Dr. Rahul Parikh is a pediatrician in the San Francisco Bay Area.  From 200-09 he wrote the Vital Signs column for Salon and then the PopRx column, which focused on medicine at the intersection of popular culture.  

Dr. Parikh grew up near Los Angeles.  He went to college to at UC Berkeley and attended the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.  He received his pediatric training at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.