ABSTRACT
This book explores the complex and contradictory relationships between sport, medicine and health. It stems from the observation that while currently there is considerable evidence that sport is undergoing medicalization – the process whereby ‘a problem is defined in medical terms, defined using medical language, understood through the adoption of a medical framework, or “treated” with a medical intervention’ (Conrad 2007: 5) – the development is multi-linear and at times contradictory to sport as an institution and athletes as a population exhibiting a high degree of relative autonomy. The book evokes a re-consideration of two socially pervasive ideas, namely: that sports participation is a fundamental and necessary part of a healthy lifestyle (the sport-health ideology); and that elite sport rationally exploits science and medicine in the pursuit of competitive success. It does so by drawing on a wide range of empirical research based on interviews, questionnaire surveys and documentary sources and through a more rigorous and systematic cross-fertilization of the sociologies of sport and medicine/health and illness than has hitherto been undertaken. Underpinned by an Eliasian sociological perspective it is an ambitious attempt to explore these phenomena holistically, via the interaction of their macro, meso and micro manifestations, their societal, institutional and interactional spheres. We begin therefore by sketching the breadth of the contemporary manifestations of this nexus of relationships.
