Why You Should Know Who Kate Ackerman Is
I sat across from a superhuman once. I didn’t know it then.
September 30, 2014.
In an exam room at the Sports Medicine Division at Boston Children’s Hospital, I sat on the crisp white paper on an exam table and the superhuman sat on a low stool with wheels.
The best doctor for treating athletes with female athlete triad and eating disorders.
This is what I knew going into my appointment.
***
Doctor, athlete, mother, professor, advocate, researcher, program director: superhuman Kate Ackerman does it all. She says she believes that she can do anything and everything, just not at the same time (PHIT blog). Kate Ackerman cannot be reduced or distilled to one or even two aspects of her identity; like a compound, the smallest substance she can be broken down to is her molecule which consists of personal, professional, and athletic elements.
Dr. Kate Ackerman seems to thrive at interdisciplinary intersections. While studying for a BA in Government and Biology from Cornell University, Ackerman rowed collegiately, trying the sport for the first time at Cornell. After graduating, she continued with the sport post-collegiately, rowing on the US national team while also attending medical school at Johns Hopkins University School of of Medicine (PHIT blog).
Intersections are a hard place to exist. So much coming and going, coordination between multiple people; the word “intersection” renders an image in my mind of a traffic intersection, a place where no one hangs out for much time. A better visual is the cross-over between two circles of a Venn diagram, but even then, I see this cross-over area as pulling parts from the other two larger, more established circle concepts, and not an established area itself.
Following medical school, Ackerman earned more accolades and gained experience as she earned a MPH in Quantitative Methods from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2003, and completed her internship and residency at the Internal Medicine Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania from 2004 through 2006 (Boston Children’s Hospital).
Ackerman has been a practicing physician at Boston Children’s Hospital since 2006 with a fellowship in Sports Medicine at Boston Children’s since 2007 and another in endocrinology, diabetes, and hypertension at Brigham and Women’s Hospital since 2009. Stemming from her experience as an athlete, she recognized an intersection, or Venn diagram cross-over area in medicine that went unaddressed: the space occupied by female athletes who suffer from bone injury, amenorrhea, disordered eating, to name a few. Ackerman, currently the medical director of the Female Athlete Program in Division of Sports Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, has been a leading figure in this realm both for patients and for doctors in this and related fields, while also teaching as an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School (Boston Children’s Hospital).
Ackerman has co-authored twelve publications in the past twelve months (which is incredibly high, many PIs (principal investigators) try to publish once a year) and is an internationally-acclaimed researcher in the fields of bone injury and osteoporosis, amenorrhea, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), and the Female Athlete Triad. She has contributed ground-breaking insights into the treatment and development of athletes, including co-creating the RED-S clinical assessment tool commissioned by the International Olympic Committee.
This lead researcher also organizes a bi-annual Female Athlete Conference held in Boston that invites the world’s foremost authorities on prevalent issues in the field, ranging from effective treatment to body positivity movement to building and using mental toughness in sport. These initiatives illustrate her practice philosophy, she explains “As a physician and athlete,” says Ackerman, “I enjoy being able to get to know my patients and become part of their team. I try to learn what their goals are and help them get there, with a focus on maximizing their physical and mental health in the process. I love helping patients get back to doing what they love, and hope that I can work with them to get them to train smarter and safer, improving health and performance in the process” (Boston Children’s Hospital).
Dr. Ackerman’s interpersonal skills distinguish her among colleagues and with patients, myself included. I am one of those women who have greatly benefited from Ackerman recognizing the need for research and care in female athlete medicine. I struggled to take care of myself as both an athlete and a human, beginning at the age of twelve. By the time I was eighteen, I was very sick. Physically, I was underweight and did not menstruate, my hair was brittle, my skin was always dry, my heart rate and blood pressure were low, I often experienced stomach aches, and my extremities were always cold. I also ran very fast. In my mind, I could resolve the disonance between the mounting ailments I experienced with my success in running. However, I could not conjure up spark for my interests such as reading and writing or going to concerts. An athlete since a young age, I could not find joy in my sport. My father found Dr. Ackerman through an online search, and she made room for me in her schedule when she understood the severity of my situation.
I do not remember many details from our appointment nor from the tumultuous few weeks around my appointment; I remember a small number of sharp moments. I remember she let me talk, tell her what I was experiencing, how I felt — physically and emotionally — giving special attention to my athletic career and goals. Near the end of our time together, she grabbed my hands and said, “Look, these are not the hands of an athlete.” It felt like she pierced me with a knife, slicing my central identity in two. At the same time, she offered me a way to be healthier, happier, and, the most appealing prospect to me at the time, a stronger athlete: treatment.
As Dr. Ackerman flexes her discipline, strength, and compassion in her sport, she continues to work these muscles all day with her patients and the public writ large. An active twitter-er, Ackerman involves herself in female athlete advocacy, recently reposting a Thanksgiving tweet from the Women’s Sports Foundation. Her twitter documents her support of women in medicine and in athletics and those that exist, like her, at the intersection of the two. Easy to talk to and an eloquent and confident speaker, Dr. Ackerman’s voice contributes a wealth of knowledge and passion at the intersection of medicine, sport, and female empowerment.
In my appointment, Ackerman encouraged me to flex the discipline and strength that I relied on to succeed in athletics in pursuit of saving myself and giving myself the opportunity to continue doing what I love, including running as well as spending time with friends, going to the beach, and making art. Kate Ackerman is a model of her own advice, in one day, embodying mother, athlete, care provider, scientist, social and medical innovator — an inspiring superhuman and living illustration of a poem by Olympic runner and creative, Alexi Pappas: “train hard/ make things/ i wasn’t born this way/ i made my wings.”
