What official records list the current Physicians to the President and their dates of service?
Executive summary
Official, government-run compilations that chronicle who has served as Physician to the President and when are limited but do exist in fragmented form: the Military Health System’s timeline of White House physicians is the clearest “official” list cited in public sources, while historical and biographical compilations (including academic bibliographies and curated Wikipedia lists) fill gaps and provide names and dates drawn from archival announcements and media reports [1] [2] [3]. Reporting from professional organizations and trade press documents more recent appointments — for example, notices that Capt. Sean Barbabella, DO, was named Physician to the President in March 2025 — but those are organizational releases rather than a single, consolidated government roster [4] [5].
1. What counts as an “official” record and where it is kept
The most directly government-affiliated public record identified in the reporting is the Military Health System’s historical timeline of “White-House physicians,” which is hosted on the Department of Defense’s health site and explicitly catalogs doctors from the Military Health System who have served presidents, making it the closest thing in the available sources to an official roster [1]. Academic and medical-historical treatments — notably a biobibliography archived in PubMed Central — synthesize primary records, press accounts and archival documentation to produce authoritative lists of presidential physicians across eras, and those works are treated as secondary but scholarly sources for dates and names [2]. Wikipedia’s entries and category pages aggregate the same documents and media but are not primary government records; they do, however, point to specific appointment announcements or nominations in National Archives holdings when available [3] [6].
2. What those records actually list about current physicians and dates of service
The Military Health System timeline and multiple professional profiles confirm that Kevin O’Connor, DO, began serving as Physician to President Joe Biden on Inauguration Day in 2021 and was publicly described in profiles through 2024 as the White House physician responsible for the president and the White House Medical Unit [1] [7] [8]. Professional association and trade press notices report that as of March 7, 2025, Capt. Sean Barbabella, DO, was named Physician to the President for President Donald Trump, a fact announced by the American Osteopathic Association and summarized in Medical Economics, but those are organizational press releases rather than a centralized federal posting [4] [5]. These sources therefore allow reporting of at least the recent sequential occupants and start-dates (2021 for O’Connor; March 2025 for Barbabella) but do not, in the supplied materials, produce a single government PDF or database listing every occupant with uniformly formatted start and end dates [1] [4].
3. Gaps, inconsistencies and why they matter
Publicly accessible, government-hosted timelines — useful and authoritative for military physicians assigned to the White House — do not always align in real time with trade press and association announcements about specific appointees, and academic compilations are retrospective and may lag; Wikipedia ties threads together but carries the usual caveat about crowd-sourced currency [1] [2] [3]. That means for the “current” roster and exact end dates, journalists and researchers typically triangulate between a DOD timeline, White House announcements (not present in the supplied sources), and professional organization releases; the supplied corpus shows that triangulation but not an official, single-source list with up-to-the-minute status [1] [4] [5].
4. How to use these records responsibly and what to watch for
When citing who currently serves as Physician to the President and the precise dates of service, use the Military Health System timeline and peer-reviewed historical bibliographies as primary reference points for past and institutional assignments, but corroborate recent appointments with contemporaneous official announcements from the White House or DoD and with professional announcements (the osteopathic association and medical trade outlets supply timely notices) because organizational releases can precede or supplement federal postings [1] [4] [5]. Readers should also note that Wikipedia and media profiles are valuable aggregators but are secondary: they should be cross-checked against the Military Health System timeline and archival appointment records when an exact official date is required [3] [6] [2].