I remember the early days, right before the explosion, when the streets of New York were littered with black and brown men (and some women) covered with the lesions of HIV. It didn't matter if they were gay or heroin addicts, they were almost invariably poor and homeless.

Then the epidemic struck the middle class gay men and all of a sudden the face of AIDS changed drastically and so it's activism which has turned the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender community an advocacy and political force to reckon with in our country. Numerous organizations were created, including AMfar, and a huge push for medical research and pharmaceutical development happened all throughout the 1990s.

The strategy has paid off.

Although 50% of all HIV patients are composed by mostly white, gay men, they're survival rate is the highest when compared to Latinos and African Americans. A lot of that is due to the critically important activism by organizations Gay Men's Task Force.

Yet the truth also is tainted by the stain of prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities by the country's medical establishment. In our country many medical practices and pharmaceutical R&D projects have been focused on serving mostly middle class and "white" patients; considering race and ethnicity as "deviations" from the norm. It's why, for example, AIDS prevention and therapy policies have failed miserably among the fastest victims of the disease, black and brown women and children.

Yet, just to be clear, medical prejudice is not just an issue with AIDS. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer, the list of ailments that affect black and brown racial and ethnic minorities harder than whites in this country, continues to grow. They grow in part due to medical culture that discriminated against blacks and other colored professionals.

For example, up until the 1990s, many hospitals wouldn't hire any doctors that were not members of the American Medical Association. And yet, many chapters would not so much bar their entrance as such much as put barriers to entry that would either make it easy for them to reject minority doctors or discourage them from applying for membership.

It's for these shamefully racist and bigoted practices that the American Medical Association officially apologized for this week:

AMA apologizes for history of racial inequality and works to include and promote minority physicians

The American Medical Association (AMA) today apologizes 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. In 2005, the AMA convened and supported an independent panel of experts to study the history of the racial divide in organized medicine, and the culmination of this work prompted the apology. Details of the panel's work will be made public next week on the Web site of the AMA's Institute for Ethics to coincide with publication in a scientific journal.

"The AMA is proud to support research about the history of the racial divide in organized medicine because by confronting the past we can embrace the future," said AMA Immediate-Past President Ronald M. Davis, M.D. "The AMA is committed to improving its relationship with minority physicians and to increasing the ranks of minority physicians so that the workforce accurately represents the diversity of America's patients."

What is great about this very public apology is that it's a formality that comes 5 years after the organization formally started to really work towards changing it's practices. Since 2003 the AMA, along with the National Medical Association and the National Hispanic Medical Association has been working on the Commission to End Health Care Disparities. The Commission, coming into its 4th year of work, has been actively working to create guidelines for more inclusive medical policies as well as encourage new forms of scientific research that would take into consideration the demographic diversity of our country.

So hoorah for the AMA. It's such a rare thing for a US organization to acknowledge their past mistakes. It's truly a refreshing sight to these jaundiced by cynicism.

Now go read the whole statement by the AMA.