Games have special friends from the North Shore

SWAMPSCOTT – Two Swampscott residents have made their mark on the Special Olympics over the years, and now that they’re back from this summer’s World Games in Los Angeles, they can reflect on it.Dr. Steve Perlman, who founded Healthy Athletes, and Jo Ann Simons, who was on the board of Special Olympics International for a number of years, were there for the games, and for Simons it was an exciting experience, as she marched in under the banner of the tiny nation Uzbekistan. It was the ninth time she’d marched with a country’s delegation, also having done so for Greece, Austria and Ireland.Simons was asked to join the athletes because of the nearly 10 years she spent on the board of directors.”It’s very exciting,” said Simons, who is president and CEO of Cardinal Cushing Centers. “You’re in the tunnel and you hear the noise and the people cheering and you just get to soak in the experience.”The wonderful thing about the Special Olympics is that the athlete that comes in last sometimes gets the biggest applause,” she said. “Everybody is brought home to the same thunderous crowd.”One of the highlights Simons has had while working with the organization was connecting Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of Special Olympics, with Perlman, a dentist who she and her son Jon, who has down syndrome, met one day at the beach.”He was so kind to my son,” Simons said. “That was 34 years ago and it started a personal and professional friendship.”Simons introduced them and it wasn’t long before Shriver was reaching out.”In 1993 I got a call from Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded Special Olympics,” Perlman said. “Her sister, Rosemary, was having very serious dental problems and the people that took care of her in Fort Atkinson, Wis., wanted to extract all of her remaining teeth.””She searched the country and somehow found me, a pediatric dentist, and asked me to treat a 63-year-old woman,” he said. “They flew her in and I did an oral rehabilitation under general anesthesia because of the complexity of her dental problems.”Perlman assembled a team of local specialists to help him address other medical problems that Rosemary Kennedy was having while she was already sedated. Through proper care, he was able to save all of Rosemary’s teeth.”She never had another dental problem,” he said. “We fixed everything.””Mrs. Shriver was so grateful to me that she wanted to meet me and thank me and talk about health care for people with intellectual disabilities,” he said. Perlman agreed and flew to Washington.”She asked me to create a program to bring healthcare to them all over the world,” he said. Pelman piloted the program in 1995 at the Special Olympic games in Massachusetts.He quickly realized the need for this type of program. Specialists in other fields started reaching out to him and offering to team up, and it wasn’t long before he formed Healthy Athletes, an initiative to provide proper healthcare to people with intellectual disabilities.”Dental care is the most unmet need for children and adults with disabilities,” Perlman said.”Roughly 14 percent of athletes show up having oral pain,” he said. “Almost 50 percent have untreated decay and about 70 percent have periodontal disease.”There are a number of reasons why people with intellectual disabilities don’t get the proper care they need, but the most substantial cause is health care professionals choosing not to treat them, Perlman said.Forty percent of children are born with cardiac defects, said Simons.Many medical professionals don’t accept Medicaid Insurance because of its “infamously low reimbursement rates,” said Simons.”Sometimes they decide that someone’s behavior is awful,” she said. “But maybe they have two abscessed teeth. You might be aggressive too.”Healthy Athletes has seven different disciplines: podiatry, physical therapy, better health and well-being promotion, audiology, sports physical examination, vision and dentistry.”There is an air-conditioned tent for each of the disciplines,