“It's sort of help yourself” – DIY medical care and team-doctoring in amateur women’s sport

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Forbes, D ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5720-1378, AlHashimi, R, Bowes, A ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5635-106X, Liston, K and Matthews, C ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8561-2863, 2024. “It's sort of help yourself” – DIY medical care and team-doctoring in amateur women’s sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. ISSN 1012-6902

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/10126902241250090

Abstract

It has become something of a truism, that within various athletic subcultures pain and injury are regularly normalised as ‘part of the game’. One clear consequence which flows from this empirical reality is that athletes often need medical care in various forms. Recent developments in the gendered structuring of sport means that sportswomen are increasingly centred within this process. Yet, there is a broad consensus from sportswomen and academics alike that access to medical support and the availability of associated resources in women's sport is inadequate. Based on interviews with 17 women located in the United Kingdom, we cast new light on how medical support and care appears to be structured across various women's amateur sports. Two key findings are highlighted, firstly, that the majority of medical support was via first aid kits, which is problematic in their inconsistent restocking, and the availability of someone trained to use them. And, secondly, that there was a DIY approach to medical care which we explore via a discussion of athlete-to-athlete ‘team-doctoring’ – wherein sportswomen provided medical advice, care and treatments to each other. Our analysis of these two findings shows how medical care might be inconsistent, compromised and otherwise poor in quality, especially when viewed through the lens of critical scholarship about the sociology of sports medicine. This has specific consequences for the sports women we spoke with, and wider implications for our understanding of amateur sportspeople generally.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	International Review for the Sociology of Sport
Creators:	Forbes, D., AlHashimi, R., Bowes, A., Liston, K. and Matthews, C.
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Date:	13 May 2024
ISSN:	1012-6902
Identifiers:	Number Type 1884318 Other 10.1177/10126902241250090 DOI
Rights:	This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Request permissions for this article.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	12 Apr 2024 09:39
Last Modified:	21 May 2024 09:33
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/51239