MINNEAPOLIS, July 11, 2008—The American Medical Association has formally apologized to black doctors for a history of racial discrimination.

The apology is the outcome of a report commissioned in 2005 to examine the history of what the AMA called "the racial divide in organized medicine." 

"The point of the apology is to acknowledge our policies and practices in the past that discriminated against African American physicians," Ronald Davis, M.D., the AMA's immediate past president, said.

The report of the AMA panel will be released next week on the website of the association's Institute for Ethics to coincide with publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 

AMA statement

Nelson Adams, M.D., president of the National Medical Association which represents black physicians in the United States, said the NMA was founded in 1895 because of the AMA's discrimination.

"Black doctors couldn't be members of the American Medical Association," Adams said in a written statement.

"AMA looked the other way when local medical associations worked to exclude most black physicians from becoming members. Back then and even as recently as the early '70s, in order to get hospital privileges, lots of times you had to be a member of the county medical society," Adams said.

"If you couldn't get on the county medical society, you couldn't get hospital privileges," he said. 

And the problem is not all in the past. There are fewer African American physicians per capita to date than there were in 1910, according to Adams.

The AMA promised it will work in future to increase the ranks of minority physicians and their participation in the association. 

Wall Street Journal news item