The nation’s largest doctors group apologizes for discrimination
The country’s largest medical association is about to apologize formally today for its historical hostility toward African American doctors, expressing regret for a litany of transgressions, including barring Black physicians from its ranks for decades and remaining silent during battles on landmark legislation to end racial discrimination, the Washington Post reports. In a commentary in the July 16 Journal of the American Medical Association, Ronald M. Davis, the organization’s immediate past president, noted that many of the organization’s questionable actions reflected the “social mores and racial discrimination” that existed for much of the country’s history. But, he wrote, that mores are no excuse for the organization’s actions. AMA officials would not tell the Post why it chose to make the apology or how it came about. It said that information would be released today. Otis W. Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society and a member of the National Medical Association, a predominantly Black medical association that was established in 1895 in response to the AMA policy allowing the exclusion of African American physicians, welcomed the apology. “Any sort of acknowledgment that Blacks were excluded is a positive step,” Brawley told the Post. “But I’m much more interested in the future than in the past. I would like to see a focus on getting quality care for all people.”

Drugging overweight young people is a bad idea
Vital Signs: The move by the FDA to suggest that doctors give children as young as 8-years-old statins, an adult anti-cholesterol drug, is a bad idea. Vital Signs tell tells you why.

Overweight men have lower sperm counts
Overweight men have lower sperm counts than normal-weight men, a group of researchers told a meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, on Wednesday. There is a very long list of health hazards from being overweight,” said Ghiyath Shayeb, the study’s lead researcher at the University of Aberdeen. “Now we can add poor semen quality to the list.”But experts aren’t sure if that necessarily means obese men face major difficulties having children.”If you have a man who isn’t fantastically fertile with a normal partner who is fertile, her fertility will compensate,” said Dr. William Ledger, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Britain’s University of Sheffield, who was unconnected to the study. But if both partners are heavy, Ledger said that could be a problem, since obesity is known to decrease women’s fertility. Shayeb and colleagues analyzed the sperm samples of more than 5,000 men in Scotland, and divided the men into groups according to their Body Mass Index. Men who had an optimal BMI (20 to 25) had higher levels of normal sperm than those who were overweight or obese. Fat men had a 60 percent higher chance of having a low volume of semen, according to Shayeb’s research. They also had a 40 percent higher chance of having some sperm abnormalities. Shayeb and colleagues found that underweight men were just as likely to have the same problems as obese men. “But there were not many underweight men in Scotland,” he noted