PMNR physicians work to improve the quality of life for their patients through groundbreaking research, innovative care, public service, and volunteerism. For the individual physiatrists in practice, to the collaborative work of thousands of members within the Academy, physiatrists have boldly risen to the challenge. The American Academy of Physical Medicine Rehabilitation and the Foundation for PMNR offer our deepest gratitude to those with an exceptional commitment to excellence and advancement in physiatry. The Foundation for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation's mission is investing in the future of physiatry through research. Over the past two decades, the number of grant applications we receive has greatly increased as has the level of scientific sophistication, making these awards competitive, valuable, and prestigious to the recipients. Congratulations to the following Foundation for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation grant recipients. Each year, the Foundation provides Richard Matterson ERF New Investigator Grants to support career development for physiatric investigators five years or less out of training. This year's recipients include Dr. Edowuyi is awarded for her research on motor unit number estimation in spinal cord injury. Dr. Park is awarded for his research on extracellular microvesicles after spinal cord injury and their effects on fibrinolytic capacity in brain endothelial cells. Dr. Solinsky is awarded for his research on influence of cutaneous autonomic innervation in pressure injury pathophysiology following spinal cord injury. Dr. Sarmiento is awarded the Gabriela Molnar Pediatric PM&R Research Grant for her research on growing pains, a mixed methods approach to understanding the transition of care needs of adolescents and young adults with cerebral palsy in a pediatric rehabilitation clinic. Dr. Cushman is the recipient of the 2022 Scott F. Nadler Passor Musculoskeletal Research Grant. Dr. Cushman will be working on validation of a low-cost, platelet-rich plasma, PRP. Dr. Misogli is this year's recipient of the prestigious Gabriela Molnar Pediatric PM&R Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Misogli is a professor of rehabilitation medicine and adjunct professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine as well as UW's rehabilitation medicine residency director. She will receive this year's Gabriela Molnar Pediatric PM&R Lifetime Achievement Award for her extraordinary contributions to the field of pediatric rehabilitation. She is not only a brilliant clinician and educator, but she has also served on the American Board of PM&R, most recently as the board chair from 2010 through 2013. There, she helped to establish standards for pediatric rehabilitation to help to ensure the highest quality care. Foundation for PM&R research grants are made possible by the generosity of donors like you. Your support is deeply appreciated by these physiatric grant recipients and awardees who are greatly contributing to the future of our field. Congratulations, Foundation for PM&R grant recipients. AAPM&R leads the advancement of physiatry's impact throughout healthcare, across all clinical areas and practice settings, through stewardship, leadership, collaboration, innovation, respect for human dignity, and the success of every member. Thank you to this year's awards committee for their time and diligence in selecting the following AAPM&R award recipients. Here are the 2022 recipients of distinct recognition. Dr. Gail L. Gamble, Frank H. Kruzan Lifetime Achievement Award. Dr. Gamble is awarded the Academy's highest honor for her distinguished career of outstanding and unique contributions to the specialty of PM&R in areas of patient care, research, education, literary contributions, community service, and involvement in academy activities. Dr. Gamble graduated from Hood College in Maryland with a bachelor's degree in government and Western European history. She later received a master's degree in education from Bowling Green State University. After finding her passion in medicine, she completed her medical degree from Mayo Medical School in 1979 and her graduate training in physical medicine rehabilitation at Mayo Clinic in 1984. For more than 28 years at Mayo Clinic, Dr. Gamble provided leadership in cancer rehabilitation and other administrative positions. In 1994, she was elected as the first woman president of the Mayo Medical Staff, as well as a four-year term as a chair of the Mayo Foundation Medical Industry Relations and Conflict of Interest Committees. Dr. Gamble has made significant contributions to the specialty of PM&R and national medical organizations. She served on the board of the AAPM&R and was elected president in 2001. She also served as the first president for the Foundation of PM&R with a goal of developing funding avenues for education and research. Throughout her career, Dr. Gamble has been committed to assuring that functional health for cancer patients is addressed and protected at all points of cancer care throughout the entire continuum, from diagnosis to wellness. Dr. Gamble's countless achievements have been vital in evolving the specialty and it was a great honor that we recognize her extraordinary impact on PM&R. The Distinguished Member Award was established to honor AAPM&R members who have provided invaluable service to the specialty of PM&R. Dr. James W. Acheson, Distinguished Member Award. Dr. Jim Acheson is a physician in the Department of Physical Medicine Rehabilitation at Mayo Clinic Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, where he holds a joint appointment within the Department of Neurologic Surgery. Dr. Acheson specializes in the evaluation and treatment of non-operative spine care and rehabilitation, spinal manipulation, and comprehensive chronic pain management. He is a nationally recognized teacher and researcher and in 2010 was presented with the American Academy of Physical Medicine Rehabilitation Distinguished Clinician Award. Dr. Acheson has spent his career providing excellent patient care in academic medical institutions, including the University of Kentucky, the University of Florida, where he served as chief of PM&R, Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, where he was chief of pain medicine, and the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, where he is currently the chair of PM&R. Dr. Haekyung Kim, Distinguished Member Award. Dr. Kim is an accomplished academic physiatrist, professor and chair of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and the Kimberly Clark Distinguished Chair of Mobility Research at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, Texas. She is a passionate advocate for PM&R and for the care of people with cerebral palsy. She is a World Health Organization member of a development group preparing a package of rehabilitation interventions for people with cerebral palsy. Dr. Kim is nationally and internationally regarded as an expert in pediatric rehabilitation medicine, especially caring for people with cerebral palsy. She serves as a faculty of the Step Ultrasound course and has participated in numerous workshops and lectures on pediatric rehabilitation medicine and other educational activities at the Academy. Dr. John C. Shaw, Distinguished Member Award. Dr. Shaw is grad as faculty at the University of Louisville Neurosurgery Division of PM&R, medical director at Passport Travel Health and civil surgeon in Louisville, Kentucky. In a career spanning more than 35 years, Dr. Shaw helped with the Good Samaritan Rehabilitation Center in Pusan, Korea in the 1970s, and he helped create the Institute of Rehabilitation and its associated residency program in Cheongju, South Korea in 1980, which is the first comprehensive rehab center in the entire country. In addition to his work in Korea, Dr. Shaw served as a medical director for the Southern Indiana Rehabilitation Center from 1993 to 2017, where he focused on spinal cord rehabilitation and developed the ARMS program to restore relaxation and function to the spastic arm. Distinguished Public Service Awards honor individuals who have made significant contributions through public service activities to enhance the quality of life for our most vulnerable populations and individuals with disabilities. Dr. Michelle L. Arnold, Distinguished Public Service Award. Dr. Arnold is a physician executive with more than 14 years' experience in a variety of leadership roles, including hospital chief medical officer, regional executive medical director overseeing multiple service lines, chief medical informatics officer, medical group vice president of medicine, as well as chair of multiple hospital and systems committees and service on boards of directors. She currently serves as the vice president and chief medical officer at Intermountain Healthcare. She's an inspirational physician committed to the equitable delivery of safe, high quality healthcare for all and passionate about innovating healthcare delivery, building and supporting teams and positive culture change. Dr. Arnold is a recipient of the Rod and Nancy Hochman Physician Leadership Award and Scholarship in 2019, and the Seattle Met Top Doctor Award winner in 2019, 2020, and 2022. Dr. Andrew J. Haig, Distinguished Public Service Award. Dr. Haig is board certified in PM&R, pain medicine, and electrodiagnostic medicine and currently in private practice in Vermont. