Exercise and Health

Athletes often have to deal with injuries as part and parcel of rigorous training schedules. Serious sports injuries can be repaired with surgery or prostheses. Some athletes may choose to take performance enhancing drugs to give themselves an advantage in competitions - very naughty..

Repairing sports-related injuries with surgery

Serious injuries can be fairly common when playing sports due to the fact that the body is being put under a lot of stress, for example, the knees takes a lot of impact during running. Advances in medical procedures, such as keyhole surgery, can help sportspeople recover more quickly from sports-related injuries. Keyhole surgery is a technique in which only a small incision is made in the skin. Surgeons can insert a camera and medical equipment through the tiny cut and repair the damaged part of the body. A common sports-related injury which can be repaired by keyhole surgery is damage to the cruciate ligament in the knee.

The advantages of keyhole surgery over normal surgery is that, due to the smaller incision, the patient is in less pain and recovers much faster from the surgery. The patients lose less blood from the incision and have less scarring after the procedure. This results in a shorter hospital stay for the patient and means that they can get back to playing sports sooner.

Prostheses

A prosthesis is an artificial limb which is used to replace a damaged or missing body part, allowing people with disabilities to participate in sport. Some prostheses are used to replace whole limbs (such as an artificial leg) or parts of a limb (such as a hip replacement). Other prostheses can be connected to an electronic device which is able to pick up information from the nervous system. For example, artificial hand prostheses which are connected to an electronic device can allow the person to move the fingers just by thinking.

Performance-enhancing drugs

Performance-enhancing drugs are drugs which are sometimes used in competitive sport to improve performance. They are banned in most sports and competitions will usually drug-test athletes to reduce their use. Any sportsperson who is found to have these drugs in their system can be banned from the sport and have medals and prizes taken away from them. There are different types of performance-enhancing drugs:

• Anabolic steroids - these are drugs which help your body to produce muscle, increasing strength, speed and stamina of the athlete. They can also make people feel more aggressive.

• Stimulants - these drugs increase reaction time and make people feel more alert. They also have the side-effect of increasing aggression.

• Narcotic analgesics - these drugs reduce pain, so that if an injury occurs, this will not affect the performance of the athlete.

Performance-enhancing drugs are controversial and there are arguments both for and against their use. Some people (referred to as absolutists) think that the use of performance-enhancing drugs is wrong and should be completely banned in all sports. They argue that these drugs are illegal, so using them is considered breaking the law. The drugs also have worrying side effects, such as increasing blood pressure and causing heart problems. They also argue that the use of performance-enhancing drugs makes competitions unfair, giving the drug user an undeserved advantage. Other people, called rationalists, believe that the use of performance-enhancing drugs can be justified in some situations. These people would argue that each athlete has the right to decide for themselves whether to take performance-enhancing drugs after weighing up the health risks. Furthermore, some athletes are at a disadvantage compared to others as they may have less access to training facilities - for these people, taking performance-enhancing drugs may actually reduce the inequalities between athletes in competitions.

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