10 Things You Didn't Know About Regina Benjamin
President Obama nominated Benjamin to be surgeon general
1. Regina Benjamin was born in 1956 in Mobile, Ala., and raised in Daphne, where her divorced mother worked as a waitress.
2. Benjamin cites her "strong-willed and very compassionate" grandmother, who died when she was 9, as her mentor.
3. Her family has had a history of illnesses. Her father died of diabetes and hypertension, her only brother of an HIV-related illness, and her mother of lung cancer.
4. Benjamin served as a student intern-trainee for the Central Intelligence Agency while completing her undergraduate degree in chemistry from Xavier University in New Orleans. She graduated in 1979.
5. In 1990, she founded the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic, which serves the poor in a fishing community on the Gulf Coast of Alabama. About 80 percent of Benjamin's patients live below the poverty level.
6. She helped rebuild her clinic twice, after Hurricane Georges in 1998 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. During those times, she made house calls to her patients in her 1988 Ford pickup.
7. Benjamin never thought about becoming a doctor until she entered college. Before that, she said, she had never seen a black doctor.
8. In 1995, she became the youngest doctor and first African-American woman to be elected to the American Medical Association Board of Trustees.
9. In 2002, Benjamin became head of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama, making her the first African-American female president of a state medical society in the United States.
10. Last year, she received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," a $500,000 fellowship.
- See who is in Obama's inner circle.
Sources:
U.S. National Library of Medicine
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Encyclopedia of Alabama
CNN
Reader Comments
A phony resume
Dr. Benjamin has used our community of Bayou La Batre to promote her phony career for the last decade or more. I have documented one of the time periods that she has received world wide acclaim for being the single provider of health care for our citizens, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which struck BLB on August 29, 2005. As you can see from my daily log in my FACT SHEET, Dr. Benjamin was not present in her clinic for 90% of the time from Nov, 2005 thru Jan, 2007. This was the same pattern during the period Sep and Oct, 2005, but I did not realize that it would continue for another year and a half that I maintained a daily written log of her presences.
As a retired United States Regular Army Officer, I am astonished that something like this could lead to her appointment as the future Surgeon General. My life has been saved twice by honorable Medical Doctors and Dr. Benjamin is not in their class. I urge you and other members of the HELP Committee to do what you can to expose this fraud and stop her nomination to the position of our country's top doctor, the Surgeon General of the United States.
Sincerely yours,
LTC (ret) United States Army
Congratulations, Dr. Benjamin
I want to compliment Dr. Benjamin on this accomplishment. I saw a documentary about her a long time ago, and I came to the conclusion that she is a doctor because she loves mankind. Let's ignore all these ridiculous comments because there are so many people out there who would not know what the word "love" means if it lit on their foreheads. Congratulations, Dr. Benjamin! I am behind you all the way!!!
Doctors
Doctors
Yes all you Doctors are GODS (in your own minds, delusional). A fats a$$ is a fat A$$. And it IS a symptom of MENTAL SICKNESS!
(correct typo)
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