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and a volunteer professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Throughout his career, Dr. Haig has advanced the field of PM&R through research, teaching, and advocacy. He is a co-principal investigator for the Vermont Retain Grant, which is developing a national model for ensuring PM&R processes are included in return to work strategies. After his brother suffered a spinal cord injury, they formed the not-for-profit International Rehabilitation Forum, which recently held its first world conference on disaster rehabilitation, leading to major international efforts advancing rehabilitation after natural and human-induced disasters. Dr. Richard T. German, Distinguished Public Service Award. Dr. German is a professor and chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine and is the director of Rowan Medicine's Neuromusculoskeletal Institute. He is also a consultant and expert witness for the New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners. Dr. German is a pioneer in treatment, education, and research in the field of pain management and more recently, addiction medicine. His career is focused on underserved communities and spans HIV, chronic pain, and addiction medicine. He has sought after for his expertise and ability to deliver compassionate care, which has led to him taking leadership positions on many national grant review panels, advisory boards, and major committees. The Passore Legacy Award and Lectureship is meant to recognize an individual in mid-career who has advanced musculoskeletal physiatry through clinical care, education, service, or scholarship and research. Dr. Matthew Smuke, Passore Legacy Award and Lectureship. Dr. Smuke is the chief of PM&R and professor of orthopedic surgery at Stanford University, where he concentrates on medical and interventional management of spine disorders. Dr. Smuke is internationally recognized as a physician leader in spine care for his authorship on more than 100 publications on the mechanism and treatment of spine disorders, his contributions to spine care guidelines, his service on international work groups to influence treatment trends, and his leadership appointments within professional medical societies in the leading scientific journals. He is an award-winning researcher and pioneer in the field of human physical performance and monitoring. He founded and currently directs the Wearable Health Lab at Stanford, developing methods of wearable sensor data analytics. Dr. Smuke has been an AAPM&R member since 1998 and provided years of service to the academy. Thank you to the 2022 award recipients for advancing our specialty and the work we do on behalf of our patients. Please join us in congratulating all of the distinguished AAPM&R and Foundation for PM&R 2022 award winners. Please welcome Awards Committee Chair, Dr. D.J. Kennedy. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm D.J. Kennedy. I'm chair of the AAPM&R Awards Committee. I'd like to ask all of our 2022 award recipients to please join me on the stage. As they do, I am also asking that our 2020 and 2021 award recipients to stand for a round of applause since they were only recognized virtually. And can you please join me in congratulating this year's awards winners on their incredible work on behalf of our specialty. It's truly inspiring to see the amazing work you are all accomplishing. Now I'd like to ask our Cruisin' Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Dr. Gail Gamble, to step up to the front to say a few words. Okay. I haven't done this in a long time. And I also would love for you to give one more clap for all of these people because they're not being able to mouth off right now. So I would really just give, let's give it to them. Okay. I want to say hello to each and every one of you as I stand before you. I'm so very grateful to receive this award. I did call them and tell them it was a mistake. Anyway, I really have news and that is that in order to get going for the plenary that I have two and a half minutes. So just to let you know that for those of you who don't know me, I describe myself an opinion with nowhere to go. I will try to quickly explain to you where I truly did go. I began my journey in medical school at the late stage of my 20s. And at that time, excuse me, through almost really magical happenings, I was accepted at Mayo Clinic Medical School and my journey had begun. They trusted me. The following years of my career provided me honestly with the joys of working, excuse me, with all of the patients to whom I was exposed. The following years of my career, it just provided me with joy and work and going home every night saying, I can go to bed. Well, I did help somebody. After many, many years from school to retirement, I was able to continue to actually be able to have specific help for cancer patients, each gaining hope for functional independence. To my surprise, at age 61, I actually had three brain cells in my head. In 2008, my life changed with an invitation to come to the then-named Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, excuse me, and was asked to lead and extend their already well-named cancer rehabilitation program. I say this really very seriously. It was a wonderful experience for me and I felt that I was able to help a number of different people and we progressed to develop a very strong program. Those five years were a wonderful, wonderful experience for me, learning much and giving much. Now can I count to two? We're just turning a little bit because I think this is important. In receiving this award, many feelings have surfaced regarding Dr. Kruzan. That's who we are here to honor today and we really need to think about why. The Mayo Clinic and certainly our PM and our department are proud of his accomplishments because he did much of his science work in that institution. He recognized the countless medical values that needed to be developed, Dr. Krusen had been an inspiration for many of us in his relentless pursuit to find new remedies to bring hope and independence to patients. He went to work every day. He did not stop until changes had been made through his efforts and, listen to the word, his research. These are the same values, frankly, that had guided my interactions with patients for whom I advocated every day. We did have, I was involved in the board of our, our, excuse me, group in early 2000s and we did have, we had a lot of things going out and we are just developing things both in every sector of this United States. New things were happening and so our board would like to think about what do we need to look again and kind of up our values and what are we really working toward and so forth. I was part of that and I'm going to be quite slow or quick in telling about it and that is that in the board there were, of course, at 2000 there were many clinicians and people who were not in, actually not very many of us were into science and so forth. So this group actually, we worked for a long time, many, many hours and this was over one word and that was, for some of us, we had proposed that, excuse me, the word research should be taken off our mission. Others of us felt very strongly differently because we were at the beginning of this new century and I would be very proudly to tell you that indeed the group did vote and they voted for exactly that and so we have had wonderful things happen. I would also like to note that during those discussions, our group was able to have a wonderful decision in that the board was very happy to open the word foundation and begin to have a place where young people who needed some money for things that they wanted to invent in this new world of research and that was a wonderful time as well to start these several things and I do have to say I was very, very happy to be one of those people at the time. I am grateful to be able to follow the many, many accomplishments that are sitting out here. We put everything together that you all have done. We'd be flying to the moon, honestly. I'm so grateful for all of our current complimations and this old gal is waiting to hear about the next 10 years of what we have accomplished. I cannot thank you enough, each and every one of you. