Wokeness in medicine will have ended when its explicit gestures and its implicit values and assumptions disappear. A high-level speech at the AMA’s 2026 Annual Meeting of the House of Delegates reveals how far we are from that goal.
The address in question, by incoming AMA president Willie Underwood III, MD, was at times inspiring. Recalling a defining childhood encounter, Underwood evoked a scene half a century old in which an aunt set him on the path of achievement.
“Willie,” Underwood remembered his aunt saying, “we need a doctor and a lawyer in the family. Your cousin is going to be the lawyer. What does that make you?”
One would need a heart of stone to be unmoved by this optimism and ambition. Yet that is, in part, why other elements of Underwood’s speech were so disappointing.
Looking behind him toward a row of past AMA presidents, Underwood declared that “[t]hey represent historic firsts for the AMA, across race, orientation and gender.”
“Their leadership,” Underwood continued, “represents … the responsibility of this profession.”
This is discouraging thinking. The men and women whom Underwood named — Nancy Dickey, Robert Wah, Patrice Harris, Jesse Ehrenfeld, and Bobby Mukkamala — are exceptionally accomplished individuals, whatever one thinks of their politics. To note only their “race, orientation and gender,” as Underwood did, is to celebrate identity rather than achievement.
Such an ideology has no place in a field where merit must reign.
Neither, for that matter, do Underwood’s recourses to woke clichés:
“[T]he cracks in our health system are … structural failures affecting lives every single day.”
“[O]utcomes are determined more by ZIP code than diagnosis.”
“These are lived realities that I understand as a physician and as a patient.”
“That is why conversations about health equity matter.”
None of these remarks is likely to compromise patient care. But they nevertheless represent a way of thinking that is political and ideological.
Allowed to become habits of mind, these assumptions compromise the institutional integrity of the AMA and its commitment to the “science of medicine.”
Here, in a nutshell, is why the intrusion of leftist political thought into medicine matters. Physicians ought to treat patients as unique individuals rather than representatives of identity groups, pursue objective scientific truth without deference to political narratives, and defend the profession’s commitment to merit, evidence, and excellence against ideological capture.
Doing otherwise jeopardizes patient confidence in the profession. As outgoing AMA president Bobby Mukkamala rightly noted in his own address, “When trust is weakened, every diagnosis becomes harder, every treatment more difficult, and every patient is put at greater risk.”
This is all the more reason to reject the politicization of medicine and recommit the profession to the pursuit of truth over political narratives.
The relationship between Americans and the medical establishment will fully heal only when physicians with public platforms cease to pepper their speech with woke platitudes and presumptions. That hasn’t yet happened.
Trust your doctor? We’d like to. But we’re going to need some help.
