Avrum Bluming received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia College, where he majored in music, and his M.D. degree from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons where he was elected to the academic honor society, Alpha Omega Alpha.
He spent 4 years as a Senior Investigator for the National Cancer Institute and, for two of those years, was Director of the Lymphoma Treatment Center in Kampala, Uganda, where he was also an Honorary Lecturer at Makerere University.
He has taught at medical and academic institutions around the country, including Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities, as well as UCLA and USC. He is an Emeritus Clinical Professor of Medicine at USC, and has been an invited speaker at the Royal College of Physicians in London, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and the International Society of Hematology in Jerusalem.
He has served as Director of Oncology, Chief of Medicine and Chief of Staff at both Encino Hospital and at the Tarzana Regional Medical Center, now called the Providence - Cedars Sinai Tarzana Medical Center, where he was Director of Continuing Medical Education for four years. He was a practicing hematologist and medical oncologist in Encino from 1975 - 2016.
In 1994, he was elected to Mastership in the American College of Physicians, an honor accorded to only 500 of the over 100,000 Board-certified Internists in this country. From 1994 until his retirement in 2016, he was consistently listed in the Woodward-White book, The Best Doctors in America.
In the 1970’s he was a fellow panelist with Lewis Thomas at Johns Hopkins University at an NCI sponsored conference on Spontaneous Regression of Cancer (Bluming AZ: Spontaneous regression of sarcoma. Nat Cancer Inst Monogr 1976;44:55-57.)
In 1998, he was a speaker at the 9th Roundtable of the Council for Technology and the Individual (CTI). Other speakers at that program included: Jeff Bezos, Stewart Brand, Leonard Kleinrock, Alan Kay, Ray Kurzweil, Paul MacCready, Steven McGeady, Walt Mossberg, Paul Saffo, John Scully, and Rick Smolan.
He has been a reviewer for many medical journals including: Blood, Cancer Research, Johns Hopkins Medical Journal, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Journal of the American Medical Association, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, New England Journal of Medicine, and Science.
He has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times and the British medical publication, The Lancet. He has been quoted in the Economist, Forbes, the New York Times, Newsweek, Scientific American, and the Wall Street Journal. He is mentioned in Norman Cousin’s book, Head First - The Biology of Hope, in Jack Canfield’s book, Chicken Soup for the Surviving Soul, in Gail Sheehy’s book, The Silent Passage, and in Berry Gordy’s book, To Be Loved.
He has cooked with Danny Kaye, played Balalaika - guitar duets with Theodore Bikel, jogged with Frank Shorter, long distance running Olympic medalist, performed in front a medical audience with Patch Adams, was introduced by Gregory Peck at an LA Free-Net kickoff fundraiser event, flew a T33 jet fighter, flew over the Taklamakan Desert in an ultralite, traveled with the Tuareg in the Southern Sahara, spent time in a Buddhist Monastery on Mount Koya in Japan, and was the official Mohel for the Jewish community in Uganda, where, for a very brief time, he was also physician to Idi Amin.
He is a founder and was President for over 20 years of the H.O.P.E. Foundation, established to provide both information and bereavement counseling to families touched by cancer, and is a founder and first President of the Los Angeles Free-Net, a non-profit organization, inaugurated in 1994, providing inexpensive internet access (free to K-12 students) and extensive medical information resources on the World Wide Web. In 1996, the Clinton White House identified the Los Angeles Free-Net as the prototype for community information resources that should be emulated around the country.
He organized the first study of lumpectomy for the treatment of breast cancer in Southern California in 1978; he was a co-investigator on the original study evaluating the relationship between the timing of initial breast cancer surgery within the menstrual cycle and prognosis, and for the past 3 decades, he has been studying and publishing the benefits and risks of hormone replacement therapy administered to women with a previous history of treated breast cancer.
His book, written with Dr. Carol Tavris, a Social Psychologist and author, is entitled:
Estrogen Matters: Why taking hormones in menopause can improve women’s well-being and lengthen their lives - without raising the risk of breast cancer. It was first published in September, 2016. A second edition is scheduled for publication in September, 2024.
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