Thank you.
I have been searching for years and this week I finally found out what has been going on.
I share this here because it’s only fair that I show the lows because I have shown all the highs of my career. It turns out I have 3 abdominal tears ( 2 in the left rectus abdominis and one in the left oblique) along with a tear in the rectus abdominis connection to the bone and an old tear to the adductor connection and old abdominal tear that have since healed.
Pushing through pain is never a good idea but I have been pushing through it since winter of 2021 before the last Olympics. Every doctor I had gone to had not been able to find any serious issues so I would rest until the swelling or issue went down and then get back on the track. It’s been frustrating to have constant setbacks with no real answers.
I am so grateful to have finally found the answer, now I’m on another recovery journey
but I’m so excited to get back to hurdling and running without pain!
Sage Watson (@sagewatson) • Instagram photos and videos
#recovery #grateful #godisgood
Sage Watson’s coach calls her ‘ranch tough.’
The Canadian will have to overcome an injury hurdle at Tokyo Olympics Canadian automatically advanced to Tuesday’s semifinals in the 400-metre hurdles by finishing fourth in her opening heat. By Dave FeschukSports Columnist
TOKYO—It wasn’t long into Fred Harvey’s time coaching Canadian Olympian Sage Watson that she confirmed to him she possessed the mentality to be a great hurdler.
Harvey, the track and field coach at the University of Arizona, can tell you plenty of triumphant stories of Watson’s time in the program —
tales of the NCAA Division I championship she won in the 400-metre hurdles in 2017, and the myriad school records Watson broke en route. But never mind any of that. When Harvey wants to illustrate the qualities that separate Watson from athletes of comparable talent, he casts back to an evening training session in which the runner and her teammates were distracted by insect activity near the track.
“There is this ant carrying this beetle across the ground.
The beetle is dying, but it’s not dead yet. And Sage sees it, and she goes over and she steps on the thing,” Harvey said. “And the other girls are like, ‘Wow. What are you doing?’ And Sage says, ‘You’ve got to put it out of its misery. It’s going to be eaten alive.’ That’s her mentality. She is ranch tough.”
Sage is Ranch tough.
Harvey is referring, of course, to Watson’s upbringing up on the family cattle ranch near Medicine Hat, Alta., the base to which she retreated when the Olympics were postponed on account of COVID last year and Watson — who would end up spending five months with her family after most of eight years travelling the world as a track star — needed a safe place to continue to train. Rather than lament her lot in life, she relished the time spent with parents Wade and Jolene and younger brother Waylan. She kept up her strength in a weight room in a barn and honed her speed on the gravel road
where she first fell in love with running.
“I tell people about that story about the beetle, and they say, ‘Whoa. That’s kind of morbid,’” Harvey said. “And I say, ‘Well, no it’s not.’ If you think about when you grow up on a ranch and some of the things you need to do to survive and have your ranch continue to thrive, they’re things most people can’t do — they won’t do — and when you take that mentality into a hurdles race. The natural talent you have is one thing; a lot of people have the talent. A lot fewer people have the mentality to deal with the stresses and the pain that come at the back end of the race.”
It was the stress and the pain of the back end of Saturday’s heats of the 400-metre hurdles that nearly undid Watson. While she finished 11th in the event at the 2016 Rio Olympics — and while Harvey is of the belief that, at age 27, Watson has a couple of Olympics in her beyond this one, so long as she’s enjoying the craft — her expectations coming into Tokyo have been at least somewhat adjusted by injury.
Watson strained her lower back in June, a malady Harvey said probably never would have happened if not for an improvised training environment and reduced access to sports-medicine personnel on account of COVID restrictions. Watson knew she was in trouble when she attempted to haul the water jug she brings to training — which weighs in the range of 50 pounds — and couldn’t lift the thing.
“That was a really dark time, knowing I was less than two months away from this race today and I couldn’t even lift 50 pounds,” Watson said. “People don’t see those moments with athletes and Olympians, where you can’t even lift a water jug because you hurt yourself training or competing. I know the calendar. The time’s always ticking, the pressure’s always on.”
