by Roger Zotti
Weighing in at 186 pages, Dr. Anthony G. Alessi’s Healthy Sports: A Doctor’s Guide for a Winning Lifestyle (Backus Foundation) is a book that may well change the reader’s life. It’s divided into six sections (Sports as Exercise, Getting Started, Sports Injuries, Disorders and Diseases, Controversies, and Trends and Sidelines), and each chapter is informative, to the point, and extremely readable. As ESPN broadcaster Joe Tessitore writes in his Forward, “Dr. Alessi’s knowledge stretches far beyond the field and arena to subjects that are wide and varied. Still, there is one common target: our health.”
One thing Dr. Alessi, Chief of Neurology at The William W. Backus Hospital, in Norwich, would like people to know before they begin reading his book, is, “If people are thinking of adapting a healthier life style, the book is for them.” Another thing is: “If they want to want to know more about health from a medical standpoint, it would interest them as well. The book should be interesting to a wide variety of people.”
For the last two years, Dr. Alessi, a Norwich resident, has written a column for the “Norwich Bulletin.” For the most part, “Healthy Sports” is a compilation of those columns. Column and book consider sports and health from the viewpoint of parents, whose children might be participating in sports, and from the perspective of coaches and athletic trainers. Dr. Alessi added, “We also consider health from the standpoint of the athletes themselves. We look at it from afar, too – that is, at good and bad decisions famous and even not-so-famous athletes have made with regard to their health.”
Writing “Healthy Sports” and his column has proved rewarding for Dr. Alessi. “Well, most rewarding about writing the column is that it can impact people’s lives in a very direct way, in our community,” he said. He recalled an incident two years ago when a young woman, who thought she was having a stroke, “came to the emergency room. I was on call and asked her what made her get to the emergency room. She said she had read my article about the warning signs of stroke.” Equally rewarding is putting “the book together as a fund raising opportunity for the hospital – all the proceeds go to the Backus Hospital Foundation. It’s been fun. It’s an all-around winner. I’m very lucky because I’m not just a writer but I practice medicine here, so I get to see the full circle of things.”
Currently Dr. Alessi is working on a book titled Everybody Has a Health Question. When he has the opportunity, he travels the country and gives people, he said, “The opportunity to ask any health question they may have. It’s interesting to see the types of health questions based on the area. So, the next thing is to look at these regional health questions, because health is such a concern and popular topic from everyone’s standpoint.”
