ABSTRACT
Medicine is implicated within healthism as 'notions of health and illness, in whatever context used, in large measure retain a medicalized meaning'. Within the privileging of performance at all costs, we see pain, injury and even death constructed as individual troubles or failings and not the consequence of the particular depoliticized, individualized and medicalized ways in which we produce athletic bodies. In this sense, sports medicine plays a collusive role in the forged athletic body and the re/production of performance-related health at all costs. Rather than occupying space outside of contemporary sport and fitness regimes – and thereby being in a better position to contribute to the 'reordering of the social, political, and environmental circumstances' that frame and are framed by contemporary sport and fitness culture – sports medicine clinicians find their raison d'être within the performance principle.