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Gamble. If you would like to learn more about our 2022 winners, you will receive a publication in your tote bag that provides biographies and additional information about the winners. This publication can also be found on the Academy's websites and the October-November issue of the Physiatrist. To continue celebrating the work of our peers, we'll also be posting this video on the Academy's website and on social media. I encourage you to share the video with your friends and colleagues. And now, Dr. Rachel Brackey-Holman is going to introduce today's Zeider Lecture. Thank you very much, Dr. Kennedy. The Walter Zeider Lectureship is an Academy tradition that honors the qualities of statesmanship, scholarship, executive leadership, and warm friendship of Dr. Walter Zeider, past Executive Director of AAPMNR and ACRM. The lectureship honors a broader spectrum of leaders who share Dr. Zeider's admirable qualities. I'm excited to introduce this year's Zeider Lecture, Dr. Farami Okunlami. Dr. O, or Dr. Okunlami, is the Director of Student Accessibility and Accommodation Services at the University of Michigan, where he oversees the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities and the Adaptive Sports and Fitness Program. Dr. Okunlami earned his MD from the University of Michigan before matching into orthopedic surgery at Yale. At the beginning of his third year, he experienced a spinal cord injury, paralyzing him from the chest down. After two surgeries and intense rehabilitation, he was blessed with some return of motor function. He went on to earn a master's in engineering, science, and technology entrepreneurship from the University of Notre Dame, and completed his family medicine residency at Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Indiana. He was featured on Robin Roberts' Good Morning America series, Thriver Thursday, and has a catchphrase, disabusing disability, hoping to demonstrate that disability doesn't mean inability. Dr. Okunlami speaks around the country on topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. He's been featured on CBS News, PBS NewsHour, and MSNBC's Morning Joe, and is passionate about adaptive sports and fitness, striving to provide access to physical fitness and inclusive recreational and competitive sports for all. We're catching Dr. O at the end of an amazing, career-changing week, from being invited to the White House to being awarded the Visionary Prize from the Craig H. Nielsen Foundation in recognition for his impactful work supporting the spinal cord injury community. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Okunlami. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. First, I've got to say, this whole walk-up music thing is pretty cool. I don't know if you always do that, but... So, thank you so much for allowing us to join us. Thank you so much for the introduction. Thank you to all of you. Thank you to the awardees. Now, first thing you'll see is that I'm not here alone. So, I will introduce myself. I'm Fermi Okunlami. I use he, him pronouns. I'm a young black man with short black hair. I'm wearing dark-rimmed glasses, a wooden bow tie, and a bright pink blazer with a t-shirt with a shirt underneath. I identify as a proud wheelchair user, and I'm honored to speak to you today. To my left, I have Dr. Johan Latorre, who will introduce himself. But, Dr. Latorre is here with me because one of the things that I like to do is to teach and to mentor. And so, Dr. Latorre has been my mentee ever since his residency at the University of Michigan, where he did PM&R residency there, and then he did his sports medicine fellowship there. And he's now faculty at UAB in Birmingham, Alabama. And so, when I was honored and humbled to get this invitation, I asked if I could have someone who has been instrumental in the work that I'll talk about today present with me. So, I'll let Dr. Latorre introduce himself as well. Hi, everyone. First, I just want to say thank you for this opportunity to be able to share my perspective, especially as a trainee, trying to be in the adaptive sports world and having a great mentor along the way, kind of teach me all the ropes. Now, as faculty, hopefully I'll be able to continue this work at a different institution and help make Lakeshore even a better institution as well as UAB. So, my name is Johan. I'm wearing a blue suit, blue shirt, blue tie. My pronouns are he, him. I'm a young Hispanic male with young but a little bit of graying hair here. But yeah, so I'll hand it back to Dr. O and kind of let him start it off. So, first thing I point out is the fact that we did that visual description because that's something that not only during the Zoom era for the past two years, but I've learned, this is not something that I always knew, I've learned that our presentations are not always accessible. And if people can't access the things that we are doing, how can they possibly feel as though they're included? So, while we're going to talk about disability specifically today, my presentations are always framed with a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens. Now, as I understand it, one of the plenary speakers earlier this week talked about how our institutions and organizations should not rely upon diversity offices to then carry the torch for diversity, but it's something that should then be embedded in every single person's department, every unit, every institution. I could not agree more. One of the things I also say is that at times people don't know what they can do to be more inclusive. People don't realize how things may be perceived if they do not live or belong to a certain demographic. So, I will raise my hand here today and say it wasn't until nine years ago when I started to live life, as I call it, on both sides of the stethoscope, that I realized how ableist our world was. I realized how inaccessible the world was to individuals with disabilities. And so, this is just an end of one's perspective, but I'm coming with my own sort of humility to bear to say I'm not the best, I'm not the first or the best or the only, and I'm still in this constant learning process. So, hopefully that's something that we can all recognize. So, without further ado, we're going to start our disabusing disability presentation. Neither one of us has any disclosures. So, I'm going to tell a quick story to provide the framework. Now, the story doesn't resonate or hit the same way because of some of the clues that have been given away, but I'll still tell the story. So, earlier this year, I was invited to my friend's house. And before going to my friend's house, I was asked to do a COVID test. So, as I was wheeling down the road to the building where they gave me the address to do the COVID test, this is what I found. Now, there's nothing wrong with this picture except for the fact that, as a wheelchair user, there was no way for me to get in. So, luckily, I was with someone who went into the building and said, there's a gentleman that's supposed to be getting a COVID test before he goes on to this next destination and he can't get inside. So, they came and allowed me to do the self-swab outside while other people that were going to the same destination came in and out and in and out and saw me sitting there. So, then afterwards, we went into where we were going and we were having a conversation. And the purpose of this conversation was to talk about how certain policies had impacted our communities. Now, as physicians, sometimes we stay in our lane and we think that being clinicians or researchers or teachers is the only thing we do and the only way that we can have impact. But, at this point, I recognized an opportunity to talk about things in a way that people don't always hear. So, rather than talking about the policies that were implemented and how they impacted our community, I talked about the experience I had that morning of trying to get my COVID test before being able to go into the building that I was going to. I said that we can implement the best policies in the world, but if the individuals with whom we're trying to then support and benefit cannot access them, how are they going to then be able to reap whatever benefits that it is? If I can't get my COVID test or my COVID vaccine because of an inaccessible testing or vaccine site, if this wasn't 65, 70 degrees and a bright and sunny day with someone else that was with me, if this was the middle of the night or early in the morning, if it was very cold or rainy, I might just not come back. I might not know how to then get that access. And so, at my friend's house that day, I had an opportunity to then talk to the individuals of the White House about how their Biden and Harris administrative policies were great, but were not hitting the communities that they had to hit because of something as blatantly obvious as that that morning. That if I can be invited to the White House and can still not get access to the place that I'm supposed to be getting a necessary procedure done, imagine how all of these things are happening across the country. If we cannot expect that even in the highest office, that we recognize the inaccessibility of the built environment