International Extreme Sports Medicine Congress returns after COVID-19 hiatus
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The fourth International Extreme Sports Medicine Congress will be held from May 20 to May 21 at the St. Julien Hotel in Boulder, Colorado, after the meeting was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With extra time to prepare for this year’s agenda, meeting organizer Omer Mei-Dan, MD, extreme sports athlete and associate professor in the department of orthopedics at Colorado University School of Medicine, is looking forward to welcoming a host of new speakers, topics and activities in the extreme sports medicine specialty.
“The majority of speakers who originally planned to come here in 2020 will be here, but we were able to add many more new speakers from all around the world – from South America, from Europe [and] from all over, basically,” Mei-Dan told Healio Orthopedics. “We are going to have a lot of new ideas and concepts to talk about, and it’s going to be exciting,” he added.
In a subset of sport that draws a unique athlete, extreme sports medicine also draws a unique and diverse group of physicians and health care professionals, according to Mei-Dan. The meeting is not just for orthopedic surgeons.
“We are talking obviously about adventure and extreme sports, but we have physicians and health care providers from so many different subspecialties – everything from orthopedic surgery to athletic training, physical therapy, endocrinology, cardiology [and] mental health providers,” he said. “When we talk about the extreme sports athlete, we want to cover that person from every point of view possible.”
A hot topic on this year’s agenda will be the debut of several new extreme sports in the latest Summer Olympics, Mei-Dan said. In 2021, rock climbing, skateboarding and surfing were introduced to viewers worldwide at the Tokyo Games. Other hot topics on this year’s agenda include extreme sports head injuries, the physiology of the aging athlete, the recent dominance of adolescent athletes, as well as injury prevention and rehabilitation sessions.
Similar to past meetings, attendees will also have the option to participate in guided activities on Friday morning and Saturday afternoon. These activities will include paddleboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking, trail running and hiking. Trying a new extreme sport can help physicians and health care providers understand their athletes, Mei-Dan said.
“We can go rock climbing, trail running, mountain biking and paddleboarding all within 5 to 10 minutes from where the conference is taking place,” he said. “First, you have to understand as a physician [and] as a health care provider: What is that thing [the athlete] is after? What are going to be the biomechanics? What is going to be the potential mechanism of injury you are telling [the athlete]? If you don’t understand that, then you may endanger her or his life,” he added.
Mei-Dan is also excited to discuss the latest research that has been published since the last International Extreme Sports Medicine Congress in 2018.
“Now we have 4 years – because of COVID – since the last meeting. There are so many new things that people came out with, and a lot of studies that were incepted here at the congress 4 years ago that now came to conclusion and will be presented,” he said. “Talking about some of the injuries we saw 4 years ago, completely new surgical procedures were invented and introduced since then. So, I think all together, having that 4-year gap was beneficial to that new agenda.”
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