If there’ve been times in the lead-up to the Games when it’s felt like there was a piano strapped to her back, some of that weight was removed Saturday when Watson finished fourth in her opening heat to automatically advance to Tuesday’s semifinals.
The race wasn’t her best, she acknowledged, as evidenced by the left knee bloodied by contact with the eighth of 10 hurdles. But given her event is as stacked as it’s ever been — headlined by 21-year-old American Sydney McLaughlin, who set the world record of 51.90 at last month’s U.S. Olympic trials — the advancement wasn’t exactly a given for Watson. In an era in which six athletes other than McLaughlin broke the formidable 54-second mark this year, Watson’s personal best is 54.32. Getting to the final, in other words, will likely require her to better that mark.
Having just watched her heat from Tucson, Ariz., Harvey offered a theory on how she might. “What threw her off, quite frankly, was her lack of confidence in herself,” the coach said. “Coming from the seventh hurdle to the eighth hurdle, she did exactly what she thought she could do, but she didn’t trust it. Consequently, she kind of backed off the eighth hurdle, hit the hurdle and lost a lot of momentum.”
Watson is also slated to compete here as a member of Canada’s 4×400-metre relay team, which finished fourth at the 2016 Olympics. If Watson is happy to take input from the likes of Harvey, who was with Watson at the Rio Games but couldn’t make the trip here, she said she has logged off social media for the duration of the Games to avoid what she calls “couch coaches.” Though Watson is a bit of a star on TikTok, where she commands some 137,000 followers, she said she’s become exasperated by the unsolicited advice of armchair experts.
“I’ll never forget. One time a guy in Rio, I was going to the semifinals and he said,
‘You need to use your arms less when you run.’ And … being young, I was like, ‘Wait.
Do I use my arms too much?’ ”Watson said. “You start to question yourself …
So just for my sake I stay off of it.” Speaking of coaching, Watson spent part of the pandemic working as a volunteer coach with university-level athletes. If she’s nobody’s couch coach, Harvey will tell you she’s a real one. Ranch tough, indeed.
“That young lady, you look at her and she has blonde hair and you might think, ‘She’s so meek.’ No, no,” Harvey said. “Sage will let you know. If you ask her a question, you should make sure you want to know the answer. She’s going to give you exactly what she thinks.”
Paramedics are seen at the Dartmouth General Hospital in Dartmouth, N.S.
PHOTO BY THE CANADIAN PRESS/ANDREW VAUGHAN
FIRST READING: Why Canada intentionally limits its supply of doctors
Despite crippling physician shortages, the Canadian government still
imposes tight quotas banning the creation of new ones.
Author of the article: :Tristin Hopper
Published Feb 06, 2023
First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Thursday at 6:30 p.m. ET (and 9:30 a.m. on Saturdays), sign up here.
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This week, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh tried — and failed — to convene an emergency House of Commons debate on the privatization of Canadian health care.
As the Ontario government of Premier Doug Ford debuted a plan to outsource more health procedures to for-profit clinics, Singh warned that it would serve only to cannibalize the public system. “Health care is already dramatically understaffed, and for-profit facilities will poach doctors and nurses,” said Singh.
It’s a point on which Singh is probably correct – although he likely disagrees with the remedy. While Canadians are increasingly warm to the idea of private options to alleviate a worsening crisis of health-care wait times, it won’t do much unless Canada can also break its onerous controls on health-care supply. At the same time as politicians of all stripes condemn the country’s worsening doctor shortage, it is government policy to keep that shortage in place.
Canada maintains top-down limits on the number of students entering medical school each year. Provinces are also notoriously obstinate about approving foreign credentials in order to avoid overwhelming health-care budgets. Until that system can be liberalized, any government contracts with for-profit providers will just be drawing from the same artificially small pool of clinics and physicians. Canada stands alone among developed nations in maintaining an outright ban on private health insurance for anything covered by the Canada Health Act.
