I love the Olympics. It’s nice to take a break every couple of years and immerse myself in a little patriotic competition. Unsurprisingly, I pay the closest attention to the sports I participated in – archery, gymnastics, swimming, and all the horsey stuff. I still love horsies, though it’s been a long time since I rode.
The conversation around 2024’s Games has been colored by a lot more healthcare than usual, especially in the sports I follow.
The last summer Olympics was an outlier because of COVID restrictions, and around that time, the conversation about mental health was ramping up because of the paths chosen by a few brave athletes to prioritize their own well-being over their sports careers. The psychological strain made public by such superstars as Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, and Coco Gauff paved the way for heightened awareness, and allowed the people we put on pedestals to be more human even while they remained on those pedestals. We got to see that they aren’t machines. They are extraordinary, immensely talented people who sometimes struggle the same way we do.
Yay for helping lessen the stigma around mental health!
Then there is Suni Lee, who came back from what appears to be a pair of unspecified, “uncurable” (aka chronic, lol, but it’s so much more dramatic to call them uncurable) kidney conditions. I am happy for her and what she was able to achieve, but not everyone is lucky enough to have their conditions go into remission, as NBC’s broadcasters claimed they did, or what I suspect is more likely, that she was able to get quick, top-notch care to bring her conditions under control and continues to get the kind of medical attention most of us can only dream of.
But Suni Lee isn’t the first Olympian with a chronic condition, and she won’t be the last. Jackie Joyner-Kersee won six gold medals in track and field while dealing with asthma, gold medalist Shannon Boxx competed in Olympic soccer matches with lupus, and Gary Hall, Jr. won gold after acclimating to Type 1 diabetes in the middle of his Olympic career. These are only a handful of many.
But the healthcare point of discussion that is taking up the most space in my head, and not in a good way, isn’t an athlete or a condition. It’s a commercial. For a TV show. Brilliant Minds is about an “eccentric but incredibly gifted neurologist who suffers from a rare condition that gives him a unique perspective on care, fueling his mission to change the way the world sees his patients.”*
The way the commercials are cut makes empathy seem like some kind of magical power. But do we really want to think about it as some kind of extraordinary lift? We all have the capacity for empathy, including clinicians. I would guess they express it fairly regularly with their non-patient social circles. Would it really be so hard to allow it to drip into their clinical practices, as well?
No, no it wouldn’t.
But until we make an effort to incorporate it as a regular part of both hospital and office visits, I guess we’ll just have to wait for a clinician with the superpower of empathy.
* The TV show is based on the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks, who was, in fact, a gifted neurologist and revolutionary thinker when it comes to the humanization of patients, especially those with neurological disorders. His book, Gratitude, written while he was dying, sits on the easy-access bookshelf in my bedroom (as opposed to the shelves that are harder to reach).