by Kirsten Brown

Doctors don’t have to go overseas to find sick patients fettered with third-world poverty. They can find them right here in the heartlands of America.

The counties devastated by Hurricane Katrina have earned the nickname “America’s Third World Country,” says Ronald Myers, M.D. Myers will speak to OU-COM students about answering the call to care for the poor in his lecture “The Challenge of Providing Healthcare to the Those in Need, Post-Katrina” Friday, April 28, from noon to 1 p.m., Irvine 194. Myers is the last lecturer in the college’s Minority Health Month speaker series.

Myers is the founder, president and medical director of Myers Foundation Christian Family Health Centers in Tchula, Belzoni and Greenville, Miss. Myers also is an ordained Baptist minister and jazz musician. He has appeared on “Good Morning America” and other television shows advocating for disaster victims.

His lecture will open with a video clip previously featured on Direct TV, which followed Myers as he distributed food, clothing and medical supplies to evacuees.

“I’ll be talking about the challenge of helping those in need,” he explains. “I want to challenge the students to realize that they are the ones that have to make the difference between these people getting health care and not getting health care. Students should realize that they’re the ones who have to make a difference by providing health care to the poor, the disenfranchised and the victimized. And I hope to give them a glimpse of the rewards of providing health care to the poorest counties in America.”

Myers lives on the front door of Katrina’s devastation.

“I live in Humphrey County, Mississippi,” he says. “It is officially recognized as a disaster county.”

Humphrey retains the highest infant mortality rate in Mississippi, Myers says.

“A black baby had a better chance of surviving in Bangladesh than in Humphrey,” he says. “I ask, ‘Why is it that the United States is twenty third in the industrialized nations for infant mortality? How is it that with all of our diagnostics and hospitals this country is the twenty-third highest for infant death?’”

The answer lies in the country’s attitude toward its poorest, Myers says.

“You can tell a lot about a country by how it treats its poor, its elderly and its youth,” he says. “Katrina is a reminder of how this government responds to the cry of those in need. A lot of what I have seen in the poorest counties has to do with lack of concern on the part those who should be providing the health care.”

“We seem to have a two-tier health system,” he explains. “We have those who have the money get the best health care and those that don’t get it at all.”

If health care is unaffordable for the impoverished, the government essentially guarantees the steady decline of their health, Myers says.

“Preventive care is the most important part of medicine,” he says. “Without it these people will undoubtedly end up with heart attacks, cancer and other debilitating diseases.”

As a result, the cost of treating the poor is increased, which, in turn, inflates costs throughout the health-care system.

Future doctors in the Friday’s audience have the potential to help, Myers adds.

“You’re going to make the difference,” he says. “When you finish school and you’re training, you are going to face the challenge of paying back loans. You’re going be thinking, ‘I just can’t see these people. They don’t have insurance; I can’t afford to be their doctor.’”

However, that way of thinking negates the true mission of every doctor, Myers says.

“I want to remind them what a doctor is supposed to be about,” he says, “and encourage them to make themselves available to poor, the disenfranchised and the victimized. These are people who will not have health care unless we, the physicians, make a commitment to give it to them.”

Katrina serves as a reminder of the poor’s precarious situation, Myers says.

“And that’s the lesson that we learned from Katrina,” he says. “Hurricane season starts again in two months. We are only a disaster away from losing thousands more lives.”