Athletes and the journalists who cover them make valuable assists to doctors

By the time the patient was admitted to the hospital, his creatinine level was ten times higher than normal. He was now paying the costly price of a long history of uncontrolled hypertension. His kidneys were shot, and he faced a certain future on dialysis.

The wrinkle in the story was that the patient—I’ll call him Fred—was refusing surgery to create an arteriovenous fistula that would allow us to filter his blood. Psychiatrists had ruled Fred competent to make his own decisions, and he was now testing our team’s negotiation skills. A daily parade of doctors at every level of training—kidney specialists, general medicine doctors, fellows, residents, and, me, the medical student—would visit with him and repeat variations on a theme: He might feel fine now, but kidney failure would kill him unless he went on dialysis. He would respond to us all in the same way: “I feel fine. I don’t need dialysis, and I don’t need surgery.” 

Fred was at once frustrating and perplexing. Each day we debated hypotheses about the reasons for his refusal. Was he suspicious of our motives? Our competence? Our judgment? Was he afraid of surgery? Tired of living? Our debate continued until one morning, when our team of doctors approached him during rounds. “I want dialysis,” Fred said, “and I’ll meet with the surgeons.” 

Why the sudden change? 

“I was thinking about a picture I saw in Sports Illustrated of Hank Gathers,” Fred told us. “He just collapsed and died on the court. I don’t want that to be me. His death was so awful for people to watch. I don’t want to be another Hank Gathers or Reggie Lewis.” None of the other members of my team knew who these basketball giants were—and they didn’t care. They couldn’t afford to let the patient change his mind again, so they scheduled an immediate surgical consult. 

As an avid sports fan, I knew that Gathers was a college-basketball phenom who had died suddenly during a championship playoff game, and that Lewis was the young Boston Celtics star who had collapsed and died one day during practice. From the grave, Gathers and Lewis were accomplishing what doctors alone could not: saving Fred’s life. 

Fred’s sudden change in thinking underscored for me the incredible influence that athletes have in shaping the way we think about our health. As icons of extreme physical well-being, professional athletes remind us of the pinnacles of human performance, but also of our own frailty. While they express the virtues of human perseverance and intense training, they can also bring to light the egalitarian quality of disease—striking anyone, even optimally conditioned professional athletes, at any time. In doing so, they help patients like Fred understand disease, feel less alone with their diagnoses, and persist in treatment when they feel like giving up. 

While athletes like Gathers and Lewis remind us of our mortality, others call attention to our body’s innate capacity to cope with disease and to heal. When Magic Johnson returned to the basketball court after announcing he had HIV, he helped destigmatize the disease, eased our fears of infectivity, and made us realize that those testing positive for the virus could still lead vigorous lives. When Red Sox pitcher Jon Lester publicly faced a life-threatening cancer diagnosis and fought back to return to top form, he allowed us the realistic hope that we, too, might recover and live normally. 

Sports journalists, by chronicling the stories of the illnesses of athletes, and professional athletes, by sharing those stories with us, perform an invaluable public health service. They help us understand and cope with disease in ways that caution, reassure, and inspire us. 

(Originally published in Harvard Medicine magazine)