I have been a sports medicine doctor here at Harvard Medical School for almost 40 years, and I am convinced more than ever that this is one of the most exciting fields in the health care continuum.

The field of sports medicine is thriving in response to the demand for health care professionals to care for the growing number of men, women, and children who are participating in vigorous physical activity. Yes, it may be true that some of society's problems are due to inactivity among our citizenry, but paralleling this phenomenon has been an explosion in organized sports and recreational exercise.

At one time, there might have been a few privileged, upper-class ladies and gentlemen who could play golf, tennis, and polo, but now there are myriad sports and exercise opportunities open to all people, irrespective of age, class, race, or gender. And just as one kind of activity fades from the headlines (jogging and in-line skating), another one takes its place (extreme sports and Pilates).

With the growth in sports and exercise has come a concomitant increase in the number of related injuries. Often these are “acute” injuries, such as a sprained ankle while playing basketball or a skinned knee from falling off a mountain bike. There has also been a rise of so-called overuse injuries. Unlike acute injuries, which are the result of an accident, overuse injuries occur because athletes do too much of exactly what they're supposed to be doing, whether it's serving a tennis ball or jogging every evening. Trying to prevent overuse injuries has been one of the focal issues of sports medicine doctors like me.

Because there are so many segments of the population now engaging in sports and exercise, their sports medicine needs are also different. The young athlete, for instance, is not just a miniature adult and shouldn't be treated medically as such.

Older athletes have their own special needs, as do active women.

Remember, too, that sports medicine is not just a specialty focusing on injuries. In addition to preventing, treating, and rehabilitating injuries, sports medicine deals with nutrition, conditioning, bio-mechanics, psychology, and more.

All this is to say that there are now many different people included in a sports medicine team compared with when I started in the field all those decades ago. Here, at the Division of Sports Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston at Harvard Medicine School, we have not just orthopedists but primary care physicians, athletic trainers, sports psychologists, nutritionists, podiatrists, and others.

With all the career opportunities available, it's no wonder that so many more people are developing an interest in sports medicine. For the same reason there are more athletes to be cared for, there are more people with an interest in sports and exercise who want to develop their interest into a career in health and medicine.

That is why I and so many of my peers got involved in sports medicine—we were athletes who became doctors, and we wanted to blend our occupation with our avocation. Now I see exponentially more people doing the same! Bravo to you, and I trust you will get the same enjoyment out of it as I and my contemporaries have.

The purpose of this encyclopedia is to provide an introduction to those very people who are developing an interest in sports medicine, as well as those who are presently working in the field. We have covered a marvelously broad spectrum of topics in what I trust is sufficient, but not overwhelming, detail.

As with any resource of this size and scope, a lot of planning went into its creation. How to decide [Page xlii]which topics to cover? To a tree trunk called sports medicine, we attached branches of subspecialties such as nutrition and physical therapy and then twigs and leaves that represented topics and subtopics within those areas. At times, this seemed overwhelming given the scope of the field, but gradually and over time, we developed a headword list that was comprehensive but as short of redundancies as possible (though “better redundant than incomplete” was one of our mottos!).

Wherever it was feasible, we asked contributors to make their contributions as easy to understand for as many readers as possible. In many cases, this meant asking eminent scientists and academics to write at a level to which they are not necessarily accustomed, and I am grateful that so many were willing to make this necessary adjustment. I can speak from personal experience when I say that writing in this way after so many years of writing for scientific publications can be a challenge. Of course, sometimes our text will take a more scientific bent, but sometimes this is essential given the particular subject matter.

Above all, I am extremely pleased that we have contributions from so many preeminent experts in their fields. The list is long, and I run the risk of neglecting someone, so I will mention just a few names—Dr. Wilma Bergfeld (dermatology), Dr. Art Boland (history of sports medicine), Dr. Bob Cantu (catastrophic injuries), Dr. Eduardo De Rose (doping), Dr. Avery Faigenbaum (children's fitness), Dr. Steven Pribut (athletic footwear), and Dr. Jim Whiteside (team physician). The fact these men and women were willing to contribute entries says much about their interest in bringing their respective specialties to as wide an audience as possible.

I hope this will be your “go-to” guide when you have a question about sports medicine. Regardless of whether you use a hard copy of the Encyclopedia of Sports Medicine or the online version, I trust that, like generations of encyclopedia buffs before you, you will take pleasure in perusing this resource and searching randomly through it for the sheer pleasure of absorbing the knowledge you will find inside.

It has been an enormous pleasure to work with the many hundreds of health care professionals who contributed to this resource, as well as our august body of advisers. I hope the readers will take as much pleasure in the fruits of our labors.

Please enjoy and make use of this terrific and comprehensive resource, that it may educate you on one of the most fascinating areas of medical specialty—one I am pleased, proud, and honored to have worked in all these years.