Ethics in sports medicine--the sports physician.

There are problems about the limitations of medical skills, both generally and in the individual case. In sport every coach and athlete is almost uninterested in present knowledge and its limits. The coach only starts looking for new aids at the borders of the present knowledge. Therefore, the doctor is in the land of speculation, risk, research and new ground, new theory and new fact. In practice, doctors are fairly rigidly educated, rigidly controlled, governed by rigid codes and are, therefore, not very well equipped to meet the attitudes that rule in sport and certainly coaching. Doctors are easily at a disadvantage. They do not really know the language of the trainer and coach. It is no consolation to say that the coach's mythology is not scientific because it is nevertheless the lingua franca of the sport.