Abstract
Several scholars have examined the medical uncertainties faced by sport medicine professionals surrounding their diagnosis, treatment, and management of concussion. However, recent evidence suggests that combat sport athletes seem to have ‘reasonably good concussion knowledge’. How, then, have athletes gained such an understanding when medical professionals have not? Given that the medical community is still searching for ‘certainty’, we argue that this logical inconsistency is most likely an artefact of the inflexible data collection methods rather than a nuanced representation of athletes’ actual understanding of concussion. This paper addresses this issue by employing immersive research strategies to provide epistemological space for complexities and contradictions that lie within fighters’ understanding of such experiences to come to the fore. In so doing, we demonstrate the interdependence between notions of ‘certainty’ and ‘uncertainty’ in fighters’ knowledge about concussion. In particular, we discuss how some athletes displayed ‘transient’ certainty within their understanding of concussion. To conclude this paper, we propose the notion of ‘the ‘expert’ on the street’ to explain the ways in which fighters gained ‘non-medical’ certainty and highlight the potential problems that are imbedded within it.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Concussion, Brain Injury, Combat Sport, Certainty, Uncertainty
