When a gymnast lands badly, the camera goes to her face. Dr. Mark Hutchinson is one of the people already moving.

He has been one of them at six Olympic and Paralympic Games, three of those as head physician for all of Team USA. He is a distinguished professor of orthopedics and sports medicine at the University of Illinois Chicago, head team physician for UIC Athletics, and his first Games was Atlanta in 1996, the same summer the Magnificent Seven won gold across town.

He and Gina have shared patients for years, which is why this conversation moves fast and goes deep. Two clinicians who have worked the same Games, the same athletes and the same arguments, on what it actually takes to keep an athlete whole.

In this episode:

• Why elite sports medicine is a communication job before it is a surgical one, and how you earn the right to say "they need water"
• What changed in thirty years, from coaches who trained without water breaks to a Team USA mental health program that leads the world
• The overtraining thread running through nearly every injury he sees, and the season his soccer program had six hip labral injuries instead of one
• Why "back in four months" is not an ACL plan, and what functional testing and mental readiness screening replaced it with
• What athletes tell him after he asks the coach to step out of the room
• Biologics, honestly: PRP, stem cells, the $2,000 shot insurance will not cover, and why an injection is not caulk
• The Achilles warning signs most people train straight through, and the antibiotic risk factor almost nobody hears about
• Specialization, wearables, and the duty that comes with choosing one sport
• Rio 2016, the Final Five, and the moment he remembers best, which has no medal in it

Dr. Mark Hutchinson practices at the UIC Sports Medicine Center in Chicago and can be reached at hutch@uic.edu.

The practitioner directory, the gymnastics sports medicine certification for healthcare practitioners, and every episode's show notes are at medgym.net.

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.