AMA President-elect Bobby Mukkamala, MD, has served as president of his state and county medical societies. He has chaired the AMA Substance Use and Pain Care Task Force and the AMA Council on Science and Public Health. But he thinks his recent experience as a patient with a major illness is what has most prepared him to lead the nation’s largest and oldest physician organization.
“This sort of experience—after 25 years of being a doctor—being knee-deep as a patient on death's door, … helps me understand what my patients go through,” Dr. Mukkamala, an otolaryngologist in Flint, Michigan, said during a recent episode of “AMA Update.”
This past December, on Friday the 13th, Dr. Mukkamala had surgery to remove an 8-centimeter tumor from the left side of his brain. The location required him to remain conscious during the procedure so he could answer language-processing questions as the surgeon worked on his brain.
“It was an amazing opportunity to ... have the tumor removed in what's called an ‘awake craniotomy,’ where they're talking to you,” Dr. Mukkamala explained. “They're making sure they're not hitting any sort of important nerves while they're taking out as much as they can. And they got 90% of it out.”
Dr. Mukkamala was out of the hospital in just five days and headed home accompanied by his family, including his wife, parents, twin sons and his sister.
“So surgery is on Friday, I leave the hospital on Tuesday, and we go spend the night in the Airbnb that we rented,” he recalled. “Then we fly home on Wednesday—so less than a week after this big brain operation, I'm on an airplane.”
But then time dragged on as he waited for the pathology report. Fortunately, the wait ended with good news.
“There was a wait for the pathology that took a few weeks, and then the final pathology came back as a Grade 2 astrocytoma,” Dr. Mukkamala said.
“Given the spectrum of a 10-month survival, if it was Grade 4, or a 10-year survival if it's Grade 2, I'm happy to say that it's a Grade 2,” he explained. For that grade, he noted, “the average survival is about 10 years.”
His family served as his care team during his recovery.
“It was a rough first couple of weeks with swelling and not being able to sleep,” Dr. Mukkamala recalled.
“The kids and my wife and my mom and dad took care of me,” he added. “It was an amazing experience in that sense.”
Learning from experience
Dr. Mukkamala said his experience as a patient will help him create a better experience for his patients, especially when it comes to delivering bad news such as a diagnosis of cancer.
“It made me feel guilty a little bit,” he said, adding that, unless physicians have been in the position of being a patient, “there are some things that we just don't realize.”
“It never occurred to me the consequences of them being there by themselves versus being in a room like I was ... with my wife, my kids, my mom and my dad all hearing this,” Dr. Mukkamala said.
First, a patient gets the shock when hearing the diagnosis, and then they are numbed by the details of their condition and overwhelmed by the options they are given on what to do next: Radiation? Chemotherapy? Surgery?
All of these hard facts follow a heavy emotional experience.
“For a person to be the one who has to figure out all that stuff and navigate it, that's not something that we should expect,” Dr. Mukkamala said.
“Now with telemedicine, when I'm having that conversation with patients, and they can get their family on the phone—whether they live in California or New York or right here in Michigan, but busy during the day, they can get them on the phone,” he said.
“It's just something that never occurred to me before,” Dr. Mukkamala added. “And it's so simple just to make my patient's life a little bit easier to navigate a terrible diagnosis.”
The prior authorization process can be acutely frustrating and is a leading cause of burnout for physicians. Now Dr. Mukkamala has a better understanding of how crushing the experience can be for patients.
Dr. Mukkamala can only receive a 10-day supply of the medication he has been prescribed to keep his cancer from returning.
Before a recent trip to Uruguay where he represented the AMA at a World Medical Association event, Dr. Mukkamala attempted to obtain enough medication to last beyond 10 days. He even enlisted his physician wife—Nita Kulkarni, MD, with whom he shares an office—to also try to persuade his insurance plan to grant him a larger supply.
