AMA Apologizes to Black Doctors for Past Racism

Yet another apology

Transplant surgeon Clive Callender has hurtful memories of being the only black doctor at medical meetings in the 1970s, met with stark silence when he pleaded for better access to transplant organs for blacks.**

In statement on its Web site, the AMA apologized “for its past history of racial inequality toward African-American physicians, and shares its current efforts to increase the ranks of minority physicians and their participation in the AMA.”

The apology is among initiatives at the nation’s largest doctors’ group to reduce racial disparities in medicine and to recruit more blacks to become doctors and to join the AMA.

AMA data suggest fewer than 2 percent of its members are black, and that fewer than 3 percent of the nation’s 1 million medical students and physicians are black.

Source

**Which is to say blacks as a whole, especially doctors, recognize and articulate race realism…a position EAU agrees with. — Ed.

2008-07-10