Honolulu Marathon 2024: Spotlighting medical professionals
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - The Honolulu Marathon is this Sunday, and medical professionals will be there to help.
God forbid anything should happen, but should it actually happen? Dr. Alex Berk and his team are prepared.
Dr. Berk is a race medical director for the Honolulu Marathon.
“This is gonna be my fourth year doing the marathon. It’s been an incredible experience over the last couple of years. We’ve taken the marathon and I think we’ve created such an intense and incredible medical response basically to anything that could happen on the entire course, we took it from basically a few aid stations. We doubled the number of aid stations over the last couple of years. We have doubled the number of volunteers and even physicians all throughout the course. So over the last four years, we’ve been able to recruit over 16 emergency medicine doctors to be at each aid station on the course. Our aid stations are set up basically about every mile and a half to two miles of the course. There’s 13 of them out on the course, plus the finish line tent area. So that’s 14 total aid stations with a quite a bit of a robust medical presence for anything that could go wrong,” said Dr. Berk.
Dr. Berk said there’s over 350 volunteers this year.
“We’re talking doctors and nurses. We have massage therapists out there. We have physical therapists, translators for Japanese translators. Yes. Our Japanese numbers are well into the 7-8000 range. So we have quite a number of them out there to help us take care of any patient that comes in,” Dr. Berk said.
HNN asked Dr. Berk what type of injuries they usually see during the race. He answered:
“So obviously, you know, running can cause almost anything from the most minor injuries which are our scrapes, you know, you fall down, you scrape your shin. We have wound care techniques for for that. Someone who’s running an endurance race gets a lot of different problems including chafing and other things that happen. So we have things for that as well. Obviously, while we’re really there though are for the most serious patients. So if you’re on the course, unfortunately, there is a statistic that about one in 100,000 runners will actually have a cardiac arrest on the course. So every single one of our aid stations comes equipped with the automated external defibrillator known as an AED. All of our personnel are trained to use it. We have a very robust ems presence and ability to transport off the course, whether it’s to the finish line tent where there’s more robust medical care or to our local hospital.”
Dr. Berk also introduces us to a portable laboratory that awaits runners at the finish line if they’re feeling a bit woozy from the treacherous 26.2 miles.
He says his job during the race is to make sure the runners are safe.
“So if we say, hey, come on over, just give us like five minutes and let us check you out.”
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