STRONGER TOGETHER for Better Care care. Our teams maintain constant communication year-round, expediting hands-on evaluations, arranging imaging studies and providing full-spectrum patient care so our athletes can return to play safely and efficiently for all of Louisville and the world to see. During the season, we hold regular interdisciplinary meetings to ensure alignment across operations and care teams. These spaces foster collaboration, innovation and respect for every voice at the table.
You can make a lot of connections between sports and medicine. In fact, many former athletes go into medicine because of the innate qualities that overlap these two worlds. Both demand discipline, endurance and the ability to perform under pressure. They push you to your limits and force you to rally until the last buzzer goes off. Both medicine and sports come with wins and losses. In medicine, our“ opponents” can take the form of cancer, illness, injury or uncertainty. On a regular basis, we are faced with clinical hurdles and challenges, just like our athlete counterparts. Just like them, we trained for these moments, lean on our team and persevere.
However sometimes in sports, as hard as you fight, you may not get the intended result. That’ s life, and that is also medicine. Like sports, medicine teaches us to stay present and focused, totally in the moment. The most important patient is the one in front of us. We can’ t be thinking ahead to the next patient on our list or the next surgical case.
If you look past an opponent in sports, that very well may be your last. Even in setbacks, we grow— we learn, adapt and come back stronger to help our next patient. This is what makes the journey meaningful, our hope and determination that any minor setback will be followed by a major comeback.
Medicine and sports are all about our continued growth and learning through training and experience. Sure there may be weeks where there are more bad days than good and your team is on a tough losing streak. But we keep fighting to better ourselves because we love what we do. That’ s why we went into medicine in the first place. Being a sports medicine physician is one of the best jobs in the world, besides being a parent. You are part of a team. You are never alone. You celebrate wins and injury recoveries together. You grow through the losses and overcome adversity together. You create lifelong memories with your colleagues and your patients. And let’ s be honest, it’ s a pretty fun day at the office if you’ re on the sidelines cheering on the Cards!
Justin Chu, MD, CAQSM, FAAP is a board-certified internist, pediatrician and sports medicine physician within UofL Health and is a Team Physician for University of Louisville Athletics. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and the Division of Sports Medicine. He also serves as a co-course director for the Introduction to Clinical Medicine Course for ULSOM.
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