Doctors Born In India Filling Medical Gaps In Georgia

Dr. Alluri Raju has been practicing medicine in the small southwest Georgia town of Richland for 37 years. He’s the only doctor left — not just in Richland, but in Stewart County and neighboring Webster County with a combined population of more than 8,000.

Katja Ridderbusch / Courtesy of Georgia Health News

This is the first in a series of articles on foreign-born physicians practicing in Georgia. Other articles in this special report will focus on barriers that immigrant doctors face if they want to work in the state, a clinic that serves mainly immigrant and refugee patients and Muslim physicians here.

Dr. Alluri Raju vividly remembers how, more than 30 years ago, his ethnicity brought a patient to tears. Back then, the young physician was known in the small southwest Georgia town of Richland as “the Indian doctor.”

“I had this patient in her 90s, a very nice and very sick lady,” he recalls.