This is why Canadians can purchase insurance to cover emergency dental surgery,
but if they get cancer they’re restricted either to getting in line – or paying cash in a U.S. hospital. None of our peer countries do this. Two-tier systems are the norm everywhere from Japan to Belgium to the U.K. In Australia, an expectant mother can deliver her baby for free in a no-frills public hospital. Or, if she’s got a good health insurance plan, she could opt for premium birthing care at a private hospital. In Canada, only the public option is legal.
These wide scale limits on private health insurance are why Canada is particularly uptight about certifying a doctor or greenlighting a clinic, because the assumption is that the public system will have to pay for it. The most obvious effect of this approach is that Canada maintains a quota system on how many students are allowed to enroll at the country’s 17 medical schools. A recent RBC analysis called the quota system a “choke point” that “limits student admissions to just under 3,000 spots for prospective doctors each year.”
Each year, provincial health departments calculate how many doctors they’ll be able to afford, and then set med school admissions on that figure. In 2018, for instance, the Government of Quebec cut medical school admissions after they determined that “too many” medical students were graduating. Basically no other profession works this way. Provinces don’t really care how many lawyers or auto mechanics their schools are producing each year, since it’s not the government’s job to find them work.
But an oncologist can only realistically expect to find employment through the government, which then prompts the government to only train as many on hand as they can afford. A detailed “quota allocation” published by the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine shows how the system works. For the 2020 scholastic year, the school was only allowed to train eight cardiologists, four endocrinologists and a single clinical pharmacist.
The school also had to scale back its number of graduating family doctors,
with one fewer allocation in the realm of “family medicine” than the year before.
It’s in part due to these quotas that in 2011 the Fraser Institute accurately forecast that Canada’s doctor shortage was poised to get exponentially worse. “Even if government imposed restrictions on the number of doctors being trained in Canada are immediately removed, it won’t have an impact for much of the next decade given the time it takes to train a new doctor,” they wrote at the time.
The import of foreign-trained doctors has been singularly responsible for stopping the physician shortage from becoming an even worse catastrophe, but even then, Canada’s culture of top-down control of the health care supply has sharply limited foreign recruitment. Canada is notorious for maintaining unusually onerous requirements to certify foreign doctors, with the result that the country is home to more than 13,000 internationally trained doctors who are not able to work as physicians.
At the same time, government quotas on medical residencies have been instrumental at scaring away even Canadians who have obtained medical training abroad. “The messaging for so long has been that it’s nearly impossible to get a bloody residency in Canada if you’re an international graduate,” reads a recent quote in the Globe and Mail by Peter Nealon, CEO of the Atlantic Bridge Program, a group that slots North Americans into Irish medical schools. “You tell people to go away long enough, and eventually, they go away.”
US vs Canadian Healthcare: What Are the Differences? | AIMS Education
The 2 countries’ health care systems are very different-Canada has a single-payer, mostly publicly-funded system, while the U.S. has a multi-payer, heavily private system-but the countries appear to be culturally similar, suggesting that it might be possible for the U.S. to adopt the Canadian system.
Regardless of how health care insurance is funded, consumers in both the US and Canada have concerns about which health care services are covered
under their respective health care systems. Because of differences in how the systems are funded, consumers in each country end up having different access
to types of health care services.
How much does it cost to become a medical Doctor in Canada?
It typically costs around $200,000 to obtain a professional medical degree in Canada. However, the cost of medical school can vary depending on the program and school you choose to attend and the government pays for it. Whereas in the United States Over four years—which includes class time, lab hours and clinical experience—the median total cost of attendance was $255,517 to $337,584 for the Class of 2020
How much does it cost for a doctors education in United States – Search (bing.com)
How much does it cost for a doctors education in Canada – Search (bing.com)
Salaries for Doctors: Top 10 Countries in the World (careeraddict.com)
How much do doctors make in the United States – Search (bing.com)