The healthcare for elite athletes has the potential to create many ethical issues for sports practitioners. And the relationship between a sports practitioner and an athlete differs significantly from the traditional doctor-patient relationship. However, there has been little discussion of them to date. To investigate the ethical awareness and concerns in sports medicine field, we surveyed the responses of Korean medical team to a questionnaire during the Summer Olympic Games 2012. The questionnaire was developed to access a wide-range of common ethical issues in sports medicine; conflict of interests, confidentiality, pediatric athletes, performance-enhancing substances, infectious disease, innovative therapies, medical advertising. Twenty-nine out of 32 sports practitioners responded to the questionnaire (90.6%). Respondents identified many ethical matters concerning the unique characteristics of athletes-as-patients in sports medicine. This study has started the process of identifying contemporary ethical problems with regard to the sports medicine, and there should be further studies dealing with these problems.
Athletes ; Communicable Diseases ; Confidentiality ; Conflict of Interest ; Delivery of Health Care ; Humans ; Performance-Enhancing Substances ; Surveys and Questionnaires ; Sports ; Sports Medicine ; Therapies, Investigational