Official Website of The Washington Post's 'Ask A Doctor' columnist and Harvard physician
“Dr. Pasricha has become one of the most important medical voices of our time.”
—Sanjay Gupta, MD, Chief Medical Correspondent at CNN
Barry Braunstein Photography
Hi, I'm Dr. trisha
I’m Trisha Pasricha (Pus-REACH-ah), a physician and scientist at Harvard Medical School. With over 15 years as a medical journalist, I am also the 'Ask a Doctor' columnist for The Washington Post where I answer your health questions every week. My new book "You've Been Pooping All Wrong" is coming out in April 2026 (Penguin Random House).
My goal is to empower readers with information to make the best decisions about their own health. I love injecting my own sense of humor into my columns and offering straight talk about “embarrassing” topics. Anyone who does colonoscopies for a living like me can’t be bashful—for example, my column leading with “Pooped your pants?” I’m proud to say was a first for The Washington Post.
After attending Harvard College, I later trained at Johns Hopkins Hospital at the Osler Internal Medicine residency program and then completed gastroenterology and neurogastroenterology fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital. During that time, I also studied biostatistics and epidemiology, earning a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I lead an NIH-funded laboratory and am the Director of the Institute for Gut-Brain Research at BIDMC, investigating how the brain and gut communicate with each other. My laboratory has been awarded by the prestigious American Gastroenterological Association and the Parkinson's Foundation.
To read my latests 'Ask A Doctor' columns, which publish online Monday morning, visit the Well+Being page of The Washington Post.
Is my poop normal?
Tune-up your body: A health checklist for every age
More young people are getting cancer. Can I lower my risk?
IN THE PRESS
"The brain and the gut are in constant communication via an intricate network of nerve fibers called the vagus nerve. This information superhighway, as it’s often called, runs between the brain and the abdomen and is the reason our thoughts affect our guts so uniquely. Recall from high school biology that it took merely the thought of food for Pavlov’s dog to begin salivating."
TRISHA PASRICHA, MD, MPH
The New York Times, February 14, 2023