Content area
Full Text
Sports medicine is a broad field derived from many basic and clinical disciplines. In 1993, the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Board of Family Practice, the American Board of Pediatrics, and the American Board of Emergency Medicine jointly established certification in primary care sports medicine. This group also better defined primary care sports medicine as "a body of knowledge and broad area of health care which includes exercise as an essential component of health throughout life, medical management and supervision of recreational and competitive athletes and all others who exercise, and exercise for prevention and treatment of disease". 1, 2 After the 1993 conference, sports medicine training for US primary care residents became a focus of discussion. In 1996, the American Academy of Family Physicians published core educational guidelines on sports and recreational medicine for all family practice residents. 3 Although there are guidelines for sports medicine training in paediatrics 4 and increased recognition for the need to adequately train paediatric residents in sports medicine, studies of sports medicine education in paediatric residencies have identified suboptimal sports medicine educational experience. 5- 7
Although sports medicine education has been addressed with varying degrees of success in the training of American paediatric and family practice residents, less focus has traditionally been placed on this area in internal medicine residency programmes. The current residency review committee guidelines for internal medicine residency programmes published by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education addresses sports medicine in three separate parts of the document. 8 Most significantly, under the heading of special educational requirements, the topic of sports medicine is addressed as follows: "It is desirable that all residents receive instruction in the areas of preparticipation sports assessment, injury prevention, evaluative management and rehabilitation related to athletic and recreational injuries". One example of a successful focused effort to teach musculoskeletal examination to internal medicine residents in the United States was published by Stirling. 9 However, little other information is available on education of American internal medicine residents in musculoskeletal and sports medicine topics.
The main purpose of this study is to determine the general status of sports medicine training in United States internal medicine residency programmes. Do programmes have a specific sports medicine curriculum? Is sports medicine education available...