in which we are in, then how are we going to be able to create these policies and expect people to benefit from them? So, that's the framework that I'd like to lay. I did not do it in an accusatory negative way. I really just did it in a way to say, we all still have work to do. And I'm sure nine times out of 10, you remember to make things accessible. But that one time that we forget, there are so many people that are going to be impacted. While we are 32 years post the ADA now, we all know that our world is not as accessible as it should be, despite having that piece of legislation in place. So, this conversation is a way that we as clinicians, as physicians, can just try in everything we do to then make sure we're providing access. And as Dr. LaTorre mentioned, we're going to talk about adaptive sports today. Because in my history, I was an academic All-American track athlete at Stanford. I'll talk about that a bit. But that is how I got into this world. So, we're going to jump right into the presentation. I show this image here, which is an image of me jumping through the sky and triple-jumping at Stanford, graduating from Michigan Medical School and jumping. And then a picture of my family that are all physicians or PhDs. Not to then be a pat on my back, but to say, this is what I saw as my world. Everyone in my family had some sort of professional degree. I'd been given access to prestigious institutions. I had this education. I was a very, very active athlete. And I thought that I was going to have significant impact in the world based on that. Now, that all changed when this happened. And as you heard, I had a C6 incomplete spinal cord injury in my third year of orthopedic surgery residency. I had no idea what access I was then going to have. In fact, I had a little bit of an idea what access I wouldn't have because of what I saw our patients going through. But I still didn't recognize just how ableist the world was. Because it was not something that I had experienced on a day-to-day basis. I didn't realize how inaccessible things were. And so immediately I had to question, what was it that I was going to be able to do with my life? How was I going to have this impact? I thought that because of my Deerfield, Stanford, Michigan, Yale, Notre Dame degrees, that I deserved some sort of access to things. But it was very, very difficult to then see that I was being excluded from things that I thought I should be allowed in. I tell people that, believe it or not, I've been a black man my entire life. But it wasn't until I started to experience life on the other side of the stethoscope that I felt what it was truly like to be discriminated against. Now listen to that, because I have been discriminated against in major ways as a black man. So make no mistake, this is not to say that racism was not live and well in my family and my life. It was that the ableism that I then experienced was something that my education could not overcome, my pedigree could not overcome, my family could not overcome. And so if that was what I was experiencing at my level with my access, then imagine how the majority of our patients are experiencing it. So I show this image now, which is an image of me on two sides of this, of me in a standing frame wheelchair. This was the thing that I thought was that first step of access that allowed me to then get back into medicine. Now I will say that I was very excited about this chair. I'm still very excited about this chair. But when I give this presentation, I show this slide now, I add a different piece into it. So there's a film that's going to be coming out in some time. And I showed Judy Heumann, who is a disability rights activist, the little teaser to the film. And when she watched it, she said, you know, Fermi, if I didn't know you before this, I don't know that I would have wanted to. And I thought, whoa, I thought we were friends. Judy, like what gives? And she said, well, you have all this huffing and puffing and walking and all this macho stuff. You have a platform to be able to talk about disability. And while it's all well and good that you were able to regain function and walk, what message are you sending if you make it seem like the only reason you're now able to then have an impact is because you've regained that function? What about all the people that did not regain their function? What about those that never had that function? Now, I was in this sort of catch-22 place where I thought, well, as a physician, isn't our job to try to restore that function? Isn't that what we're trying to do? And the way that I've been able to sort of navigate this line is to say, we can encourage people to regain as much function as they can. But what we should also do is make sure that if people do not regain that function or if people do not ever have that function, that they are not then destined to a life of lesser-than. That they do not feel as though they're lesser-than because they cannot do X, Y, or Z. And so there are a lot of these sensational stories around the hero story of recovery. And it's this tough juxtaposition to have between that person that does regain function and that's exciting and positive. But making sure that we're not building this ableist narrative that the only reason that that person has now value is because of that function. And that the environment in which we live, we need to make sure it's accessible to the diversity of individuals that we see, rather than making that individual feel as though there's something wrong with them. So that is just what sort of got us into this conversation of disability. I want to very quickly breeze through these slides, which many of you have seen before. But this is the image of individuals that are trying to watch a baseball game on the other side of a fence. The two images show three people, I call them tall, medium, and short, each standing on one box on one side. When each is on one box, the tall and the medium individual can see the game, but the short individual cannot. That says equality. On the other side, it has those same individuals, but now the boxes have been moved such that the tall individual is not on any box, medium individual is still on one box, shortest individual is now standing on two boxes. With this one, everyone can see the game, and it says equity. Now this slide is used to talk about leadership and DE&I at times to say equality and equity are not the same thing. Equality is giving everyone the same thing, whereas equity is giving them what they need to have access. Now unfortunately when I show this slide, some people look at this and see something different. There was someone that left a comment and said, why don't those, insert racial slur here, buy tickets like everyone else and watch the game from the inside. I'll say it again. Why don't those, insert racial slur here, buy tickets like everyone else and watch the game from the inside. I do that not to be controversial or jarring, but to say that when we look at something, two people can see the same image and see a very different problem. And the toughest part is that the reality is more like this. Now I have a third pane to the slide that says reality. In reality, the tall individual is standing on multiple boxes, medium individual is still on their one box, and now the short individual is in a box-sized hole. It's easy to talk about DE&I with cartoon characters, but when we talk about it in real life, about what access we're providing, it's a bit more difficult. But here the reality shows that there's some people that have more boxes than they may need, and some people that are starting from behind already. Now this nuanced conversation, however, is to say, I don't know what that tall individual did to deserve those boxes. They very well may have worked very hard for those boxes and earned every single one of them. Similarly, the person in that box-sized hole may have dug it for themselves, but it may also have been something that was a systemic injustice that then they had nothing to do with. So we don't always know what gives someone privilege or what subjects them to prejudice, but we as clinicians, as physicians, we are then here to then be agnostic of all of that and to provide access and to provide care. And so you're probably wondering how does this have anything to do with disability or adaptive sports, and that's with this last one. This last one brings that disability picture into it, because I tell people that no matter how many boxes you were to give me, it would not then give me access to watching that game. So in this last slide, in broader DE&I conversations, I talk about the different races that are trying to be displayed here. They look like there's different genders as well. There's the rainbow in the top corner to represent the LGBTQ community, but disability is how I then pull this in now, to say that the resources that people need may be different. If you take some of that wood and instead build a