Dr. Steven Dilkas is at the Paralympic Games!

By Shauna Mazenes

Dr. Steven Dilkas believes in movement as medicine.

That’s what guides his career as a physiatrist at UHN’s West Park Healthcare Centre and will continue to motivate him in Paris as the doctor for Canada’s men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams at the 2024 Summer Paralympics, which opened on Wednesday, Aug. 28.

“I’m a believer in the importance of physical activity, exercise, movement and its health impacts,” says Dr. Dilkas. “I also believe that sport, and the power of sport, can heal.”

As a physiatrist, his goal is to enhance the physical function and quality of life in patients who have significant medical conditions. Whether it’s injuries of the brain, spinal cord or musculoskeletal system, he’s helped countless patients achieve what some would have considered impossible.

For those patients, it’s not about gold medals and world records, but rehabilitation to regain and sometimes surpass the function they had before they arrived at West Park.

“I have patients who are going from a wheelchair to learning how to walk again,” says Dr. Dilkas, who specializes in amputee rehabilitation, prosthetics and orthotics.

“And that’s just the beginning.”

He says the most rewarding part of his job is not only helping patients be physically active but seeing them become amazing at what they do. He sees parasports as an extension of that rehabilitation process — the highest level of pushing limits and challenging what is functionally possible.

“For me, it’s that continuum, that journey along the spectrum — and I love that I get to see it all,” says Dr. Dilkas, who is attending his fourth consecutive Paralympics as a team doctor.

In Paris, he will be responsible for keeping athletes healthy and enabling them to perform at their best — a job that starts well in advance of the Games. After the past two Paralympics, which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, he’s learned a lot about infection prevention and keeping people safe.

In addition to infection prevention, heat mitigation, cooling strategies, and air and water quality control are among the things he will be monitoring.

Dr. Dilkas says he hopes his role at the Paralympics will enable his athletes to achieve their personal best, something he’s also helped many of his patients at West Park do.

He recently treated a young man from Ukraine with a congenital infection, which led to multiple complications including deformities of his legs. The patient had never walked — until he was referred to West Park following lower leg amputations — and took his first steps with prosthetics at age 21.

“For someone who was crawling around and not leaving their house much, to walking for the first time and learning how to tie shoelaces — that’s pretty special,” Dr. Dilkas says.

He hasn’t only treated young people. Dr. Dilkas once had a 95-year-old patient who lost his leg above the knee. He was the oldest person to get a prosthesis at West Park.

“That man was remarkable in his own right to have the ability, perseverance and motivation to learn how to walk again, no matter how hard it was,” Dr. Dilkas says. “Seeing how people’s lives can really change for the better is what inspires me to be in this.

“And one of the great things about parasports is that everybody has a story like that.”