Sports Medicine – Glastonbury, CT

What is Sports Medicine?

Sports medicine is a branch of the healing arts profession that utilizes an integrated, comprehensive approach to the prevention, diagnosis, and management of sport- and exercise-related injuries, disorders, dysfunctions, and disease processes.

Yet sports medicine is more than just physical therapy, a knee brace, a cortisone injection, or arthroscopic surgery. While all of these may be important, sports medicine involves knowing not only the athlete but also the sport. What are the demands placed on the athlete’s body by a given sport? What specific skills are required to perform a sport? And how does the body respond to these demands and required skills? Knowing this is crucial to understanding not only how injuries occur but also to know what the best way to treat them is.

Athletes have medical needs also. Asthma, diabetes, and other medical conditions affect athletes as well as the non-athlete. Yet the athlete often needs special treatment because of the demands he or she places on the body. Physical therapists, chiropractors, and surgeons are not trained to manage these aspects of sports medicine.

What is a
Sports Medicine Physician?

The field of sports medicine consists of health care providers who work in synchrony to provide a “team approach” to achieve better health for the patient. At the head of this team of professionals is the physician who diagnoses the condition and directs the treatment plan.

Any doctor can claim to do “sports medicine,” but only physicians specially trained in sports medicine are uniquely qualified truly to practice sports medicine.

The evolving standard for sports medicine training is the completion of a sports medicine fellowship. A fellowship is a specialized training program completed only after the physician has already done an internship and residency. For example, to become a cardiologist, you first complete a residency in internal medicine, and then you would do a fellowship in cardiology. The same is now true for sports medicine. While there may be many good sports medicine physicians who have not done fellowships, completion of a sports medicine fellowship assures you that the doctor has undertaken a comprehensive and advanced level of specialty training.

In addition, you would also want a physician who is an active member of one of the large national sports medicine organizations. These include:

• American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM)
• American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM)
• American Osteopathic Academy of Sports Medicine (AOASM)
• American Orthopedic Society of Sports Medicine (AOSSM)