Cold Water Immersion is one of the latest trends in encouraging recovery. At the Olympics several swim teams set up immersion tanks on the warm-up pool deck for “recovery”.

What are your thoughts? Do you have evidence that they help? Please do share your thoughts on Cold Water Immersion with us at the BJSM.

This month TIME Magazine’s website, picked up on BJSM’s IOC Issue - Screening for Sudden Cardiac Death. Read the article at TIME.com here.

We would like to invite you to join us in London UK Queen Mary for the 2nd ECOSEP Congress European College of Sport & Exercise Physicians, 12th Annual Scientific Conference in SEM.

This international interdisciplinary Sports Medicine congress held every two years, attracts over 400 participants from all over Europe and welcomes sports medicine physicians, physicians, orthopaedic surgeons, academics, researchers, physiotherapists, osteopaths, manual therapists, exercise therapists rehabilitation medicine physicians and students.

For more information and to submit and abstract visit the conference website: www.aesculap-academia.co.uk OR www.ecosep.eu.

To view and download a PDF, click here.

As you know, the American College of Sports Medicine is actively advocating clinicians take a more active role in exercise prescription. The organization also aims to be politically active – an essential for behaviour change. Here you see a letter that Robert Sallis shared with members; also new ACSM president James Pivarnik wrote to President Obama’s nominee for Surgeon-General. Interesting times with much more attention to behaviour change and advocacy than there was in the past.

- K. Khan

Prevention involves lifestyle changes, not just diagnostics

As health system reform takes center stage in the United States, prevention has become a hot topic among lawmakers, media and the public.

Some question the cost savings of preventive health care. Does it save money in the long run, or is it an expensive indulgence with too little benefit to justify the up-front cost?

Answer: It depends. While many diagnostics, such as colonoscopies and mammograms, save lives and head off expensive treatment regimens, some may be unneeded. Sound medical judgment and appropriate guidelines are required.

But, everyone can practice prevention in the form of healthy lifestyles, and it doesn’t cost a dime. Better nutrition and higher levels of physical activity don’t increase cost, and they bring a huge payoff in terms of lower health-care costs, increased productivity and greater quality of life. Getting more active, eating a bit healthier, incorporating some kind of movement into everyday life – those are the main keys to health, longevity and disease prevention. It was recently reported that treating obesity was responsible for the biggest jump in health care spending in recent years; obese populations accounted for $303.1 billion in health care costs in 2006, nearly doubling the $166.7 billion spent on these individuals in 2001.

In a very real sense, exercise is medicine. Studies repeatedly show that physical activity and exercise can help prevent obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other chronic conditions.

And leading a healthier lifestyle needn’t mean hitting the treadmill every night or becoming fanatical about exercise. Walking for 30 minutes each night after dinner or during a lunch hour has powerful preventive effects and requires just a pair of comfortable walking shoes.

Physicians and other health care providers should encourage patients to become physically active. A public survey conducted in 2007 by the American College of Sports Medicine found that nearly two-thirds of patients (65 percent) would be more interested in exercising to stay healthy if advised by their doctor and given additional resources.

Bottom line: While we trim unnecessary costs to better manage health-care resources, let’s keep in mind the powerful and necessary cost-effective potential of healthy lifestyles. Truly, exercise is medicine—a prescription for better health.

Sincerely,

Robert Sallis, M.D., FACSM

Dear Dr. Benjamin,

Congratulations on your nomination as United States Surgeon General. Based on your extraordinary career and your commitment to addressing health disparities among underserved populations, no doubt your tenure will be marked by great progress toward the goal of improved health for all Americans.

Each United States Surgeon General has the unique opportunity to create his or her own lasting legacy. Dr. Koop focused on smoking prevention. Dr. Satcher, one of your own mentors, released the first comprehensive report on mental health. We encourage you to build your own legacy around the concept o prevention through healthy lifestyles – a legacy that is both sustainable and cost-effective.This also is an important issue for Members of Congress, many of whom believe that promoting prevention and wellness initiatives will bring down costs and help people lead healthier lives.  ACSM would be honored to partner with you on such an initiative.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the largest sports medicine and exercise science organization in the world, stands ready to work with you to increase healthy behaviors – especially physical activity – throughout the life span.  During this crucial period of health system reform, we’ve been advocating for strategies that support preventive medicine not just through diagnostic testing, but by promoting healthy, active behaviors that all Americans can achieve at little or no cost.

In fact, ACSM already has a working agreement with the Surgeon General’s office, focused initially on a series of healthy-lifestyle public service announcements for our Exercise is Medicine™ program, a program that specifically calls on doctors to encourage their patients to incorporate physical activity and exercise into their daily routine. As you are well aware, physical activity can prevent and treat a host of chronic conditions – such as heart disease, type II diabetes, and obesity – that currently plague our country. Your example as one whose family has suffered from preventable disease and who demonstrates healthy lifestyles can be powerful indeed.

Anytime either before or after your appointment is confirmed, we would welcome the opportunity to meet with you and your staff to discuss how we, along with other leading health organizations, can enhance the prevention paradigm through physical activity.

