Sports and exercise medicine aims to optimise function to reach higher levels of well-being and performance. It aims to increase the human body’s ability to resist, postpone or prevent disease and/or injury, and maximise human performance in terms of adaptive capacity, endurance and physical fitness. It measures the capacity and interaction of the body’s functional systems over time and modifies exposure to environmental factors in such a way that an individual’s health is optimised by operating at the “sweet spot” where both performance and longevity are maximimised. This is achieved through an increased adaptive capacity, which is the human body’s ability to turn stressors into growth opportunities.
We support natural performance training and not enhancement through doping, and use medicine to treat conditions impending performance, not to augment natural traits.
Sports medicine also deals with the treatment of musculoskeletal injuries related to sports and exercise, such as muscles, ligaments, tendons, joints and bones of the body. It also deals the chronic diseases that can affect an athlete’s physical performance, such as asthma, diabetes and others. These chronic conditions need many times a different approach in athletes than in the general population.
