About Thomas J. Sims
Thomas J. Sims, MD is a physician, writer, and actor who studied zoology and creative writing at UCLA before attending medical school at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. After leaving Alaska, he and his family moved to a small Oregon town where Tom practiced Family Medicine for twenty-five years before retiring to become a full-time writer. To read more about Tom, his life, and his career, please scroll down.
Dr. Thomas J. Sims was born and raised outside of Los Angeles, California. He met his future wife, Pat, at UCLA, where they both received degrees in Zoology. They married after Tom’s first year of medical school at Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska, where Tom received his MD degree.
Tom began his medical career as a Board-Certified Family Physician in Oregon after leaving the wilds of the Alaskan Arctic, where he, Pat, and their two children spent two life-changing years during the time Tom worked as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service as a frontier doctor in and around the city of Nome.
Working as a ‘bush doctor’ was an adventure that changed their lives, as chronicled in Tom’s exciting award-winning Amazon #1 Bestselling memoir “On Call in the Arctic: A Doctor’s Pursuit of Life, Love and Miracles in the Alaskan Frontier”.
Following discharge from the service, Tom began his private medical career in remote Oregon. He worked there until retirement so he could write full-time.
During the two and a half decades Tom worked as a family doctor, he and Pat participated in over fifteen first-rate theatrical productions as actors. Their combined performing credits included starring roles in such classic productions as “The King and I,” “Agatha Christi’s Ten Little Indians,” “Oliver,” “Up the Down Staircase,” “Dial M for Murder” and “Annie Get Your Gun.”
Tom didn’t slow down his acting career following retirement. Since then, he has played leading theatrical roles in both Palm Springs, California and Bend, Oregon. In Palm Springs, for his dual role in “Neil Simon’s California Suite,” he was nominated by The Desert Theatre League for an award as “Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy.” Since then, he was featured in a nationally broadcast Public Service Announcement, he starred in the famous play “Sordid Lives” and he played a part in the major Hollywood film “Next” starring Nicholas Cage and Julianne Moore. As an Executive Producer, Tom worked on two Independent Films – “Gunnar” and “Defiant”.
Tom still remains active in medicine even though he no longer practices full-time. For several years he worked evaluating patients applying for a medical marijuana card in the state of Oregon and, in that capacity, certified, educated, and successfully managed medical cannabis use in over 6,000 people.
It is his personal experience working with a large population of cannabis users, combined with his training and education on the use of cannabis as medicine, that led Tom to create his book, the “Medical Marijuana Workbook” and his presentation by the same name, as a way for his expertise and knowledge to be available to the general public.
Tom and Pat live in Tucson, Arizona, with a devilish little red Shih-Tzu boy named Lucifer and two fiendishly cute Halloween cats, Mr. Mistoffelees and Mazikeen.
Tom is currently working on a novel titled “Margin of Error.”