ramp, we say that everyone can use the ramp while not everyone can use the stairs, so why don't we build more ramps to then give people the access that they need. So with that, I'm going to let Dr. LaTorre talk a bit about the programs that we built at the University of Michigan to try to give people more of those ramps. So here on the slides, you can see that this is the adaptive sports and fitness kind of the program in a broad sense, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about adaptive sports in general. So before my first real job at UAB, I was a trainee at Michigan, both for residency and fellowship. So as a resident, I was very very fortunate to meet Dr. O practically on my first day on campus, and he gave a grand rounds talk about his view and vision of adaptive sports, and I was immediately mesmerized. I was like, I need to know this guy. He knows what's going on. So I talked to him. I was like, can you be my mentor? He was like, for sure, come on. I was like, okay, sounds good. Next thing I know, I'm a pickup basketball, helping out putting chairs together, learning about adaptive sports equipment, transferring, and it was a hands-on experience that we just needed someone to like be able to be there to be able to help out, and Dr. O gave me some responsibility with that. But remember, I was a PGY2. Dr. O was a new faculty as well, so he was struggling to finish those of those notes in clinic, and I was just struggling to survive, figure out how the system works. I'm on call. I'm on, you know, trying to get chairs together while answering pages and things like that, and but we made it work, but to credit to Dr. O, on top of that, when we all went home after that, he stayed up, did grants, talked to donors, did all these little things that, little by little, we started getting a bit more funding for the program, and we were able to then expand to having pickup basketball more than just once a week. Now it was becoming, you know, twice a month and a little bit more frequently. We started adding wheelchair tennis to the recreational programming, and all throughout this, our little organization, which was just three of us at the start, started to grow. Some students would come in and help out, some residents, etc., and the program started to expand more and more, and this all happened around my PGY2 year, just to give you a little time frame. Then, if we want to create a collegiate team, we're kind of missing the collegiate student-athlete, right? So how do we go about recruitment? Well, we were very fortunate that we found out someone who Dr. O actually knew was then going to be coming to the University of Michigan when I was going to be starting my PGY3 year, which is here. Our first individual I wanted to highlight, Caden Baxter. So Caden is from Michigan and had his spinal cord injury when he was 15, and after rehab, very bright individual who obviously wanted to go to Michigan, who wouldn't, even though his family, all are Notre Dame fans. And he came to Michigan, and just like any other freshman, everyone has challenges that they'll face adjusting to a, you know, a different world, being away from home, etc., but Caden has more challenges than most because of his mobility issues. And Michigan's cold, so when it gets, when it's winter, it's icy, and just to get into class, while you and I just walk through the door, no problem, he has to park his car on the other side of the building, then roll to the other side to then get inside to the accessible entrance, just to go to class. So that whole thing may take up 30, 40 plus minutes just to be able to have the opportunity to learn. So these little things did weigh on Caden a lot, but there was one thing that always made him want to stay, even though he considered at one point even transferring, and that was adaptive sports. Adaptive sports was, for him, a community where he could meet people, exercise, play, and just be a part of something bigger. He was very excited to be our first undergraduate student athlete, and was very gung-ho about trying to do whatever he could to do so, and for example, he never played tennis even before his injury. He just kind of found out about it. We also had a graduate student come in at the same time, and so we decided that wheelchair tennis would be our sport, that we would first, be our first inaugural University of Michigan sport, because you only need two individuals to start a program compared to basketball, which we initially thought would be our first option, because it's a little bit harder. You need at least five, and of course you need a bench as well. So all these little things made it a bit more difficult, but nonetheless, Caden was like, I got to know how to play. Like, what do I do? So Dr. O gave him the opportunity with these funds to then be able to attend different camps around the U.S. to learn a little bit more about the basics of wheelchair tennis. So he came back from that, but now we need to keep those skills up. So what are we going to do as a program? So Caden then started practicing, as you can see in all these pictures. He literally was practicing five days a week from 7 o'clock to 9 p.m. every single day. When you think about that, the varsity athletes at Michigan practice during the daytime, and for tennis, especially where the climate's colder, there's only so many courts that are indoors, so we're not able to practice during normal, regular times. So he was willing to do all the schoolwork, etc., come to train from 7 to 9, and then, you know, do some more schoolwork after, and he had to put in that time. But then we have another issue, right? Who's going to be the coach? That was, at first, we had some volunteers. We had the men's coach from the varsity team actually come help out a bit. Some assistant coaches would also come and help out a bit, but Caden needed practice every single day, and that's where I, as a trainee, saw that now that I'm a PGY3, I'm doing less call, so I have a bit more free time, and I'm willing to put that effort in to be able to help him progress as a student-athlete. So I then became one of his coaches and was there with him every day, trying to get him a little bit better, and that hard work did pay off, and substantially so. So here you can see Caden has won multiple awards. He's been winning pretty much something at every tournament since this past year. The picture down in the middle is when we won second place as a team at Wheelchair Nationals. We lost to Bama, but this was our first time ever playing in our tournament, and we got second place. That's pretty good, right? But most importantly, he didn't just do well on the field or on the court, but he also did very well off the field as a student-athlete, not just as an athlete, and he was an academic All-American every single year he's been at Michigan. On top of that, recently he also had a big announcement that he's now a degree-breaking-limits athlete, so you can all check him out online, on social media, and you can hear more about his story, where he kind of shares everything he's gone through and what adaptive sports has done for his life. So now I want to pivot to our next athlete, which is Spencer. So Spencer came to us kind of without us knowing at all, to be honest. So at one of these camps that Caden and Dr. O went to, they were there for tennis and skiing, and then this little boy comes up to them and goes, hey, can I go play with you guys? Let's play some basketball, though. And they're like, yeah, let's do it. So let's play. While they're playing, he just nonchalantly throws out, oh, by the way, my coach is going to your school. And you're like, coach? Who? What? Turns out it's Spencer. So Spencer actually graduated from the University of Illinois, was a wheelchair basketball athlete, and was coming to Michigan to get his degree in epidemiology. So we contacted Spencer right away, and we're like, Spencer, you need to be a part of this somehow. And he, if there's one thing about Spencer, he is the most selfless person, hard-working person you'll ever meet. And once he came onto campus, his goal was always to play basketball. And in these pictures, you'll see that Michigan eventually had a basketball team, but when we first started, we didn't really have the team just yet. We still didn't have enough recruitment, enough funding to really kind of have that team set in stone. But thankfully, the Miller family was a huge donor for the program, was able to help out more with funding, and we were able to then finally recruit some more members to then create this team. Things took a little bit longer than we would have, you know, liked, but you know, COVID was happening, so that delayed things. But Spencer didn't stop when we said, hey, no wheelchair basketball for a little bit while we're still trying to develop things. He was just like, hey, can I just do some tennis then, and I'll happily learn. And when I say Spencer is a ridiculous athlete, I think I'm kind of understanding