AMA Admits Decades of Discrimination Against Black Doctors (opinion)

Thursday, July 10, 2008 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: racial disparities, health news, Natural News

(NaturalNews) After more than a century of institutional discrimination against blacks in the medical profession, the American Medical Association has finally admitted its role in promoting such discrimination, issuing an apology for all the harm its racist policies have caused over the years. Unknown to most consumers, the American Medical Association barred physicians from becoming members of the AMA unless they were first accepted as members of local AMA chapters, yet many local AMA chapters had rules specifically barring membership of black doctors well into the 1960's.

That's right: Whether you could become a practicing member of the AMA depended largely on your skin color!

Even after the discriminatory rules were rewritten, many AMA chapters maintained a discriminatory stance against black physicians that effectively barred their participation in the white-dominated, "rich man's" system of conventional medicine that still stands today.

Today, the AMA issues a website statement that apologized, "for its past history of racial inequality toward African-American physicians." While this is clearly a step in the right direction, it does nothing to reestablish the careers and livelihoods of all the black physicians who were denied placement in "white man's medicine" simply because of their skin color.

You see, there's a dirty little secret about conventional medicine that even the AMA won't admit: Modern medicine remains racist right now. Look at who's in charge of the AMA, the drug companies and the FDA? Can you say, "Rich white guys?"

Look at who gets the high-end health care services (white women and men) and who gets stuck with the low-budget, overcrowded hospitals, emergency rooms and medical clinics? (Black women and men.) As Dr. Nedra Joyner, president of the National Medical Association (NMA) said yesterday, "These persistent, race-based health disparities have led to a precipitous decline in the health of African-Americans when compared to their white counterparts and the population as a whole."

So why isn't anybody taking any serious action towards ending racial disparities in medicine right? The AMA may be able to apologize for its one-hundred-year participation in blatant discrimination against black physicians, but it has barely taken the first step towards ending racial disparities in medicine today.

The AMA has a whole lot more to apologize for

But there's a lot more than just racism going on in the history of conventional medicine. I ask: When will the AMA apologize to all the other people it has harmed throughout American history?

• When will the AMA apologize for ongoing discrimination against black patients? Black men and women are suffering from extremely aggressive forms of prostate and breast cancers right now, and the AMA has still failed to educate black patients about the crucial role of sunlight and vitamin D in preventing such cancers. See https://www.naturalnews.com/rr-sunlight.html

• When will the AMA apologize for decades of attempts to destroy the competing practice of chiropractic medicine? What about the AMA's hundred-plus years of attacks on virtually every form of medicine it did not control or profit from?

• When will the AMA apologize to all the families of the victims of Big Tobacco companies for promoting cigarettes in its Journal of the American Medical Association, even long after evidence clearly linked cigarette smoking with cancer and heart disease? Read What the American Medical Association hopes you never learn about its true history at https://www.naturalnews.com/008845.html

• When will the AMA apologize to all the nutritional supplement companies whose vitamins have been discredited in JAMA using fraudulent science clearly designed to distort study results and discredit nutrients that compete with pharmaceuticals?

• When will the AMA apologize to Dr. Burzynski for its ravaging attacks on his antineoplastons cancer therapy which astonished conventional cancer researchers by reversing cancer in numerous patients? See http://www.burzynskiclinic.com

• When will the AMA apologize to Harry Hoxsey for attacking his character and attempting to outlaw his anti-cancer salves? Today, we know the ingredients in Hoxsey's salves are genuine anti-cancer medicines made by Mother Nature.

• When will the AMA apologize to all the people who have been killed by the dangerous pharmaceuticals that are regularly promoted in its journal? (JAMA looks more like a catalog of drug ads than a genuine science journal...)

• When will the AMA apologize to the homeopathic community for its vehement attacks against a system of medicine that conventional doctors make no attempt to even understand? Read How the American Medical Association Got Rich by Dana Ullman at https://www.naturalnews.com/023195.html

• When will the AMA apologize to the entire U.S. population for its utter failure to embrace the safer and far more effective natural therapies that make many pharmaceuticals truly obsolete? By refusing to recommend such natural therapies, the AMA has played a significant role in limiting the choice of health care consumers, forcing them to rely on highly profitable - yet highly dangerous - prescription drugs that just happen to enrich the corporations that provide most of the financial support for the AMA!

