As Ryan Singerman, DO, FAAFP, concludes his year as ISMA president, his decades-long commitment to medical mission work offers a glimpse into the experiences that shaped his calling to medicine.

Oct. 12, 2017, began beneath a mango tree in Fovo, Haiti.

Dr. Singerman and the rest of his medical mission team had unloaded their trucks and were setting up tables for the day's clinic. The temperature was already nearing 90 degrees when Singerman noticed a commotion across the compound.

A young mother emerged from a house, screaming for help and carrying the limp body of her baby girl.

Dr. Singerman took the child from her arms.

“She wasn't breathing. There was no palpable pulse,” he said. “Her eyes were flat and glassy, staring.”

He began CPR.

Other members of the team rushed to help. A nurse took over chest compressions as Dr. Singerman cleared the child's airway. Then, he felt something, a faint carotid pulse.

The baby flinched. She coughed. Her hands and feet began to move.

Then, she cried.

“I hadn't heard a more beautiful sound in a long, long time,” Dr. Singerman said.

The crisis was far from over. The malnourished child had aspirated, had serious infections and had a blood glucose level of 306 mg/dL. Dr. Singerman and the team began fluids and worked with the supplies they had available.

There was one significant problem: There was no insulin.

Because the mobile clinic was hours from the team's base, keeping insulin refrigerated would have been difficult. Dr. Singerman remembered asking whether any had made the trip.

The answer was no.

Then, a member of the team approached him holding a single, chilled vial of insulin. It had been discovered in a tote that wasn't refrigerated.

“No one remembers packing it. No one remembers bringing it,” Dr. Singerman said. “No one.”

The team administered insulin and antibiotics and arranged transportation, funding and continued treatment at a clinic about 45 minutes away.

Years later, Dr. Singerman learned the little girl was thriving. A local Mission of Hope nurse continued to visit her weekly, her diabetes was under control, and she was healthy and attending school.

“The number of small miracles that day still feels unreal,” he wrote of the experience.

For Dr. Singerman, medical missions are more than an opportunity to practice medicine in underserved communities. In many ways, they are part of what led him to medicine in the first place.

Singerman grew up in Benin, West Africa, with his Southern Baptist missionary parents. As a young man, he spoke French and served as a translator for volunteer medical teams. The experience he said, “stoked a passion for medicine.”

That passion eventually brought him to medical school and then to Fort Wayne, where he built a career in family and obesity medicine. Dr. Singerman is the primary care section chief and medical director of weight and bariatric medicine at Parkview Health and has been an ISMA member since 2011.

But medical mission work remained part of his life.

In 2019, ISMA selected Dr. Singerman to receive its Medical Mission Sponsorship. At the time, he was serving as an ISMA District 12 trustee.

His service has continued.

On a more recent medical mission to the Dominican Republic, Dr. Singerman joined a team of 11 traveling to communities where physicians, nurses and other volunteers provided care through local churches.

The days were long. Some clinics require a roughly 90-minute bus ride over difficult roads. The team prepared medication packs, treated patients and improvised when circumstances demanded it. At one clinic, Dr. Singerman even extracted severely decayed baby teeth from a young patient. According to him, this was a skill he said he had learned “on the job” alongside dentists during previous medical relief trips.

By the end of the mission, Dr. Singerman estimated the team had cared for nearly 560 people and dispensed more than 50,000 pills.

“While numbers are not what is important, I think it is fun to reflect on the calculable impact while we also consider the intangible,” he said.

That same emphasis on service followed Dr. Singerman into his presidency of ISMA.

When he was sworn in as ISMA president in 2025, Dr. Singerman told physicians he would bring to the association the same commitment he makes to his own patients: to work tirelessly, seek answers and rely on the knowledge and expertise of others.

He also challenged physicians to remember what unites them.

“I do not pretend that unity is easy,” Dr. Singerman said. “I do not ask that we agree on every issue.”

Instead, he asked physicians to find common ground in their “shared calling to heal.”

As Dr. Singerman moves into the role of past president at ISMA's 177th Annual Convention, that calling offers a fitting lens through which to view his year of leadership — and the path that brought him there.

Long before he led Indiana's largest physician organization, Singerman was a child in West Africa translating for physicians who had traveled far from home to care for people who needed them.

Years later, he became one of those physicians.

And beneath a mango tree in Haiti, he found himself holding a child whose life depended upon the knowledge, supplies and people gathered there.

Continue the mission: Apply by Oct. 1
ISMA members interested in undertaking medical mission work can receive support through the same program that sponsored Dr. Singerman.

ISMA's Medical Mission Sponsorship provides up to $5,000 to an ISMA member engaged in a medical mission trip. One sponsorship will be awarded through a random drawing at the November meeting of the ISMA Board of Trustees.

Applicants must obtain the endorsement of their county medical society or county alliance and submit all required documentation by Oct. 1.

Applications should include the member's name and contact information; dates and location of the proposed trip; information about other sponsors or mission coordinators; and appropriate documentation, including expense details.

Members should begin the application process by contacting their county medical society or county alliance. Questions may be directed to Angela Graves.

For Dr. Singerman, medical mission work has spanned continents and decades, from translating for visiting medical teams as a child to providing care himself as a physician.

At the beginning of his presidency, he described the legacy he hoped physicians would leave: to remain “the voice of reason, the hand of healing, and the heart of science when it was most needed.”

His own journey suggests that sometimes the hand of healing may be needed very far from home.