A cancer diagnosis rearranges a person’s relationship with their own body. It changes how a shoulder lifts a grocery bag, how a jaw opens wide enough for a bite of toast, how a leg trusts the floor beneath it again after months of treatment. Rebuilding that trust, one function at a time, is the quiet, unglamorous work of physiatry, and it is the work that has come to define the career of Dr. Obada Obaisi.
Today, Dr. Obaisi combines clinical leadership with medical education, serving as Director of Education for the RUSH Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Residency Program, Medical Director of Cancer Rehabilitation at RUSH MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Assistant Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at RUSH University Medical Center.
From Kansas City to Houston
Dr. Obaisi’s training reads like a map of deliberate stops, each one adding a layer of expertise. He earned a combined BA/MD degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, a six-year program that fuses undergraduate and medical education for students who already know where they are headed. From there, he completed an Internal Medicine internship at the University of Missouri-Kansas City from July 2017 to June 2018, before moving to Chicago to begin his formal training in physical medicine and rehabilitation.
At RUSH University Medical Center, he spent three years as a resident physician in PM&R, from July 2018 through June 2021, serving as Chief Resident during 2020–2021. It was, in effect, an early audition for the leadership roles that would follow. He then travelled south to Houston, Texas, for a year-long fellowship in Cancer Rehabilitation at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, from July 2021 to June 2022, training at one of the institutions most closely associated with cancer care anywhere in the world.
That fellowship left its mark. Dr. Obaisi now holds certification from the American Board of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine, and he is a Certified Lymphedema Therapist with LANA certification, a credential that speaks directly to the swelling, pain, and restricted movement that can accompany lymphatic dysfunction in cancer patients and survivors.
Building From the Ground Up
After completing his fellowship in 2022, Dr. Obaisi returned to RUSH, this time not as a trainee but as a physician and assistant professor, where he developed and now leads the comprehensive Cancer Rehabilitation Program at RUSH MD Anderson Cancer Center, essentially building a clinical service from its foundations rather than inheriting one already in motion.
The program has continued to expand under his direction. His clinical scope includes trismus, post-mastectomy pain, radiation fibrosis, neuropathy, deconditioning, gait and balance impairments, cancer-related fatigue, and persistent swelling, including lymphedema.
His work in lymphatic care has also developed into a screening initiative at RUSH MD Anderson. The program uses bioimpedance spectroscopy to identify early lymphatic changes before visible lymphedema develops, allowing intervention sooner.
Teaching the Next Generation
Perhaps the most telling line in Dr. Obaisi’s work is the one that arrived with his growing educational responsibilities. In his educational role, he helps shape the residency experience for physicians preparing to specialize in physical medicine and rehabilitation. It is a natural extension of a path that began with his own chief residency, and it signals something particular about how he views his specialty: not simply as a set of procedures to be performed, but as a discipline to be taught, refined, and passed forward.
His academic appointment reflects that same duality. As an Assistant Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, he works within a specialty that connects cancer treatment with the daily, physical work of recovery. His clinical and academic work includes teaching residents and developing focused cancer-rehabilitation education, helping make rehabilitation a more visible part of comprehensive cancer care.
Recognition and the Road Ahead
Dr. Obaisi is also an invited national speaker on cancer rehabilitation and lifestyle medicine, and he has contributed peer-reviewed research and book chapters in these areas, work that extends his influence well beyond Chicago’s hospital corridors. His contributions have not gone unnoticed. His work has also earned professional recognition, including a Castle Connolly Rising Star distinction and the RUSH PM&R Residency Program’s Educator of the Year Award. In 2026, he was also recognized as an AAPM&R Innovators and Influencers National Honoree.
For him, cancer care is not a problem that ends when treatment does. His career, from Chief Resident to fellow at MD Anderson to program builder and educator, traces that philosophy. He did not simply join a cancer rehabilitation program. He developed one, expanded its focus to address lymphatic and survivorship needs, and continues to prepare the next generation of specialists to see recovery as an essential part of cancer care.