• When will the AMA apologize to all the tens of millions of Americans who have been killed by the very kind of drugs-and-surgery medicine pushed by the AMA, even when safer and far less expensive alternatives are readily available? The AMA has blood on its hands, and this goes way beyond racial discrimination. I believe the AMA's power-hungry policies on controlling medicine have resulted in actions that are best described as crimes against humanity.

And finally, in the most outrageous but true conclusion to all this, when will the AMA and conventional medicine ever learn that their drug-based medicine doesn't work, and that cancer, diabetes, heart disease, depression, Alzheimer's and other degenerative conditions can be cured with raw foods, medicinal herbs, sunlight, and exercise without using a single pharmaceutical or scalpel?

AMA's president has pancreatic cancer

Here's the real highlight of all this: AMA president Dr. Ron Davis found out just two weeks ago that he has stage-4 pancreatic cancer. This is the PRESIDENT of the AMA, folks! Stage-4 pancreatic cancer? At only 52 years of age? I think that just tells you everything you need to know about the utter lack of credibility at the AMA in matters of health.

Astonishingly, Dr. Davis is undergoing the very same toxic chemotherapy his association continues to recommend to patients, meaning he has about a 5% chance of survival. In public statements, he apparently considers that a good chance. I consider it to be complete idiocy, and as much as I would never wish for death or suffering of any human being, when this AMA president dies from chemotherapy, it will only be a karmic reflection of the very same suffering and death the AMA has unleashed upon countless millions.

In no way do I wish for Dr. Davis' death, but if he does not survive chemotherapy, I pray that the entire system of conventional medicine goes with him and we end the era of AMA influence on our world. It is a complete waste for a man of Dr. Davis' intellectual capacity to die at the age of 52, especially when there are known cures for his condition that do not require administering toxic poisons that more often kill the patient than the cancer.

If Dr. Davis does die, it will only be from a lack of education, not from a lack of available options. Of course, it is his own organization -- the AMA -- that has long sought to outlaw such options, and thus Dr. Davis no doubt will find it intellectually impossible to step outside the boundaries the AMA has so vigorously defined and seek natural therapies that could save his life.

Regardless of the outcome of Dr. Davis in particular, I believe it's time to look past useless chemicals, monopolistic market practices, toxic chemotherapy and Big Pharma corruption as we attempt to create a health care system that actually offers health, not disease management. If we hope to have any real solutions for national health care in our immediate future, we need to bury the AMA, prosecute the top officials at the FDA, and unleash a new era of nutrition, natural remedies and public education about how to prevent and reverse diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease and many others.

Because all these cures exist! I've revealed many of them right here on NaturalNews.com. The AMA, however, still insists there are no such cures. And thus even their own leaders die needlessly, suffering under a system of knowledge oppression and monopolistic market practices that is, in my view, directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people in the United States alone.

What's really clear in watching all this is that the AMA has no answers for health, no honesty for the public and it can't even keep its own leaders free from cancer. If it wasn't so damn tragic, it would be hilarious. But there's nothing funny about the scourge of bankruptcy, suffering and death that has followed in the wake of the AMA for well over a hundred years. I wish AMA president Dr. Ron Davis would seek out natural therapies and cure his pancreatic cancer, but apparently he's too "educated" for that. (I've watched many doctors die from their own ignorance and stubbornness. Dr. Davis will certainly not be the first...)

Remember, the AMA is the organization that future historians will one day see as leading the delusional era of toxic chemical medicine where doctors were nutritionally illiterate, drug companies practiced fraudulent science, and half the population was drugged up on medications that only destroyed their health. That the AMA has now seen fit to apologize to blacks for decades of discrimination barely scratches the surface of all the apologies this organization owes the world for its selfishness, greed, corruption and incessant disease mongering.

In the last hundred years, the AMA has proven itself to be a great disservice to humanity. We will all be better off when the organization is shut down and disbanded.