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(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.”
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