By Caroline White
February 29th-2nd of March over a thousand researchers and clinicans descended on sunny Monaco for the seventh International Olympic Committee (IOC) World Conference on Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport.
The programme kicked off with a keynote from Dr Jonathan Drezner and Dr Irfan Asif. With the subject of “From marginalised to centralised: the future of sport illness and injury prevention research.” This keynote really set the tone for the whole conference. Having been fortunate to attend multiple conferences over the years, this is the first one I have attended were female athletes, disability athletes and discussing the challenges of low economic resourced countries was fully integrated into the conference format. Previous sports medicine conferences I have attended these topic areas have been condensed down into maybe an hour long session within a multi day conference.
The conference had a jammed packed schedule, keynote presentations, seminar based sessions, workshops, poster presentations during lunch breaks and a new format I hadn’t previously experienced at a sports medicine conference- Head to head debates. There were two at the conference. The first one was “Who cares if they menstruate?” with Dr Richard Burden arguing how the menstrual cycle is everything to prevention meanwhile Professor Kirsty Elliott-Sale was counter arguing that we must shift the focus away from the menstrual cycle as there is a lot more to our female athletes than their menstrual cycles. It was a packed auditorum with research and clinical practice being heavily debated. The final outcome was in the mid point between both their points. We need to do more high quality research into this area but also there is more to females and we can’t let this go unanswered.
The second debate was one that I discussed with my Sports Medicine students afterwards and what their perspectives was on it. Pain vs Performance, with Professor Kieran O’Sullivan arguing that pain is a performance marker in predicting function. Whereas Professor Fiona Wilson discussed how it is so subjective and doesn’t take into account the context or even a reliable maker of tissue health. It was interesting hearing from the Sports Medicine students which side of the debate would they side with. At undergraduate physio level a large focus is around pain but as students start to develop throughout their career their understanding of the complexity of it helps them to see how individual our approaches need to be to our athletes and the adaptability to respond.
It was a great conference to attend and be a part of. Plus catching up with a lot of friends and colleagues from over the years in a beautiful setting.
C.S.White@bham.ac.uk