Sports Medicine Facts
Sports Medicine is an interdisciplinary subspecialty of medicine which deals with the treatment and preventive care of athletes, both amateur
and professional.
The team includes specialty physicians and surgeons, Athletic trainers, physical therapists, coaches, other personnel, and, of course, the
athlete.
The origins of sports medicine lie in ancient Greece and ancient Rome where physical education was a necessary aspect of youth – training and
athletic contests first became a part of everyday life during these times.
Sports medicine has always been difficult to define because it is not a single specialty, but an area that involves health care professionals,
researchers and educators from a wide variety of disciplines.
Its function is not only curative and rehabilitative, but also preventative, which may actually be the most important one of all.
The Sports Medicine specialist, either an Orthopedist or a Primary-care Sports Medicine specialist, is usually the leader of the sports
medicine team, which also includes physician and surgeon specialists, physiologists, athletic trainers, physical therapists, coaches, other
personnel, and, of course, the athlete.
While watching his daughter Louise swim at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Dr. J. C. Kennedy, a doctor based in London, Ontario,
Canada concluded for a variety of reasons that competing athletic teams from Canada should be accompanied by a qualified and well organized
medical team. This belief led him to be a founding father of the Canadian Academy of Sport Medicine. One of the primary mandates of this society
was to provide expert care to Canadian athletes, and in 1972 Dr. Kennedy was appointed chief medical officer of the first "true" medical team, at
the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. Other countries soon followed this example and assigned medical teams to their own Olympic
athletes.
Many believe that sports medicine will make its most significant future contributions in the area of prevention. According to Dr. David Janda,
orthopaedic surgeon and director of The Institute for Preventative Medicine in Michigan, prevention is sports medicine's final frontier. The risk
of injury will never be entirely eliminated, but modifications in training techniques, equipment, sports venues and rules, based on outcomes of
meaningful research have shown that it can be lowered.
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