how good he is. He never picked up a racket until that day, and a year later, he has kind of gone off. You don't see any pictures of it here, but he also won nationals in tennis in Division A, which is a division right under the Open, which is kind of the professional competition. And on top of that, he was part of our team that won second place. He graduated this past year, got his degree, and then most in August, before I even talk about this great picture of him winning a gold medal here, he actually participated, he was part of the team that participated in the wheelchair basketball nationals for the first time, even got some big upsets there as well. And they caught the eye of some of the coaches there, invited him to Team USA for tryouts. He excelled, then made the team, went to Brazil, won the gold with Team USA, and will be traveling to Dubai for world championships. And they've already qualified for Paris 2024, so we're hoping we'll see him there and bring back another gold medal for our country here. And I've been lucky enough to be able to coach both of these individuals pretty much. I've seen them every day almost for my past like four years while I was at Michigan, and I can't tell you enough how proud I am it is to like be able to be a part of someone's growth and watching them grow not just as an athlete, a student-athlete, but also as a person. And I've, it's been an immense honor to be able to be a part of these two student-athletes from Michigan. And then I want to just touch on two other athletes that I didn't have the most impact in terms of coaching them because it was a different sport, but we were all together in strength and conditioning, and we all did different things pending our sports, you know, what kind of needs we needed, but we were all in the same building. So I first want to talk about Sam. Sam's a little bit different than these other student-athletes because he was already in the adaptive sports world way before coming to Michigan. And Sam had, was diagnosed with cancer, osteosarcoma, ended up getting a rotationplasty, was a very competitive kid, wanted to keep going, found adaptive sports, loved the high jump, and pretty much took off from there. He, before Tokyo 2020, he had won everything you could possibly win except that elusive gold medal. So when we found out he was going to Tokyo, we had to make sure that we were all in attendance, virtually of course, to watch him compete and hopefully bring back that gold. So I want you to, just to kind of set the scene a little bit, Sam has one shot to make the jump. If he doesn't make this jump, he goes to, he gets a bronze. If he makes the jump, though, he gets a gold. So pretty much all the pressure's on him. It's a cold, rainy night in Tokyo to add the pressure and, like, the ambiance there. And so I want to show a little video of us all watching it there. And so at this video, we're at Dr. O's house, and a bunch of the members and student-athletes of students, we're all there just cheering him on, and we're all super excited. You can see Dr. O's probably the most excited. And as a side note, you know, we were able to catch this little moment on camera, but this is how Dr. O is in general, in life. He's everyone's biggest cheerleader. When I got into fellowship, when Spencer got to Team USA, for example, he's the same excitement no matter what it is. So Sam obviously won that gold, and on his spare time, he's also a medical student at Michigan. So on top of that, he is a very busy, as we all know how medical school is, but he took the time to go win a gold medal, come back, and continue his studies. I'm trying to convince him to go PM&R. He's kind of leaning towards surgery, but we still got some time, so maybe. And then our last athlete I want to highlight is Maddie. And so Maddie had a slightly different perspective to adaptive sports. So Maddie has CP, and she was growing up, she was able to participate with all her peers, but as they started getting older and getting into high school, she wasn't able to compete at those levels to get on those varsity and JV teams. So she kind of just stopped doing sports in general and started trying to do other things with her life, but she always wanted to do more, exercise more. So she was very bright, got into Michigan, is trying to get a degree in, I think, biomedical engineering, and serendipitously, you can see a photo here of, on the left of another student athlete, Katherine, which is our first track and field athlete, and she randomly saw her in her dorm, saw that she was walking a bit different, was like, I think she has CP, just like me. So Katherine's very direct, walked up to her and was like, hey, I have CP, do you have CP? Maddie was like, yeah. And Katherine was like, hey, I'm part of this track team, you should come, it's gonna be so much fun. And Maddie probably was a little pressured, so it was like, sure. Came to track and field, was just playing recreationally, kind of every so often, running, doing stuff that Katherine was doing, but she ended up starting to fall in love with the sport, little by little, finding out what's her niche there. She's like, oh, I kind of like jumping, I kind of like sprinting, which is very different from what Katherine likes, which is a lot of throwing, like shot put and javelin, etc. And well, she's like, I think I should put a little bit more time into this, because I think I'm doing okay and I can do probably better if I just worked a little bit harder at this. And she was right, she has junior national record in long jump in her classification, she's won multiple sprinting medals in her classification at the junior national level as well, and has been super, super successful. So I just want to highlight how adaptive sports has touched all these student-athletes in different ways, and at different levels. We've had Maddie start off recreationally and want to do a little bit more, and start being more competitive. We've had the tennis and basketball team collegiately, Sam and hopefully Spencer, at the Paralympic level as well. So I want to turn over to Dr. O to kind of talk a little bit more about exercise and providing this to everyone. So I want to thank Dr. Latorre, because without him, those early days, we would not be able to be where we are, right? To bring us back, the reason that we're telling you about these athletes, the reason that we're here, is that we were two physicians at a health system that recognized that there wasn't an adaptive sports program. We recognized that there were student athletes, prospective student athletes, individuals in the community that would benefit from something like this. And while it was not part of my job originally, it was not part of Johan's job originally, you know, the idea that we can create something, carve out time, even though we have clinical time that we have to be seeing our patients all the time, we were able to build a team of individuals that then believed in this work, right? So talking to Rachel before this, this isn't something that is already baked into all the work that we do. But when we recognize that there's something we can do, I tell people, don't worry about eating the whole elephant, right? People say, how do you eat an elephant, cliche, one bite at a time. And that's sort of what we said here is that we are not going to be able to be all things to all people at all times. But each of us has a sphere of influence. And I think that as physicians, we don't recognize how wide that sphere sometimes is. We don't recognize the impact that we can have, we don't know the resources that we have. And in particular, in this space, it did not take a whole lot to be able to then carve out time and space to find partners, to find individuals that can help create that. Now, I'm talking about this here because I didn't learn about adaptive sports until I was at formerly RIC, now Shirley Ryan, doing my inpatient rehab. I'd been a physician for years at that point. I'd been an athlete for all my life, and I didn't even know adaptive sports existed. And so we believe that there's an opportunity for all of us as clinicians to have that conversation with every single patient and even people that aren't our patients. Because what we've said is that adaptive sports are not sports for people with disabilities. Adaptive sports are just truly accessible and inclusive sport that anyone can play. This slide here is talking about all the different levels that needs to exist in your local community, just like your YMCA. The college level should have sports. The elementary school level should have it in their PE classes. The professional levels exist. Anywhere that sport exists, it should be accessible and inclusive. Not just because people want to then go to the Paralympics, but because physical fitness, as we all know, physical activity is important for all of us, and it's something that we should have all access to. And so what we were trying to do at Michigan is sort of