It was a volunteer experience like few others: being a physician selected to treat athletes at the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics and the recently concluded Paralympics. “I was part of a team that evaluated acute and chronic musculoskeletal sports-related injuries,” says Gerardo Miranda-Comas, MD, Assistant Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (in photo). For Dr. Miranda-Comas, “The Paralympics, especially, was an important learning experience,” he says. “The atmosphere in the Paralympic village was unreal: it was a small city filled with elite athletes with disability and a vast variety of assistive devices for mobility that included prosthesis, crutches, wheelchairs, and other adaptive equipment.” But mostly, he says, “I felt an uplifting human spirit, where the person with a physical, mental, or visual impairment was applauded as loudly as the able-bodied individual just a few weeks before.”
