Raul M. Cruz MD

Dr. Cruz is a native Texan and third generation Mexican-American and earned his medical degree from Southwestern Medical School. After General Surgery Internship at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, he then completed his Head & Neck Surgery training at the University of Virginia Medical Center. He has been with The Permanente Medical Group as an otolaryngologist at the Oakland Medical Center since 1987. Since 2001, he has served as the Program Director for the Head & Neck Residency Training Program. This is one of the very few non-university based programs that are training young doctors in the head and neck surgical specialty based on the strength of the clinical experience in the Kaiser system.

Dr. Cruz has published more than 27 scientific articles in the medical literature and delivered more than 90 medical topic lectures. Clinically, he has an interest in revision sinus surgery, cochlear implantation, laryngology, and international medicine. For more than a decade he has served as the Organizing Chairman of the Bay Area Residents’ Research Symposium. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Tumor Institute.

He is on the Board of Directors and team leader for Hospital de la Familia (volunteer organization providing medical care in Western Guatemala). Dr. Cruz also belongs to a team providing medical mission care to the Philippines. He is a surgeon and on the Advisory Board for Operation Access (a nonprofit organization offering free ambulatory surgical services to the working poor in the Bay Area) and currently serving as the President of a regional medical society, the Pacific Coast Oto-Ophthalmological Society. For a number of years, he has been active as a journal review editor for Laryngoscope and Otolaryngology- Head and Neck Surgery.