I'm Tabassum Nafsi. I practice medicine one person at a time.

I trained on three continents: medical school and transplant medicine in Karachi, emergency medicine in the United Kingdom, internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and a pulmonary and critical care fellowship at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. I have directed pulmonary rehabilitation, read sleep studies, and sat with women whose symptoms had been dismissed for years. That range is the point. Breathing, sleep, metabolism and hormones affect each other, and I treat the whole picture rather than one symptom at a time.

I founded Rockford Pulmonary Clinic so that people with lung and sleep conditions could get unhurried, expert care close to home, and The Nafsi Institute because too many women were being told their symptoms were just stress, when they were standing at the start of a new chapter that deserved real medicine. Rockford Research Institute, my clinical research center, keeps both practices close to the evidence.

Training and career

Every stop taught me something I still use at the bedside.

1996 to 2004 · KarachiMedical school and first yearsMBBS at Baqai Medical and Dental College, with a Dean's Commendation in Anatomy and a Distinction in Obstetrics and Gynecology. House officer at Liaquat National and Abbasi Shaheed Hospitals, then transplant medicine. Where I learned to listen before I examine.

2005 to 2007 · United KingdomEmergency medicineEmergency medicine residency at Peterborough District Hospital. My audit of early deaths after emergency admission won the national award for best clinical audit presentation and was published in the Emergency Medicine Journal. Where I learned that speed and accuracy are not opposites.

2007 to 2010 · PhiladelphiaUniversity of PennsylvaniaInternal medicine residency in the University of Pennsylvania Health System, with research on exercise echocardiography and pulmonary hypertension presented at Chest, and a quality project on antibiotics in sepsis presented at the American Thoracic Society. Where I learned to measure.

2010 to 2013 · ChicagoCook County HospitalFellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at John H. Stroger Hospital of Cook County, one of the busiest public hospitals in the country, and research on pulmonary rehabilitation in sarcoidosis. Where I learned that the sickest patients deserve the calmest doctor.

2013 to today · IllinoisDirector, founder, physicianYears at UW Health as Director of Pulmonary Rehabilitation and physician lead for the COVID ICU, then Rockford Pulmonary Clinic, The Nafsi Institute and Rockford Research Institute. Attending physician at Beloit Health System. Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians and a Menopause Practitioner.

Board certifications and publicationsA complete list of board certifications, publications, procedures and professional memberships.View credentials →