reconceptualize what these equitable opportunities are. So if you're the only person in your community that has a disability, they may think that, no, we cannot sustain an adaptive sports program here. But what our program was trying to show, once again, is that whether you use a wheelchair or not, whether you have a disability or not, if you nine individuals that are without physical disability want to play wheelchair basketball, you now have these nine people without a disability and the one person with, creating that five-on-five that allows people to have access. And so we're trying to sort of change this narrative about what adaptive sport could be. We're trying to make people see that by providing that additional access, you are then benefiting others and you're benefiting yourself as well, because you are still getting physical activity. So what we're going to show you here is, we already showed you this sort of infographic. We'll quickly go through some of the different things we have. We recognize first that not everybody likes sports, but physical fitness is important. So one of our first steps was that we wrote a grant to the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation funded us to partner with our local Center for Independent Living. So most of your communities will have a Center for Independent Living. And so by partnering with that center, we renovated one of their spaces to create an accessible gym, put equipment in there, and that is where our team during the pandemic worked out, because we were not given access to Michigan varsity facilities or recreational facilities. But it was also open to any member of the community through the Center for Independent Living. So access to physical fitness was something that we were able to then support by partnering with our local Center for Independent Living, and that's our ACL gym. Now that was early on. It looks nicer than that now, but those are some early pictures. The next thing that we'll talk about is our Adaptive Sport and Inclusive Recreation Initiative. And that is where we then partnered with the public school system and another funding agency, the Michigan Health Endowment Fund, to embed adaptive sports into the PE curriculum of our public schools. And so here's a quick video that sort of gives a description of that that will show that does it better than I can. adaptive sports and inclusive recreation. We all have different abilities. Some people don't need glasses to see, some need glasses, and some cannot see. Some people are born with long legs, short legs, and some are born without legs. We have to remember that we're all different in our own way. While some of us look different and have different abilities, a similarity we all share is our love of being active. Participating in physical activity like team sports makes us healthy, helps us perform better at school, and it's an opportunity to make friends. Generally we need skates for ice hockey, cleats for soccer, or a bicycle for cycling. Some adaptive sports may require equipment like a sports chair for wheelchair basketball or wheelchair tennis. The sports chair is different from other wheelchairs you may have seen before. It's designed for speed and performance. Some sports may not require specialized equipment like city volleyball, and some sports are new all together. It introduces fun new ways to include people of all abilities like goalball. With adaptive sports we can include everyone so we can all enjoy sports and recreation together. So that was the video that we put together to then introduce this program to the public school system. What we were able to do was we partnered with our Ann Arbor Public Schools. The PE lead there met with us, and then we have what we called our Abilities Awareness Event and our Disability Awareness Trainings where we won't go into the school. We bought equipment that then was sort of a traveling set of equipment because we could not afford to buy something for every single school. And so what we did was we had packages of equipment that rotated around in the city that then we helped them facilitate that transportation with a trailer that we had that we also purchased through grant funds. And so the main PE teacher then taught all the different PE teachers within the district our curriculum. What we did in creating the curriculum was we took the PE curriculum that they had to teach anyway, right? They say in module 1.2 you need to learn how to throw a ball overhand. In module 2.4 you need to learn how to catch a ball. You can do that in adaptive sports just like you can do that in able-bodied sport. And so this way it wasn't adapted PE that we were trying to then change. We were trying to change the general educational PE curriculum so that those sixth, seventh, eighth graders were not looking at their peers with disabilities and thinking that they can only be the scorekeeper or the manager. They can't play with us as well. So everyone was getting to play, and it wasn't in this separate module. It was baked into their curriculum, and so it allowed the PE teachers to adopt it as well because sort of the activation energy was low given the fact that we made it such that they did not have to then do anything different. All they had to do was teach their curriculum, and we provided them with the equipment, and it circulated. And the thing about it is that people are now seeing that this is not some sort of disability-related thing. This was just inclusive. This was sport. It allowed those students to look at wheelchair basketball, wheelchair tennis, seated volleyball, and goalball as sports. It allowed them to see their peers as students and athletes just like them. And so our goal is to say that if we can change the stigma around disability at that age, then we won't get to the point where people look at me now and say, you know, Dr. O, with all due respect, we just can't understand how a doctor that can't take care of themselves can take care of our child. So we're not saying that we don't like you, but we want the best doctor we can have. And if you're disabled, you know, I have questions. Many of us have probably seen what's happening right now with the Pennsylvania Senate race where one of the candidates had to use captions during one of his interviews, and the ableist conversations that happen after that. And if you're not familiar with it, I'll quickly tell you. A man is recovering from a stroke and is in the Pennsylvania Senate race. In his first interview, sort of, with the media after his stroke, he used CART, he used computer-assisted real-time transcription. So he was looking at a screen that has his, the words being read to him. The way that the media talked about this was questioning his fitness, his fitness to serve, questioning whether he was going to be able to do the job simply because he was using an accommodation. The disability was automatically something that they were saying could disqualify him from being able to have access to the job that he was looking for. Now, I understand that there are lots of nuances in that particular situation, and I'm not actually speaking about this individual's fitness at all. But what I'm saying is that the way that the world views accommodations is that if you are disabled, that means that you can't in some way. If you are disabled, you are less than. People don't have the same expectations of individuals with disabilities. We're not asking every single child that rolls into our office what sport they're playing in school. If you have spina bifida, CP, cerebral palsy, and that is what we're trying to change this narrative around. Sport is a very powerful vehicle to then bring people together. And if we're recognizing that if we start to do that at this age, then we'll be able to have people that when they're 20, 30, 40 years old, do not view disability in the same way that we view it now. So last but not least is we have our Prescription to Play Program. The Prescription to Play Program was one that was funded by the Craig H. Nielsen Foundation, and that's essentially a summary of what we're doing right now, is to then get the health system to see that adaptive sport is something that we should be providing. We should be making sure that we know what adaptive sports resources exist in our community. We should be able to direct our patients towards them. We should be able to give access to our patients to do so. And so this is just really a quick summary of what our program is. I don't have to read the words on the slide, but it encapsulates what I just mentioned. We are just trying to connect athletic trainers, sports medicine physicians, orthopedic surgeons, pediatricians to the fact that adaptive sports exist. We want to then provide them with the tools and the resources to be able to then point their patients in the right direction. We have another person that I'm going to introduce very briefly. Charlotte Poplowski is sitting right here in the front. She's a medical