“I remember her sitting in the kitchen in tears trying to get this shipment of an extra few days just to get through this little bump in the road,” Dr. Mukkamala said. “This is the president-elect of the American Medical Association and a wife who is an ob-gyn, and we still couldn't do it.”
It was a stark reminder that the nation has as a health care system “that could be better,” Dr. Mukkamala said, noting that, if two physicians with 25 years’ experience were stymied by prior authorization, what hope do patients have?
“Yet, that's what everybody has to navigate, and that's not right,” he said.
The AMA is fighting to fix prior authorization by challenging insurance companies to eliminate care delays, patient harms and practice hassles.
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Role requires public speaking
Dr. Mukkamala’s condition first came to light as he was giving a presentation to the AMA Minority Affairs Section during the 2024 AMA Interim Meeting this past November in Florida.
“I had what they call an ‘expressive aphasia,’ where the words I was saying weren’t making any sense,” he recalled. “At the end, all of a sudden, my phone's blowing up, and people are saying: Hey, I think you had a stroke. You better go get checked out.”
While he did not have a stroke, a magnetic resonance imaging scan revealed the tumor in his temporal lobe.
In January, just three weeks after his brain surgery, Dr. Mukkamala had his first test for whether he could continue in a public speaking role at the 2025 AMA State Advocacy Summit in California.
After the diagnosis, there were questions about whether he would be able to perform well on stage at the conference.
Dr. Mukkamala joked that he knew that the AMA event would provide a friendly audience so, if he bombed, “they would forgive me.”
It took him two rehearsals, but he was able to get through the assignment.
“It's a pleasure to be here,” Dr. Mukkamala told the audience. “Six weeks ago, as my life ran into the challenge of brain cancer, I had no idea that I would be able to continue to participate in our collective work, but here I am.”
The audience loudly applauded, but Dr. Mukkamala only graded his performance a C-plus.
He noted that his recovery included speech therapy and six weeks later, at the 2025 AMA National Advocacy Conference in Washington, he delivered—in his opinion—an A-minus performance.
“Now it's off to the races,” he said.
Since then, Dr. Mukkamala has kept busy with speaking engagements with the National Medical Association, the Association of Physicians of Indian Origin young physician section, the Patient and Caregiver Conference at the Henry Ford Health Center, the Arkansas, Maryland and Massachusetts medical societies and several others.
Reaching a logical conclusion
“Being somebody in my 50s, we don't think about the potential end and yet, here it is staring me in the face,” Dr. Mukkamala said. “It made me appreciate so many things—particularly health care.”
The expressions of love from family, friends and colleagues also had an impact.
Dr. Mukkamala compared himself to Mr. Spock, the alien character on “Star Trek” whose life was dictated by logic and facts. But he said this is no longer the case.
“This made me appreciate the role of just taking that moment to express affection and things like that,” he said. “It just makes life more pleasant for all of us, and so that was something I learned.”
Dr. Mukkamala also noted how, as a child, he attended Catholic schools and went to Hindu classes on weekends, and he wondered if there was a higher power telling him that he was well-prepared to be the AMA’s president, but a little more preparation was needed.
“Now I can't help but think that this is more than just random; this has to be a plan,” Dr. Mukkamala said.
In other interviews, Dr. Mukkamala has noted that last August, the Food and Drug Administration approved the medicine that he needed in December to specifically attack the type of tumor that he had.
“You couldn't plan it any better than that,” Dr. Mukkamala said on “AMA Update.”
In the days ahead, Dr. Mukkamala will be preparing for his biggest speech yet: His inaugural address June 10 at the 2025 AMA Annual Meeting in Chicago.
“Everything we go to the microphone to talk about to try to improve the health of our country and improve our ability as physicians to take care of the patients that we love in our office, everything that we fight for is something that I've felt and witnessed,” Dr. Mukkamala said.
“It’s an honor to be alive to continue to be the president for this chapter of that fight.”
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