A General Framework for Exploring Ethical and Legal Issues in Sports Medicine

Abstract

Background: Medicolegal dilemmas faced by Sports Medicine providers differ from those of other primary care physicians in type and frequency. Exotic, high-profile challenges are widely covered in the literature and offer guidance on how to navigate challenging situations. However, there is a gap in the literature on how to approach more mundane, but nevertheless common, medicolegal dilemmas.Purpose: The purpose of this article is to provide Sports Medicine providers simple tools for determining whether a course of action is legal or ethical and offer Sports Medicine educators a model for teaching these skills.Methods: We searched U.S. federal and state law using the LexisNexis database for laws regulating Sports Medicine practice, and PubMed for articles related to physician approaches to Sports Medicine legal and ethical challenges. Searches started with the term sports medicine, and included winnowing terms of ethics, ethical practice, ethical guidelines, law, and legal guidelines. We used current ethical practice guidelines followed by the American Medical Association and described in detail by Beauchamp and Childress.Results: We offer a framework for how to approach legal challenges in Sports Medicine and apply it to four common scenarios that Sports Medicine physicians often face. We further suggest that the profession formally address this literature gap with a standardized curriculum in Sports Medicine law.Conclusion: A curriculum using this framework and clinical vignettes provides learners and practitioners with familiarity and confidence when legal and ethical challenges arise in Sports Medicine.

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“…( Uprety et al, 2023) considered to ensure their responsible and ethical use (Aggarwal et al, 2021;Saedi et al, 2021;Lennon et al, 2022;Pennestrì and Banfi, 2022;Editorial, 2023a).…”

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“…The Ethics Feature in this issue suggests a framework for working through the challenging and layered situations that sports physicians face. 16 Next Steps to Attain Health Care Justice Edgoose et al 17 articulate a thought-provoking consideration of race and racism in medicine with explicit, practical actions to be taken at multiple levels. "Medical academia (must) implement policies that explicitly hold us accountable to maintain a clear understanding of race as a socio-political construct so that we can conduct research, disseminate scholarly work, teach, and practice clinically with more clarity about race and racism."…”