Abstract
Several studies have examined the provision of medical care in a variety of competitive sport settings. These are important contributions, but the majority of this work has focused on elite sports that tend to have a group of medical health professionals as part of the team, with little attention given to sports that lack access to such services. This lack of dedicated medical support may result in athletes being more likely to engage in ‘team-doctoring’ – a term used to describe athletes seeking medical advice from teammates and coaches. This concept is yet to be theorised and empirically described. In this paper, we begin to define, explore and contextualise the process of team-doctoring in relation to sociocultural interactions, beliefs embedded within the combat sport subculture and the critical role it plays in shaping fighters’ perceptions of health and injury. In so doing, we demonstrate that team-doctoring is the process whereby apparent medical knowledge is (mis)understood, recommended, transferred, interpreted and developed within a somewhat coherent team.
Highlights
Nixon (1992: 127) described this as a ‘culture of risk’ that is effectively mediated to athletes via social networks called ‘sportsnets’ that reinforce ‘cultural and interpersonal messages exhorting and encouraging them to play with pain or injuries’
Considering the preceding analysis, it is evident that the process of team-doctoring frames how knowledge of lay sport medicine is circulated,understood and internalised by athletes in somewhat isolated team settings
We have demonstrated that combat-sporting spaces offer an interesting avenue for this type of research given the lack of dedicated medical support in such social settings and where coaches dominate the power relations
Summary
A number of sociologists have convincingly argued that sport often occurs in a cultural context that can serve to normalise and glorify risk, pain and injury (Frey, 1991; Hughes and Coakley, 1991; Malcolm, 2006, 2009; Matthews and Channon, 2016; Matthews, 2020; Nixon, 1992, 1993; Theberge, 2006: 127). Nixon (1992: 127) described this as a ‘culture of risk’ that is effectively mediated to athletes via social networks called ‘sportsnets’ that reinforce ‘cultural and interpersonal messages exhorting and encouraging them to play with pain or injuries’. The medicalisation of sport and the athletic body to understand sociocultural factors that shape athletes’ perceptions and experiences of risk, pain and injury (Malcolm, 2006, 2009; Malcolm and Sheard, 2002; Roderick et al, 2000; Safai, 2003; Walk, 1997, 2004) These studies provide valuable insights into the relationships between athletes and medical care providers, which appear to play a central role in medics’ ability to negotiate different options for treatment. With the exception of Pike (2005), Liston et al (2006) and Matthews (2020), little attention has been given to competitive sports that have limited access to medical professionals This is the case in combat sport settings, where ‘fight medics’ are often outsourced and usually only present during fight nights (Channon, Matthews and Hillier, 2019, 2020a, 2020b). While Channon, Matthews and Hillier (2019, 2020a, 2020b) provide some interesting accounts from the perspective of medical staff, there is still no work which considers these issues from the perspective of fighters
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