Drew Pinsky
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Image:Drew Pinsky.jpg David Drew Pinsky, (born September 4, 1958) nicknamed "Dr. Drew" is a board-certified physician and addiction medicine specialist. He is best known as co-host of the nationally syndicated radio talk show Loveline, where he offers advice on a wide array of lifestyle issues affecting not only teenagers & young adults, but people in general. Pinsky's former radio partner Adam Carolla used to provide the humor on the show with his comical analogies, often poking fun at the strait-laced Pinsky, and humorously calling him a "man of passion." Carolla left the Loveline show on November 3, 2005.
Pinsky was born in Pasadena, California and attended Polytechnic School; his father was also a doctor while his mother, Helene Stanton, was a singer and actress. He majored in biology at Amherst College, graduating in 1980, and earned his M.D. at the University of Southern California School of Medicine in 1984. He started doing Loveline as a local show on radio station KROQ while still a medical student, with no pay at first. He served his residency at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, and eventually became chief resident there before moving into private practice. Pinsky married in 1991, and he and his wife Susan had triplets Douglas, Jordan, and Paulina in 1992. Loveline went national in 1995, and the television version began the following year. The show ran on MTV for four years, and still continues on radio. A companion volume, The Dr. Drew and Adam Book: A Survival Guide To Life and Love, was published in 1998.
In the midst of the dot-com boom, Pinsky co-founded an Internet-based community and advice site for teenagers called DrDrew.com with a friend named Curtis Giesen. Among their early backers was Garage.com. DrDrew.com soon failed, and the company was sold to a corporate restructuring firm called Sherwood Partners Inc., which sold the remnants to DrKoop.com in November 2000. Pinsky no longer maintains any affiliation with the site, though they continue to run articles he wrote for the service in 2000-2001.
In addition to his radio show and medical career, Pinsky also has become quite popular on television talk shows, where his medical expertise and relationship counseling abilities are highly valued. He served as "health and human relations expert" on the first season of the U.S. TV series Big Brother in 2000. In 2003, he released a book entitled Cracked: Putting Broken Lives Together Again, recounting his experiences running the drug-addiction rehab clinic at Las Encinas Hospital in Pasadena. He also contributed to the book When Painkillers Become Dangerous: What Everyone Needs to Know About OxyContin and Other Prescription Drugs, published in 2004.
Pinsky is a trained opera singer and also plays the piano and bass guitar. He made his acting debut in 2004, playing the father of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in New York Minute.
He also has his own television series, Strictly Sex with Dr. Drew, on the Discovery Health Channel. He is a frequent guest speaker on CNN.
Pinsky frequently speaks on college and university campuses throughout the United States, both on his own and with his former Loveline partner Adam Carolla.
Although referred to by clients as Dr. Pinsky, the name "Dr. Drew" came to be as he started his radio career while attending med school. Not wanting to promote his own name or practice, Pinsky took the over-the-air title of Dr. Drew to separate his professional medical and radio careers.