John Mendelson

Dr. John Mendelson is a Board Certified Internist with over 30 years of research and practice in the field of addiction treatment. In addition to being Ria Health’s Founder and Chief Medical Officer, he currently serves as a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and maintains a private practice of his own.

Dr. Mendelson is committed to evidence-based treatment for addiction and has dedicated much of his career to researching new options and expanding access. He was Medical Director of the Drug Dependence Research Center at UCSF from 1991 to 2007, as well as Founder and Director of the Addiction and Pharmacology Research Laboratory at California Pacific Medical Center from 2004 to 2016. More recently, he has served as Senior Research Scientist at Friends Research Institute.

Through each of these research positions, Dr. Mendelson’s work has been widely published, and he has earned international recognition as an expert in his field.

In addition to his research work, Dr. Mendelson has a long-standing commitment to “boots on the ground” treatment and medical care. He has worked with patients in his private practice for several decades, and recently served as Medical Director of BAART (Bay Area Addiction Research and Treatment). In this capacity, he supervised 5 opioid treatment clinics in San Francisco, treating approximately 3,500 patients per day.

Dr. Mendelson has a deep empathy for people struggling with substance abuse. He founded Ria Health (formerly DxRx) in 2015 out of the strong conviction that patients should have access to safe, effective, and affordable treatment for alcohol use disorder. He believes that success can and should be measured by scientific data, and that tools such as medication and recovery coaching should be available to everyone who needs them.