Ran D. Anbar, MD, FAAP, is Board Certified in Pediatric Pulmonology and General Pediatrics by The American Board of Pediatrics. He is President and Founder of Center Point Medicine where, since 2015, he has provided medical hypnosis and counseling for children, adolescents, and young adults in La Jolla, California. Prior to founding Center Point Medicine, Dr. Anbar was Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at the SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY, where he was Director of the Division of Pediatric Pulmonology for 21 years. Since leaving Syracuse, Dr. Anbar has continued to provide medical hypnosis and counseling services to patients there via video conferencing.
At SUNY Upstate, Dr. Anbar was on the staff of the International Center for Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome as its pediatric pulmonologist and also as a medical hypnosis expert. In the latter role, Dr. Anbar taught people with VCFS how to use self-regulation to deal with VCFS-related anxiety and discomforts from medical procedures. He provided counseling for dealing with social pressures, a chronic problem for many people with VCFS. In one study at the Center, children with VCFS required magnetic resonance studies requiring them to be in the scanner for up to 40 minutes, but could not be sedated because certain tasks needed to be completed. In order to tolerate the noise and potential claustrophobia associated with MR scanners, dozens of children were taught self-hypnosis as a coping strategy, all but one of them responding to this technique successfully.
Dr. Anbar has been a leader in clinical hypnosis for the past 18 years during which he has treated over 4000 children with hypnosis and counseling. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a Fellow of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH). He is certified as an Approved Consultant in hypnosis by ASCH. Dr. Anbar is a Past President of ASCH, and is a member of the ASCH Scientific Task Force. He has served as a Guest Editor and Advisory Editor for the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis. He has directed or co-directed more than 20 clinical workshops in pediatric hypnosis and has provided training in hypnosis to more than 1000 health care providers. He has delivered more than 200 lectures nationally and internationally.
Dr. Anbar was graduated from the University of California, San Diego with undergraduate degrees in Biology and Psychology (1979). He earned his M.D. degree from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine (1983). He completed his residency training in Pediatrics (1986) and fellowship training in Pediatric Pulmonology (1989) at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston. He received training in hypnosis from the Society of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (1998) and ASCH (1999-2001).
Dr. Anbar has been principal investigator in 10 single-center case series studies of hypnosis in pediatrics, and has participated in over 60 investigator initiated and multi-center research trials involving pediatric patients with cystic fibrosis and other pulmonary disease. He has published over 50 articles, abstracts, editorials and book chapters, and two books relating to pediatric hypnosis and functional disorders, in addition to more than 150 other scientific publications.