(Dr. Myers will speak Tuesday, April 5, not Monday, April 4, as originally stated in this story. This story was corrected at 4:40 pm, April 1.)

by Brooke Bunch

Ronald V. Myers, M.D., isn’t in it for the money.

His dedication to minority health care has led to the treatment of hundreds of disadvantaged patients who suffered from a lack of quality medical care. Myers will share his experiences as a minority health-care provider with OU-COM students and faculty at his lecture Tuesday, April 5, as a part of the college’s Minority Health Month speaker series. Myers is the first lecturer in the series. All lectures will be at noon in 199 Irvine Hall.

The month of April has been designated to promote healthy lifestyles among minority populations and to provide crucial information on disease prevention and cure. To commemorate Minority Health Month, the Center of Excellence for Multicultural Medicine and the Office of Student Affairs has scheduled a series of speakers to discuss cultural competency, multicultural medicine and the disparate health conditions between minority and majority populations. According to a recent study conducted by a former U.S. Surgeon General, more than 80,000 black Americans die each year because of the continuing disparities in health care.

Myers, a past president of the National Medical Association, has dedicated his life to help change that. Serving the poor in rural America, Myers set up a practice in Tchula, Miss. Tchula is in the Mississippi Delta, which is often referred to as “America’s Third World.” As part of one of the poorest counties in America, Tchula lacked a physician prior to Myers’ practice, which includes making house calls.

“The public health service didn’t want me to go to Tchula because they said it was too poor for a doctor, and I would be in financial ruin if I went there,” Myers recalls. “But I went anyway, with faith in God to meet the needs of the population.” Myers, an ordained minister for 15 years, has been in Tchula for 17 years.

Myers says he felt a calling to serve the health-care needs of the poorest and neediest citizens in the country, and Tchula fit that mold. Driven by compassion for the poor and minority populations, Myers established the Myers Foundation for Indigent Health Care and Community Development, a charitable Christian foundation established in 1990 to bring better health care to the poor of rural America. Presently, the foundation’s efforts are concentrated in Mississippi.

“Health care is becoming more difficult for people to afford and access in America,” Myers says. “This is especially true in poor rural areas.”

Myers will discuss with OU-COM students the problems facing minority populations in terms of health care.

“I’m going to tell students that while it’s essential to get a good medical education, it’s also important that they don’t let financial gain be the primary reason they are becoming physicians,” he says. “It is the needs of the people that matter. I went to medical school to serve a community like Tchula so that I could make a difference, and they (students) can, too.”

Myers says he will speak on the commitment and compassion that health-care providers need to care for the poor and why it’s important that medical students, as future physicians, make that commitment to care for minority and poor populations.

“That is a commitment we need to make to ourselves out of compassion,” he says. “To serve the poor and the needy. These are the reasons we should want to become doctors.”

Myers notes that minorities have the poorest health care and the greatest lack of access to quality health care. He believes the reason for these problems of the poor is that compassion is no longer at the center of the health profession.

“There is more of an interest in money, and that’s what is primarily driving the health-care profession in America — greed over human need,” Myers says. “And that’s why people of color do not get the health care they need.”

Myers says the solution is simple: medical students, particularly those who are members of minorities, need to make a commitment to serve as ‘physicians of compassion.’

“If we don’t do it, who will? We turn our backs on the poor, on the communities we came from and no longer have a commitment to care for those populations,” Myers says. “We have a responsibility as minority medical professionals to help meet the health-care needs of our communities.”

Myers says he is coming to OU-COM during Minority Health Month to inspire the medical students to make that commitment.

“People of color have to make that extra commitment,” Myers says. “And I’ll be sharing what that means from personal experience.”