Sports Physicians, Human Nature, and the Limits of Medical Enhancement
The purpose of this essay is to examine the elite sports physician as a medical and moral actor within the world of high-performance sport along with his or her relationship to medical ethics. High-performance sports medicine requires a concept of human n
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Sports Physicians, Human Nature, and the Limits of Medical Enhancement John Hoberman
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Athletic Performance and ‘Human Nature’
The purpose of this essay is to explore the role of the physician within what we can imagine as two concentric spheres. The first and “smaller” sphere is a social institution, while the “larger” sphere that encloses this social sphere is what we think of as the “human nature” that underlies, empowers, and limits all human activities. The social institution in this case is the global subculture of high-performance sport as it is exemplified by the citius, altius, fortius ideal of the Olympic Games and the practices the pursuit of this ideal has produced. These concentric spheres are related through the physical and mental demands that high-performance sport imposes on the human organism, since the purposes and consequences of making these demands, which originate in the ambitions of the social institution, can be evaluated in relation to the capacities and limitations that belong to any reasonably comprehensive conception of human nature. The sports physician, who treats (or manipulates) the elite athletes who operate within the high-performance athletic subculture, is in a position to make judgments about the medical consequences of the stressful demands of training and competition. These judgments will be influenced by a conception of human nature that medical personnel have both absorbed and helped to construct, along with other members of society. It is in this sense that an operative idea of human nature “encloses” any social institution, whether it is a sports league, a factory, or an army, which imposes physical and mental demands upon the people who perform inside it. Their performances are both made possible and constrained by the parameters of human nature as we understand them, a challenging topic we will address below. Our major focus, however, is on how the medical practitioner interprets
J. Hoberman (*) Department of Germanic Studies, University of Texas, BUR 336, Mailcode C3300, Austin, TX 78712-0304, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Tolleneer et al. (eds.), Athletic Enhancement, Human Nature and Ethics, International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine 52, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5101-9_14, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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the resources and the limitations of “human nature” as he or she treats and counsels the patient who is also a performer. Sports teams, factories, and armies employ athletes, workers, and soldiers who are served by sports medicine, industrial medicine, and military medicine, respectively. Does the Hippocratic Oath imply an adherence to a specific model of “human nature” in relation to the stress and performances that social institutions demand? Should this oath restrain the doctor’s willingness or ambition to boost human performances by medical means? If it is true that sports medicine “is also interested in the enhancement of a normal body so that it can perform extraordinary, often intrinsic
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