Stephanie Cheng, MD

Stephanie Cheng, MD, DABMA, FAAMA completed her Anesthesiology Residency at Yale and her Regional Anesthesia and Acute Pain Management fellowship at HSS. She is a Diplomat of the American Board of Anesthesiology (board certified anesthesiologist) as well as a Diplomat of the American Board of Medical Acupuncture (board certified medical acupuncturist). In addition to her regional anesthesiology practice, she serves as the Director of the Perioperative Integrative Medicine program at HSS where she has been successful in integrating medical acupuncture as part of a multimodal approach to post-operative pain control and overall recovery.

Dr. Cheng’s primary research and clinical interest is the perioperative optimization of patients undergoing orthopedic surgery and the integration of non-pharmacologic/novel modalities to improve perioperative outcomes. She has published and won national competitions for her work in acupuncture research. In 2021 she received 1st place award for the Academy of Medical Acupuncture National Meeting’s Research competition. She speaks nationally on her work of utilizing acupuncture in the perioperative period to enhance patient recovery and pain control and she routinely holds workshops to train the next generation of medical acupuncturists.

She was named Fellow of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture in 2022 and has been profiled by Health.com where her work in utilization of perioperative acupuncture won HSS the Innovative Hospital Award for 2023. She also won the 2023 Rosalind Franklin Society/Mary Ann Liebert Award in Science for the best paper by a woman in science or under-represented minority in each of the publisher’s 100 peer-reviewed science, medicine, and biotechnology journals.

In addition to her research, she was awarded Teacher of the Year by the residents for 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023 and previously served as the Residency Program Site Director at HSS where she worked closely with residents and fellows from institutions throughout the country to teach regional anesthesia and acupuncture skills. She is the creator of the CHENG Protocol Certificate which is a CME-accredited workshop dedicated to teaching medical professionals an electroauricular acupuncture protocol utilizing research-proven acupuncture points in the ear for post operative pain control.

Medical Acupuncture