Health Professionals Aim to Increase Minority Doctors

HOUSTON - More than 50 doctors and medical students visited Jack Yates High School in southeast Houston Thursday... hoping to interest African American students in pursuing careers in medicine.

The event was sponsored by the American Medical Association.

Dr. James Rohack, president of the AMA, says only two per cent of the doctors in the United States are African-American.

The doctors spoke at an assembly, then visited many individual classrooms.

Rohack says African American students have few medical role models to guide them.

"For many minority students, they haven't seen a physican that looks like them, that cares for them," Rohack says.