LAUSR

According to the US National Federation of State High School Associations, boys have 1.13 million more sport opportunities annually than girls.1 This number snowballs when the intersectionality of race and socioeconomic status is factored in.1 Similarly, income level, gender and race contribute to healthcare inequity.2 While an athletes’ ability to return-to-sport is influenced by their physical and psychological readiness, this is superseded by the systemic social forces that shape an athlete’s reality and determines their access to sport development, funding and medical resources. Despite these realities, substantial neglect and disparity among how we address these ’non-physical’ factors in the sports medicine field continue to exist. Thus, the idea of biopsychosocial sports medicine is both everywhere and nowhere. The biopsychosocial approach to sports medicine is not new, with theoretical frameworks existing since the 1990s.3 In sport medicine, non-physical factors are often lumped together and termed ‘psychosocial’. While this broad construct was valuable for laying the foundation for biopsychosocial sports medicine, it provides a false illusion that we understand and address all non-physical factors. …