Sports Medicine in Oz

Coffs Harbour, Australia, site of the 2015 ACSP meeting.

While many of us in the Northern Hemisphere are shivering and shoveling our way through winter, members of the Australasian College of Sports Physicians (ACSP) are holding their annual meeting under a summer’s sun at the Pacific Bay Resort, Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia.  “Exercise is Medicine” is the theme for the five-day conference.

The ACSP is one of our partner societies and this year, I regret to say, I’ll not be able to make it Down Under to catch the proceedings myself.  I do, however, have a friend who is at the conference right now and has volunteered to write a post or two about what is happening in the lecture halls and on the beaches.

Dr Hamish Osborne, MBChB, MMedSci, FACSP is a Sport and Exercise Physician, a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Medicine, and Academic Co-ordinator for the Post Graduate Diploma in Sport and Exercise Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.   I know him best as one of this journal’s Associate Editors–I saw him last at our 2014 Editorial Board meeting in Canada, and we stay in touch via conference calls and Twitter the rest of the year.

Here is his first post from the meeting:

____________________________________________

The Australasian College of Sports Physicians Conference kicks off here in Coffs Harbour on Tuesday. Coffs Harbour is on the Australian east coast approximately half way between Brisbane and Sydney and enjoys a beautiful coastal location with temperatures in the high 20’s predicted. I got here safely last night driving the near 400km from Brisbane and managed to avoid any Kangaroos hopping across the road around dusk.

The conference is preceded by a mini conference for our trainees and is underway as I write. All trainees present their research to date from the various stages of the four years of their training. The variety of the work presented today has been fantastic. For example, while  plenty of work has been published on the accuracy of ultrasound vs MRI for identifying rotator cuff tears in those having operations for their rotator cuff pain, it’s important as a clinician to know how this translates to the undifferentiated painful shoulder that walks through the clinic door:  i.e. how good or bad is ultrasound vs MRI at looking at the rotator cuff if clinically I’m suspicious of the labrum being the problem? This recognizes that the history and to a greater extent examination has poor sensitivity and specificity in the undifferentiated patient and we do need to rely somewhat on the imaging.

__________________________________________________

Hamish, thanks for taking the time from both the conference and the lovely beachfront of Coffs Harbour to write this post.  I hope you will have the time to write another post as the proceedings wind down.

And to all of you reading this, make sure to follow Dr. Osborne and the Division of SEM at Univ. of Otago on Twitter @Hamish_Osborne and @OtagoUniSEM respectively; and make sure to follow #ACSP_conf and @ACSP_SportsDocs this week!