Dr. Hershfield received his Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1979. He completed his internship and residency in Family Medicine at the University of Maryland Hospital in 1982. He became certified by the American Board of Family Practice in 1982 and was recertified in 1989. He practiced emergency medicine from 1982 to 2007, becoming certified by the American Board of Emergency Medicine in 1988, and earning board recertification in 1998 and 2008. He was the Associate Director of the Wheeling Hospital (WV) Emergency Department for 18 years. During that time he was also the team physician for Wheeling’s professional ice hockey team, the single A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Penguins. From 2007 to 2012 he worked as a cruise ship physician in Hawaii. He moved to Florida in 2012 where he initially practiced urgent care medicine full-time, and medical pain management part-time. When he saw the benefit that medical cannabis provided to very close relatives, he learned all that he could about it, and opened a solo medical cannabis practice in Cape Coral in 2019 where he has practiced exclusively since 2020.

Since 2021 he has been active in the Florida Medical Cannabis Physicians Group (FMCPG). The FMCPG consists of physicians from throughout the state who have unrelated medical practices, but who share the core values of practicing the best possible cannabinoid medicine and of educating their patients, and also share the mission of trying to improve the medical cannabis climate in Florida through legislative and administrative advocacy. Serving as the unofficial scribe of the group, he has helped put the group’s recommendations and educational material into documents such as those which were included in a Legislative Packet that was widely distributed to members of the Florida Senate and House of Representatives, and also drafted amendments for the sponsors of medical cannabis-related bills. With other members of the FMCPG, he has travelled to Tallahassee to meet with legislators and to speak at committees which were considering medical cannabis legislation. The FMCPG invites and encourages all medical cannabis physicians in the state to participate in its meetings which are conducted through Zoom, to learn about and to help influence issues that affect Florida’s medical cannabis physicians and their patients, as well as to share best cannabinoid medicine practices