Olympic physicians kept the flame burning

Ready for anything from anthrax and level one traumas to common colds, volunteers are relieved there were few serious injuries.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. March 18, 2002.

When the Winter Olympics came to Salt Lake City last month, radiologist Julia Crim, MD, rearranged her life so she could be the director of the medical imaging facility at the Olympic village's polyclinic. She sent her family to California and called in eight associates from around the country to help her staff the facility.

"We provided care for sports-related injuries as well as everyone who had a runny nose," said Dr. Crim. "I spent so many sleepless nights before [the Olympics] worrying about all the things that could go wrong, but everything worked beautifully."

She was not alone. Fellow volunteer physicians working across the Olympic staging areas were braced for level one traumas and on alert for bioterrorism. Instead, they treated spectators who slipped and fell on the ice trails, athletes who blew out their knees on the slopes, and venue volunteers with chest pains.

By the end of the games, the clinics set up by Intermountain Health Care and the University of Utah Health Sciences Center at event sites, in the athletes' village and the media center had seen 11,575 patients, including one who needed an appendectomy. Also reported were several heart attacks, 16 instances of frostbite and 1,061 respiratory infections. Nearly 50 people were admitted to hospitals.

And now it's all over.

Those involved have resumed their regular lives, happy to have been there and relieved that the worst never happened. An anthrax scare turned out to be a false alarm. Several small outbreaks of gastrointestinal upset turned out to be benign. [...]