their health and wellbeing, with medicine serving their agency rather than replacing it.
The deepest healing asks us to understand and experience our value as human beings, without placing ourselves or others one up or one down.
Experience and recognition
A career spanning clinical care, research, and public conversation.
Clinical experience
Twenty-two years as Medical Director of McLean Hospital Southeast and Community Affairs, alongside years as Chief of Behavioral Medicine at Good Samaritan Medical Center.
Education
Medical and psychiatric training, plus a Master of Divinity in theology and philosophy of science from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Media and honors
Featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Dr. Oz Show, and Anderson Cooper 360°; nominated for the National Bravewell Leadership Award and recognized for leadership and patient care.
The books
Two books. One deepening inquiry into healing.
Jeff’s bestselling book Cured, now published in over thirty languages, examines the patterns shared by people who recovered from serious illness against the odds.
Co-written with Lissa Rankin, MD, Relationsick takes the inquiry further by exploring how power, relational trauma, chronic self-abandonment, and primary relationships can shape the body, mind, and nervous system—and how healing can also happen in relationship.
Explore the books
At home in California
Grounded in nature, community, and the life beyond work.
After many years in Boston and New England, Jeff now lives with his partner and Golden Retriever in a renovated barn in rural West Sonoma County. He is continually inspired by the natural beauty of the Pacific Coast and the region’s community of artists, writers, growers, musicians, and makers.
Continue exploring
What becomes possible when we listen more carefully?
Explore Jeff’s books, speaking, consultations, and media conversations about remarkable recovery, trauma, relationships, identity, and whole-person health.