On July 5th, a prominent Australian Rules football player suffered an ‘adverse reaction’ to sleeping pills after a game. Drug testing confirmed that the player had not taken any banned drugs and there was no suggestion of that. The media ran stories of players being on a cycle of caffeine ‘uppers’ followed by sleeping pill […]
Category: Hot Topic
Should performance enhancing drugs be allowed in Sport?
From Oxford University we learn of a hot topic debate by highly-cited authors Savulescu and Devine. Oxford runs Online debates – this one is ‘Should performance enhancing drugs be allowed in sport‘? Professor Julian Savulescu and Dr John William Devine are debating different sides of the question with the eminent Oxford philosopher Roger Crisp moderating. See […]
Treating Elite Athletes — Challenging Sports Medicine
1. “Should team doctors encourage, discourage or be neutral about treatment modalities with limited evidence?” 2. “Should sports physicians treat their team/elite athletes differently to their regular patients?” BJSM readers will have strong opinions about these questions. Recent BJSM articles by McCrory, Cook and Maffulli and colleagues provide a physician, physiotherapist, and surgical opinion on […]
IOC World Conference on Prevention of Injury & Illness in Sport 2011 deadline
The deadline for proposals for the 2011 IOC World Conference on Prevention of Injury & Illness in Sport is November 1st 2009 – act now! – K. Khan Dear Colleagues, Based on the tremendous success of the 1st and 2nd World Congresses on Sports Injury Prevention in Oslo in 2005 and Tromsø in 2008, their successor, […]
MRI used to screen maturity in U-17 soccer stars
Age-limited spot has long been limited by the veracity of birth certificates but MR imaging appears to provide a safe, reliable way of levelling the playing field. This blog post contains an article from the African press providing the background, MR images of a young, and mature, wrist, and a photo of the team that […]
The Potentially Dysfunctional Supervisor-Grad Student Relationship
A proportion of BJSM readers are graduate students or faculty. This article raises the issue that the supervisor-graduate student relationship has the potential to be very one-sided. Trainees can feel that their future hinges on supervisor approval and just as not all people are psychologically intact, there are university faculty who are psychopaths. (See Robert […]
Hot Topic: The Truth Behind Doping Scandals
By John Orchard One of the worst ever drugs in sport decisions – and there have been some shockers, such as Andrea Raducan losing a gymnastics Gold medal at the Sydney Olympics for taking a Sudafed tablet – was handed down by the International Tennis Federation late last week. Italy’s Filippo Volandri was banned for […]
The thickness of air: Parachuting from fixed objects
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 […]
Hot Topic: Current Anti-Doping Policies
A recent editorial by Babette Pluim entitled, “A doping sinner is not always a cheat” [excerpt below], has created some fiery discussion amongst BJSM editors and readers this month. The doping rules these days are really tough. The basic principle is: first offense gets a 2 year ban, second offence a lifetime ban. Everyone seems […]
Measuring exercise performance
Another response by Fergus J. Dignan to Noakes’ paper <em>How did A V Hill understand the VO2max and the “plateau phenomenon”? Still no clarity? Click to view more reader responses to this article. Dear Editor, I very much enjoyed reading the Review article (1) by Professor Noakes and the letter (2) in the same edition […]