One of the most unusual medical facilities in Berlin is located at the south entrance to the exhibition grounds. “Healthy Athletes” is written there on the CityCube, the event hall, and participants in the Special Olympics are crowding towards the entrances.
Some of them receive the first medical examination of their lives there. Glasses are adjusted, ordered, hearing aids fitted. Around a thousand athletes undergo seven different examinations here every day with friendly names such as Healthy Promotion, Opening Eyes, Special Smiles and Strong Minds.
Two thousand volunteers, one hundred doctors
Diagnosis and therapy should make up for what is lacking in their health care. Two thousand volunteers, including 100 doctors, 70 dentists and 700 students, provide preventive care and care, ranging from teaching simple physiotherapeutic exercises to acute treatment. An athlete from Africa with a severely inflamed abscess on his teeth was driven straight from the Cube to the dentist’s office. More than a third of athletes compete in shoes that are too big or too small. Four years ago in Abu Dhabi, they received matching footwear free of charge. But this time the sponsor is missing.
“The program has had an incredible impact,” said Annemarie Hill, director of health at the Special Olympics World Organization. People with intellectual disabilities, such as Special Olympics athletes, are in great need of care not because of their condition, but because many do not have access to doctors and medical facilities. The helpers in Berlin don’t wear white coats to prevent fear of the unknown.
The 7,000 athletes who have come to Berlin from all over the world, the 4,000 active people who Special Olympics Germany considers to be its athletes, are the tip of the iceberg, the visible representatives of the 420,000 people in Germany alone with different intellectual development. In addition to treatment, prevention and education are important to them. It is important to enable personal responsibility and strengthen self-efficacy, says Imke Kaschke, who after 24 years at the Charité Berlin, most recently as a senior physician, became a health scientist and as such director for health at Special Olympics Germany. A task not only for major events.
Sport opens up help
The pandemic has forced people with limited intellectual abilities in particular into isolation – they were not allowed to leave their dormitories, were not allowed to visit their workshops. More at risk of falling into anxiety and depression than others, they require special attention.
Michael Reinsch, Berlin Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 2 Anno Hecker Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 15 Christoph Becker Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 10
Sport offers them help. The website of Special Olympics Germany, for example, is the only one where – with more than 150 documents – information on health and care can be found in plain language. With around seven million functionally illiterate people in the country, this is a far-reaching offer. However, the project funding from the Ministry of Health is running out.
67 percent of Special Olympics athletes are obese. According to Hill, the challenge: “We don’t just have to treat those affected, we have to take care of them.” Special Olympics cooperates with 150 universities. Renee Manfredi, Athlete Ambassador and multiple gold medalist at the Texas Games, points out that physicians need to be prepared to deal with people with intellectual disabilities. “Many of us have never met a doctor, many do not want them to be dealt with quickly, but want time for them,” she said on Monday in Berlin.
Paediatrics is a good preparation, since those affected are at different stages of mental development. The sore point: “Doctors should also listen to us patients, not just look for symptoms.” The demand to speak to those affected is also reflected in the relationship to doctors, not just about them. The former hurdle sprinter and bobsledder Seun Adigun from Nigeria, the first African woman to take part in the Summer and Winter Olympics and who has a doctorate in chiropractors, even accuses the medical profession of “rejection based on ignorance”. That has to change: “Right now”.
