Michigan Senate hopeful El-Sayed calls himself a ‘physician’ but has little history treating patients

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for years has publicly said he’s a physician — but there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s had no experience as a licensed medical doctor. This April, he gave an interview to a local TV journalist where he talked up his credentials as a physician multiple times. In March, he told a group of Teamsters nurses that he had “been in enough codes to watch who really does the work” and said that same month on a podcast that “I’ve been a doctor my whole career.” His LinkedIn profile currently says he’s a “physician,” and late last month he called himself “a physician and epidemiologist” at a Council of Baptist Pastors debate in Detroit. But according to a review of Michigan and New York state medical records, he’s never been granted a medical license in those states. El-Sayed’s hands-on experience treating patients appears to be a short clinical rotation called a sub-internship at a small hospital in Manhattan for four weeks at the end of medical school, he told a podcast in 2022, where he said his “job was to be the, like, worst doctor on the team” and he was “cosplaying a doctor.” “The perception in Michigan is that he is, at least at one point in his life, a licensed physician,” said Chris Dewitt, an unaligned Democratic strategist based in Michigan. “That apparently is not the case, and it blows up a big part of his campaign.” There’s no doubt that El-Sayed has top-notch medical credentials. He attended the University of Michigan Medical School and ended up receiving his medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has a doctorate in public health from Oxford University and worked as an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia for a year before moving to Detroit to be executive director and health officer of the Detroit Health Department. “He has earned the right to be called ‘doctor’ twice over,” El-Sayed spokesperson Roxie Richner said in a statement. Richner didn’t respond to