Sports medicine is a fairly specialized medical field that is only interesting or relevant to a certain segment of the population. To put it bluntly, you could say that what the gynecologist is to the female population, the sports medicine specialist is to the professional athletes (and the small portion of amateur athletes who can afford him). There are a whole host of sports-specific diseases and ailments with which the athlete would prefer to place himself in the hands of an expert when in doubt. At the same time, sports medicine also deals with theory on a grand scale.
What is sports medicine?
Sports medicine is not just diagnosis- or organ-related like other specialties, but examines the importance of physical activity (or passivity) to health and performance. You could say sports medicine is concerned with the medical issues surrounding exercise and sport. Thus, it is not just diagnosis- or organ-related like other specialties, but examines the importance of physical activity (or passivity) for health and performance. In Germany, sports medicine is not a sole specialist training of several years, but an interdisciplinary additional designation acquired in a course: the sports physician is thus in most cases primarily once an internist or orthopedist and acquires sports medicine as a further specialization and qualification.
Treatments and therapies
In addition to the study of diseases related to lack of exercise or the practice of sports, there are many specific clinical pictures that can lead a patient to the sports medicine specialist. These patients are, of course, the full range of professional athletes, to whom sports medicine specialists are usually made directly available as association or team physicians. Furthermore, sports medicine can also be of interest to amateur athletes if they suffer from very specific sports-related complaints or can and want to afford prophylactic measures such as a lactate test or individual training advice. Typical sports-related ailments include orthopedic skeletal complaints such as tennis elbow, its counterpart golfer’s elbow, runner’s or footballer’s knee, skier’s thumb, boxer’s nose or wrestler’s ear. Fatigue fractures caused by prolonged unilateral stress or wear and tear of joints, as in osteoarthritis, may also fall within the scope of sports medicine if they occur in connection with athletic activity. Sports-related complaints from other medical fields, such as chronic fatigue due to overtraining, heart complaints due to too much training or insufficient training, runner’s anemia or march hemoglobinuria and many more can lead to a presentation to a sports physician. The special feature of all these diseases is that they can all in principle also be treated by another specialty, usually with priority: Tennis elbow by the orthopedist, the march fracture by the trauma surgeon, heart problems by the cardiologist, and so on. However, since surgeons and internists in this country in the vast majority of cases deal with older patients and accordingly have little routine with young athletes and often also no sufficient understanding of sports, many athletes with their complaints sooner or later prefer to go to a sports physician. Thus, here the “treatment of the person” is rather different, and less the “treatment of the disease”. The unique selling point of sports medicine is also the entire area of prophylaxis and training advice: breaking the habit of unhealthy postures and movement patterns, tips and aids for preventing the recurrence of sports injuries, drawing up training plans, monitoring the build-up of form, and so on. Here again, sports medicine specialists then overlap with non-medical sports scientists.
Diagnosis and examination methods
Diagnostic and examination methods in sports medicine are initially the same as those used in internal medicine and surgery: blood values such as hemoglobin can be used to detect the development of anemia due to sports, electrolyte levels indicate an unfavorable fluid balance, X-rays reveal fractures or malpositions, and often very specialized imaging diagnostics such as CT and MRI quickly become necessary in this particular specialty.As in medicine as a whole, the medical history is of course the decisive guide to possible causes of complaints and to possible or necessary further diagnostics. In plain language, this means that, in the best case scenario, the sports physician really knows about sports and the associated, sometimes very specific and also rare complaints, and therefore has them described to him in great detail in order to arrive at possible diagnoses alone, which the general practitioner may have last heard of in his student days. Meanwhile, in the area of research, training advice and prophylaxis, fitness objects such as the treadmill or the bicycle ergometer play a major role, with the help of which athletic stress can be “simulated” at an adequate level. Circulatory parameters such as pulse and blood pressure, but also invasive blood value measurements such as those of the lactate value, can then be carried out under “laboratory conditions”, with the help of which the individual physical performance can be well determined and monitored in the course of the training.
