Browsing by Author "McNamee, M. J."

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    Ethics, Evidence Based Sports Medicine, and the Use of Platelet Rich Plasma in the English Premier League
    (Springer, 2017-07-29) McNamee, M. J.; Coveney, C. M.; Faulkner, A.; Gabe, J.
    The use of platelet rich plasma (PRP) as a novel treatment is discussed in the context of a qualitative research study comprising 38 interviews with sports medicine practitioners and other stakeholders working within the English Premier League during the 2013–16 seasons. Analysis of the data produced several overarching themes: conservatism versus experimentalism in medical attitudes; therapy perspectives divergence; conflicting versions of appropriate evidence; subcultures; community beliefs/practices; and negotiation of medical decision-making. The contested evidence base for the efficacy of PRP is presented in the context of a broader professional shift towards evidence based medicine within sports medicine. Many of the participants while accepting this shift are still committed to casuistic practices where clinical judgment is flexible and does not recognize a context-free hierarchy of evidentiary standards to ethically justifiable practice. We also discuss a tendency in the data collected to consider the use of deceptive, placebo-like, practices among the clinician participants that challenge dominant understandings of informed consent in medical ethics. We conclude that the complex relation between evidence and ethics requires greater critical scrutiny for this emerging specialism within the medical community.
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    Where biomedicalisation and magic meet: Therapeutic innovations of elite sports injury in British professional football and cycling
    (Elsevier, 2017-04) Gabe, J.; Coveney, C. M.; McNamee, M. J.; Faulkner, A.
    Injury is a conspicuous feature of the practice and public spectacle of contemporary elite sports. The paper argues that the ‘biomedicalisation’ thesis (medico-industrial nexus, techno-scientific drivers, medical optimisation, biologisation, the rise of evidence and health surveillance) goes some way to capturing the use in elite sports injury of some highly specialised mainstream therapies and some highly maverick biological therapies, which are described. Nevertheless, these main strands of biomedicalisation do not capture the full range of these phenomena in the contexts of sports medicine and athletes' practices in accessing innovative, controversial therapies. Drawing on multi-method qualitative research on top-level professional football and cycling in the UK, 2014–2016, we argue that concepts of ‘magic’ and faith-based healing, mediated by notions of networking behaviour and referral systems, furnish a fuller explanation. We touch on the concept of ‘medical pluralism’, concluding that this should be revised in order to take account of belief-based access to innovative bio-therapies amongst elite sportspeople and organisations.