Gender Issues in Sport: the case of Dutee Chand

October 10, 2014 by

800px-Berliner_Olympiastadion_night

Berlin Olympia Stadium: site of the 12th IAAF Athletics Championship

It’s time for a poll.

Issues of gender in sport are a regular feature in the pages of the CJSM journal and this blog.

I wanted to share with you, again, a poll that got a lot of traffic earlier this year when I wrote about the IAAF policy on gender testing in sport. The issue continues to be relevant:  just this week, the New York Times published an excellent article on the subject of the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand.  She is the Indian 100m women’s U18 champion, and she cannot currently compete for her country because of her naturally high testosterone levels.  She faces the decision, as several female athletes have before her, of whether to retire or compete…..but the latter option is contingent on medical interventions aimed at lowering her testosterone.

The issue is highly charged, and I think both the pro and the con side of such testing and intervention make some sense in the field of competitive athletics.  At the end of the day, however, I find the IAAF policy to be highly flawed.  I think it is largely discriminatory, sexist, and reductionist:  too high of testosterone = you cannot compete as a woman. 

Read the rest of this post and take the poll.  At CJSM, we’re interested to know what you think!

Take Our Poll

sportingjim's avatarClinical Journal of Sport Medicine Blog

I was taken by an editorial that I read in the New York Times this weekend:  The Trouble With Too Much T.  If you didn’t have the chance to see it yourself already, by all means click on the link and read this piece.

20090819_Caster_Semenya_polished Caster Semanya, South African Olympian

The authors, Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young, give a broad overview of how current sports governing bodies determine if an athlete is ‘really’ female.  Of note, Karkazis and Jordan-Young are also the principal authors of  The American Journal of Bioethics critique of the current gender-testing policies of the IOC, IAAF and other governing  bodies.

They lead with the well-known story of Caster Semanya, the South African woman who, in 2009, was barred from international competition and was compelled to undergo testing after the Berlin World Championships (she has subsequently been reinstated, and in the 2012 London Olympics was…

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Filed under General Interest, Polls, Women in Sport Tagged with

Return to Play Decisions: The hits and the HIT (system).

October 6, 2014 by

It’s October, and I thought I’d share a blog post I previously wrote about return to play decisions (see below). The football teams I cover are smack dab in the middle of their seasons; I, like all my colleagues covering teams this fall, have been busy making plenty of ‘return to play decisions.’

What do you all do with your 7 and 8 year olds? Yes, your 7 and 8 year olds……little did I know when I started my career that I would be making ‘return to play’ decisions for this age group, but that is among my duties here at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. How about you?

With that sort of return to play decision in mind, I could hardly find a more relevant piece of original research than the study on head impact exposure in youth football in the September 2014 CJSM.  The authors–a group from Virginia Tech and Wake Forest–are well known for recently publishing various studies on head  impact exposure using the ‘Head Impact Telemetry’ (HIT) system.   The HIT system is being used more regularly at various levels of football in helping to determine when an athlete may need a sideline evaluation.  As we all know, athletes in the heat of competition are not always the most forthcoming in sharing when they may have had a symptomatic hit; for that matter, the collective body of sideline physicians, athletic trainers and coaches don’t always pick up on the hits that occur right in front of our eyes:  just ask Brady Hoke and the Michigan Wolverines.

Returning to youth sport…..as my friends at MomsTeam have written, “the day when monitoring of head impact exposure in football and other contact and collision sports becomes commonplace is closer at hand than one might think.”  Here’s a list of what’s available right now for players from youth level on up to the pros (again, thanks MomsTeam for the reference).

I can forsee the time when I will integrate head impact exposure data along with what I find with my other concussion assessments to determine when I will release one of my youth athletes back to the field.  Next season, I will likely be involved with coverage of a high school which uses “Shockbox” technology.  However, I don’t currently use such systems; that is to say, none of the teams I cover, high school or university, use the HIT system or any other impact exposure technology.  Are you already using such technology in your determinations? Let me know if you are.  I’d like to learn more.

Enjoy the reblogged post below.

 

sportingjim's avatarClinical Journal of Sport Medicine Blog

535001_10201384038456502_1470889600_n Though a beautiful time of year, fall is not
the most idyllic for a sports medicine clinician

Like many of the readers out there, my colleagues and I are deep in a football season, where we are managing various teams and their mounting injuries.  For a sports medicine physician, fall in America must be a bit like early spring for an accountant (tax day = April 15):  it’s the time to buckle down and crank through patients, the time, from a certain perspective, to see the volume of patients that will sustain the business through leaner times of the year.

When I’m out of the clinic and on the sidelines, I’m also doing one of the parts of my job that is the most fun, and I’m sure my colleagues out in the blog sphere will agree.  But I wouldn’t describe the work as an idyll.  I can be enjoying…

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Filed under General Interest, Technology in Sports Medicine, Youth Sport Tagged with ,

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