Aletha Maybank to step down as AMA's chief health equity officer

Aletha Maybank, who became the American Medical Association’s first chief equity officer five and half years ago, is leaving the organization. 

Maybank, a widely respected health equity advocate, led the organization to reckon with its own racist past. The AMA excluded Black physicians from membership for more than a century and paid scant attention to racist practices of one of its own presidents, J. Marion Sims. In a 2021 report that Maybank oversaw, AMA admitted a long litany of troubling actions, including that Sims tested surgical procedures on Black women without anesthesia and that AMA policies wanted to ban “irregular-bred pretenders,” like Native American doctors, from practicing medicine. 

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