Sean Bourke, MD

About Dr. Bourke

From the emergency room to the long game.

Sean Bourke studied history at Yale College. Time spent working at Mother Teresa's Home for the Destitute and the Dying in India helped turn him toward medicine, and he went on to the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California on an Air Force scholarship, graduating With Highest Distinction and as a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. He trained in emergency medicine at Stanford, in the residency class of 2000, where he met Dr. Conrad Lai, the physician with whom he would found JumpstartMD.

His Air Force service was in emergency medicine: Medical Director of emergency medicine at David Grant Medical Center, Travis Air Force Base, and Assistant Research Director of emergency medicine at Wilford Hall Medical Center, Lackland Air Force Base, with two tours in the Middle East.

In 2007 he and Dr. Lai founded JumpstartMD. As emergency physicians they had spent years treating the complications of excess weight and metabolic disease; they wanted a setting where the causes could be addressed over time, visit after visit, rather than in a single acute encounter. The practice has grown to 14 California clinics, from the Bay Area and Monterey Bay to Irvine, with the same care available online across the state.

His clinical philosophy has a consistent thread: food quality and individualized care first, with medication inside an ongoing clinical relationship rather than in place of one. He wrote about rethinking dietary fat for San Francisco Medicine in 2014; more recently he has spoken publicly about why skipping meals backfires, about protecting muscle during medication-assisted weight loss, and about how sleep and stress bear on weight.

He was first author of a 2020 study in the Journal of Obesity examining 22,407 adults treated in the program between 2007 and 2017: the 8,514 who stayed twelve months had lost a mean 12.0% of their starting weight (with every enrolled member carried forward, 8.4%). Separately, a 2026 retrospective look at JumpstartMD's own records, which he reviewed, found that among the 2,062 members who returned for a two-year measurement, 79.5% were at least 5% below their starting weight; that does not establish uninterrupted maintenance. Read the two-year results ›

Among JumpstartMD patients with a qualifying 24-month measurement (N 2,062). Retrospective EHR data, Sep 2018–Aug 2026. Patients with follow-up may differ from those without follow-up; the result does not establish uninterrupted maintenance. The 2020 figures are a completers analysis of self-paying adults. Individual results vary.

Care at JumpstartMD is delivered by its medical team of physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, led by Dr. Bourke as Chief Medical Officer. Meet the team ›