Dr. Jeremy Myers, a reconstructive urologist and long-time IVUmed volunteer, is leading a workshop in Kigali, Rwanda this June. Dr. Myers is dedicated to IVUmed’s mission of increasing access to quality urological care. Dr. Myers served on IVUmed’s Board for a number of years and has participated in five surgical workshops. In honor of Dr. Myers’s upcoming workshop, we’d like to highlight his service as a volunteer.
Dr. Myers first got involved with IVUmed by serving as a Resident Scholar in Vietnam. He commented, “it was such an overwhelmingly positive experience to interact with the trainees and the residents in Vietnam and see how they managed a lot of the problems that we manage in the United States with very low resources very successfully.”
During his first workshop, Dr. Myers observed that surgeons and physicians are similar across cultures. He told us, “they have a lot of the same values. They want the best for their patients. They’re academic. They want to learn how to do surgery better. They’re eager for IVUmed to come teach them how to do better surgery for their patients.”
Dr. Myers has also volunteered in Mongolia. While in Mongolia, he met another volunteer who had previously visited the site and taught the local surgeons how to perform a stone surgery. Dr. Myers remembers that this surgeon, “went back and discovered several years later that the surgeons had done 400 of these stone surgeries.” He added that, “it’s amazing the see the transformation at the sites where IVUmed goes because you can teach surgeons a surgery and they rapidly apply it to their patients. You can see the exponential growth and witness the transformation at these centers.”
Dr Myers added, “A lot of relief organizations and surgical international volunteer organizations go to a country and they do a lot of good, but they treat a very small number of patients in these countries. They might go to a country for a week and treat 40 patients, which is incredibly valuable for those patients, but it doesn’t leave a lot of durable effect for the population in the country.”
“IVUmed has a very unique philosophy, and it’s in their motto Teach One, Reach Many,” Dr. Myers added. “The amazing part of IVUmed’s model is that, while helping the patients while you’re in the country is tremendously important, the exponential growth of being able to help the surgeons help their patients after you leave attaches a lot of meaning to going on these trips.”
IVUmed’s workshops are only possible because of our generous volunteers and donors. Dr. Myers urges, “Donations are essential to running these workshops. A donation isn’t just helping a single person in a country with low-resources, a donation allows IVUmed surgeons and volunteers to interact with and show local surgeons how to do these surgeries. That small donation is exponentially expounded when that surgeon can apply the techniques they learn to the population of patients they see.”
From all of us at IVUmed, we would like to say thank you to Dr. Jeremy Myers! We appreciate your generosity, support, and dedication to helping increase access to quality urological care.