student at UCLA who's applying in PM&R right now, and she's one of our partners that is doing very similar work in Los Angeles, because she's taking individuals that are medical students, residents, fellows, faculty, and taking them to adaptive sports competitions all across Southern California, and they're providing the medical coverage. So I have an adjunct assistant professor of orthopedics position at UCLA, and we're trying to work together now to then have both of our prescription to play programs be one of these examples of not just introducing people to the world of adaptive sports, but also making sure that adaptive sports competitions have the clinical care that they need as well. So if any of you are part of AMSSM, you may see me in a couple months speaking there as well about this work, and we hope that then we'll be even further advanced, because the goal is to make sure that the sports medicine community recognizes that, and if you want to talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, it's not all about race or gender or ethnicity. Disability is an element of diversity as well. DE&I means that we are providing access for all. We talk about equity and inclusion, but if we are not including the disability community in all the things that we are doing, we're not equitable or inclusive at all. And so that is really the basis of what our prescription to play program is, using the health system to be able to do that. These slides, you know, we're running into time, so this is just everything that we talked about, about what sport does, about how individuals need access to physical health and wellness, individuals specifically living with spinal cord injury based on the Craig H. Nielsen Foundation. This is for everybody, but that particular grant was for that. You know, I told Rachel that I was going to make sure to be specific about how these things can get done, because I know at the beginning, you sometimes hear presentations and you don't know how people got there. I'll be the first to say we have an amazing team of individuals that was built really on blood, sweat, and tears at first, because this was not carved out of my time. It was not carved out of his time. Even at the end of his time at his fellowship, we've been still trying to figure out if we can get this formally embedded into the curriculum of the fellowship program, rather than it being something he does in his free time. Many of you probably know Dr. Sherry Blauwet, but we've been also working to try to see how can we create a sort of a foundational curriculum that's embedded in either Pam and Our Residency or fellowship programs that then actually does have a track for individuals interested in adaptive sports medicine. Dr. Melissa Tinney is probably around here somewhere, and she's got an adaptive sports medicine clinic at Michigan Medicine. She's one of our PM&R colleagues here and focuses on adaptive sports and works in the VA as well. And so there's many teammates that we have at this institution working to then make sure that this is not just an also-ran, but it's embedded into the fabric of what we do, that we make sure that we know what clinical competencies are necessary, that we know what sort of ways that we can get reimbursement for people coming to be seen in the clinic. So I know that there are lots of things we discussed today, and we're not going to have the time to go through all of the individual steps, but this goal is to say that having a seat at the table, and I'm going to go back to the beginning and tell you why we put all these things together, having a seat at the table, literally that table I showed you in the White House, and being within whatever the sphere of influence it is that you have, that is where you can have impact. And you don't always know how wide that sphere is. You don't know which table you're going to be invited to. But if you then recognize that in every table at which you sit, you should look around and see who is not there, and then do whatever we can to then elevate those voices of those people. And so that is what we can do with Adapt to Sport. That's what we can do in our profession by making sure that people see that disability is not inability. We talked about this, and I just want to end with this, the FIGS partnership that we have as well, is that FIGS is a scrubs company, as many of you know, but they are going to then partner with us to then get into that clinical space as well and show physicians and clinicians that prescription to play of literally thinking about, here is this prescription for you to go out and be active. We're even trying to get it within Michigan Medicine into the after-visit summary so that when you see your patients, you can just click on this button and then pop in all the information about the Adapt to Sport's resources in your community. And then it's just even easier again that then the patient has that information, they have that access. Because I will guarantee you, every one of your communities has something somewhere. You just may not know about it yet. And so if we can then work to create sort of this system, this network, where we can say, this is where the Adapt to Sport's programs exist, we have an interactive map that we're currently working on, so that we can say, you live in the Boston area, here are all the individuals doing Adapt to Sport's, put this in your after-visit summary, and that's how your patients can benefit from it. So we've gone well over our time, but wanted to show this as Rachel brought up, that we've been humbled and honored to then receive this visionary prize, because we don't do this work for the recognition. You know, Dr. LaTorre is here and is talking about all the efforts. The thing that he didn't mention is that that video that you saw of Sam was at like six o'clock in the morning or something, because it was Tokyo time, and all of our program came super early to my house to be able to watch. And so we do it because we love it. We do it because we're passionate about it, but it doesn't hurt to be recognized every now and then. And so we show this because, yeah, this has been a pretty cool week, and it's exciting to then have people see the unseen sometimes. And I don't like talking about unseen or unheard, because I think that perpetuates sort of the negative, you know, mindset and stereotypes around disability. But yes, disability is not something that many people see. And I know that everyone sitting in this audience here talking to Rachel about this, while I'm honored to be part of this group, even though I didn't do PM in our residency, I recognize the fact that this profession is not a profession that is often seen. I recognize the fact that you sometimes get confused with, you know, other professions. People then say, oh, that means that you're just a non-operative orthopedic surgeon. No. The specialty is important. The specialty is something that has value in every single person's life. It's something that sometimes you are the unseen ones. You are the ones that don't always have access. You are the ones that are putting your blood, sweat, and tears into making sure that the lives of your patients, they're able to have the access and the function that they need to do what it is that they can. And so I thank all of you for the work that you do in that space. I thank you for inviting us to then be part of that team. And I'm going to end with this little poem that someone introduced to me that now I end many of my presentations with. So this poem is from Maya Angelo, and it's called The Human Family. I note the obvious differences in the human family. Some of us are serious, some thrive on comedy. Some declare their lives are lived as true profundity, and others claim they really live the real reality. The variety of our skin tones can confuse, bemuse, delight. Brown and pink and beige and purple, tan and blue and white. I've sailed upon the seven seas and stopped in every land. I've seen the wonders of the world, not yet one common man. I know 10,000 women called Jane and Mary Jane, but I've not seen any two who really were the same. Mirror twins are different, although their features jibe, and lovers think quite different thoughts when laying side by side. We love and lose in China, we weep on England's moors, and laugh and moan in Guinea, and thrive on Spanish shores. We seek success in Finland, are born and die in Maine. In minor ways we differ, in major we're the same. I note the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike. We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike. We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike. Thank you. Don't you know

inaccessibility

inclusive policies

environments for individuals with disabilities

ableism

equity versus equality

systemic injustices

adaptive sports and fitness program

Adaptive Sports and Inclusive Recreation Initiative

physical education curriculum

Prescription to Play Program

healthcare providers