An Interview with AAIP President Dr. Jim Thompson

TC: Dr. Thompson, in reviewing your impressive resume, you appear to be a pioneer in terms of attaining as much as you have attained at a time when Native Americans may not have been encouraged to go to college or to medical school. Do you think that is true?

JT: It is true, but who really went through that is my father. He was a biologist and taught biology in college and had a master’s degree. He was the first person in his family to go to college. In fact, his father greatly discouraged him from doing that, but he perservered. I know he always wanted to be a doctor, but I think he did feel that the cards were stacked against him because he was Indian. So he was very supportive when I said I was interested in doing that, and I was fortunate enough to be able to get into medical school when there really were no programs – if there were I didn’t know about them -- specifically for Indian people to move into medicine.

TC: How much do you think the outlook improved since then?

JT: In 1971 I believe, there were only about 50 Indian physicians at the time. Less than 20 of them got together in Oklahoma City and formed the Association of American Indian Physicians. I was not one of those; I joined a couple of years later. But since that time, the association and others have worked very hard to bring Indian kids into health care professions, medicine certainly being one of those. At present, I suspect there are somewhere on the order of between 500 and 1,000 Indian physicians in the country.

TC: How many of those are members of AAIP?

JT: It kind of waxes and wanes. I’m going to say about 350.

TC: Does AAIP have programs that help steer Indians into medical school?

JT: AAIP has done some wonderful things to recruit kids into the health care professions. Specifically, in medicine we have what we call the pre-admissions workshops. We’ve had those for a number of years, where we bring Indian kids in who want to apply to medical schools and just put them through the whole gamut of filling out an application, going to an interview and giving them feedback and generally trying to be a resource to them so they can have the best chance of getting into schools, and that has been successful. We've had them in Minnesota, Arizona, New Mexico, New York and Oklahoma, and we’re continuing to plan even more workshops. In fact, we have a separate medical student organization called ANAMS, the Association of Native American Medical Students. It’s a different organization but it's closely tied to AAIP.