Like most doctors who have been in the field for more than a decade, Dr. Ariel Malamud has a busy schedule. Aside from owning his own private practice in Los Angeles, California, Dr. Malamud is an active practitioner at a local community teaching hospital called White Memorial Medical Center (WMMC). About once a week, he also attends to patients at Atlantic Surgical Center in Monterey Park. He said that he prefers to work in at WMMC, a relatively new hospital where he is allowed the chance to teach eager students and work with a highly dynamic faculty.

Dr. Malamud arrived in California in 2001 from Baltimore, Maryland, where he earned a medical degree at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine, and received extra training through a Gastroenterology Fellowship program to practice difficult biliary and pancreatic endoscopy procedures, such as endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP). He completed Internship and Residency work at the Albert Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and also studied medicine in Madrid, Spain for some time at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Medicina. Dr. Malamud is certified by the Board to practice Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology, although the latter has been his main area of focus for some time now.

“I really like [performing biliary and pancreatic endoscopy] because you see the turnaround of patients very quickly. Usually, the patients are very sick, but the procedures are minimally invasive and they can literally walk out of the door feeling better,” said Malamud, specifically about patients seeking medical treatment of gallstones causing obstruction. “You see the results. [Being a GI doctor] is a very rewarding profession.”

Approximately once every year, Dr. Malamud presents medical articles—which he usually co-authors with his colleagues at the teaching hospital, gastroenterology researchers from UCLA or medical students from Loma Linda—at national conferences held by the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) and the American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE).

“We’re a community hospital, so [the papers] are nothing ground-breaking, but there have been some on innovations and techniques of colonoscopy and on quality assurance of medical care—all topics that are down-to-earth and necessary for us,” said Malamud, who has been an active member of these associations for several years.

When he isn’t seeing patients in the office, Dr. Malamud likes spending his time outdoors. “There’s a group of doctors in the hospital who are hike-enthusiasts. Our last trip together was to Mount Whitney.”