Physicians' group apologizes to black doctors

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The American Medical Association, the largest physicians' group in the United States, apologized to black doctors on Thursday for a history of racial discrimination.

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

The apology arose from the work of an independent panel of experts commissioned in 2005 to study 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," Dr. Ronald Davis, the AMA's immediate past president, said in a telephone interview.

Details of the AMA panel's work will be released next week on the Web site of the association's Institute for Ethics to coincide with publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. Nelson Adams, 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 telephone interview.

"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.