Again, Dr. Benjamin, I extend our deepest congratulations and best wishes.

Sincerely,

James Pivarnik, Ph.D., FACSM

President, American College of Sports Medicine

A recent email from a reader detailed how she used a computer application to convert text from the online edition of the BJSM to an mp3 audio file so she could listen to it while running. She used a piece of software called Visual Text to Speech MP3, but there are a number of similar applications for both Windows and Mac.

Because this is such a great idea for busy people on-the-go, I’ve provided some links that I think will be helpful for those who want to give this a try for themselves. Remember to check the system requirements for any application you are thinking of purchasing to ensure that it will work on your particular system.

For Windows:

Visual Text to Speech MP3
TextAloud

For Mac:

Ghostreader
Text to Speech to MP3
Books2burn.

Enjoy keeping physically active while motoring through your favourite BJSM content! And I promise more podcasts to come as well!

By A Westman, M Rosn, P Berggren, U Bjrnstig

Kindly invited by the Editor to comment on our paper “Parachuting from fixed objects: descriptive study of 106 fatal events in BASE jumping 1981-2006,” we would like to bring the attention of the readership to the thickness of air.

In parachuting jargon, a fall through the atmosphere is often incorrectly described as a “free fall,” distinct from flying an inflated parachute. However, a person starting to passively fall through the lower atmosphere will after approximately nine seconds reach a terminal vertical velocity of circa 200 km/h, i.e. about seven times her maximum running speed. Parachutists in terminal velocity can readily initiate and terminate motion (including rotation) by steering the flows of air around their bodies, e.g. stopping a somersault into a prone position by extending the arms and palms forward, deflecting the airflow like running water. Hence the name for sport parachuting from aircraft: Skydiving.

The vertical velocity range 0-200 km/h is called subterminal. In subterminal velocity, there is less airflow for the parachutist to deflect. A hydrodynamic analogy is the steerageway needed for a nautical vessel to be manoeuvred. Skydivers seldom experience the vacuous subterminal environment, since they usually exit into the horizontal airflow generated by the forward movement of the airplane. However, skydiving from a hot-air balloon may entail even less initial relative airflow than BASE jumping, since balloons move with the winds.

Current fixed object parachuting technology distinguishes between subsets of the subterminal velocity range, with one important division being made after approximately 3 seconds of falling, when a reefing device to retard the parachute opening becomes necessary to reduce deceleration forces, to protect both equipment and parachutist. The prevailing reefing system is called a slider. In the BASE jumping community, a safety concern has been raised regarding high subterminal velocity parachute deployment, i.e. between approximately 3 and 9 seconds of free fall delay from exit, when a slider is necessary but the strong airflow of terminal velocity not yet has been achieved. The concern is that the slider’s interaction with the lines and the momentary reefing of lower surface inflation may yield less consistent heading performance, with increased risk of off-heading opening and subsequent object collision.

Another technological consideration related to expected deployment airspeed is the size of the pilot chute, i.e. the small round parachute that is deployed into the airstream, where it anchors and subsequently extracts the ram-air wing parachute from the container. BASE jumpers commonly use at least four different pilot chute sizes for different deployment airspeeds: The lower the deployment airspeed, the larger the pilot chute, to ensure sufficient drag. However, too big of a pilot chute may cause deformation of the parachute pack job during inflation, with resultant risk of off-heading opening or parachute malfunction.

A varied level of detail available in the material frustrated our efforts to satisfactorily study adverse events related to high subterminal velocity parachute deployment. Future research concerning the seconds when the air thickens may be of value.

I am very excited and most grateful that 6 international leaders in sports and exercise medicine have agreed to serve as Senior Associate Editors in Chief – Babette Pluim (Netherlands), Jill Cook (Australia), Liza Arendt (US), Steven Stovitz (US), Roald Bahr (Norway) and Timothy Noakes (South Africa).

This senior leadership group and I will take the first 5 months of the year to catch up with the hardworking Editorial Board and engage all those who wish to contribute to the Journal.The new Associate Editors and the expanded Editorial Board will be listed in the June issue of BJSM.

To contribute to the direction of BJSM, I encourage you to provide input either in person (e.g., The RendezVous Conference in Las Vegas (March 25-29), my visit to various UK centres in early May) or on email (karim.khan@ubc.ca).

The BJSM vision that aims to reflect the diverse interests of the world of sport and exercise medicine will be on the web by June 1^st.

We aim to make the BJSM the premier clinically-relevant original data journal and online community. BJSM is one of the ‘specialist journals’ of the BMJ publishing group. The mother ship – the BMJ – aims to ‘help doctors make better decisions’.

BMJ editors ask 3 questions about manuscripts that are submitted:

1. Is it new?
2. Is it true?
3. Will it change what doctors do?

Given the expertise, resources, and brand recognition of the BMJ, it seems that team BJSM might do well to follow that game plan in the first instance. Thus, we will focus on clnically-relevant health and human performance.We’ll aim to accept and solicit material that is new, true, and has the potential to change the things you do.

We hope this Blog helps us engage a global community to find answers.

Exciting times!