Sports Specific Injuries

Perhaps one sign that I'm getting somewhat older is that musculoskeletal radiology is now considered a glamour specialty. When I began my training, nothing in radiology was considered glamorous and the bone pit was considered among the least “in vogue” areas of the department. Many think that MR changed this and made musculoskeletal imaging “stylish.” I am not sure that’s true. I think it is the ability to see sports injuries that really made musculoskeletal radiology fashionable. We can talk in cocktail parties about what this famous athlete had and what it would look like on images. We can talk over drinks about why this Olympic athlete's career ended. To the layperson this is more interesting than the bread-and-butter fractures, articular disease, and, of course, degeneration.

Because this is the glamour aspect of our specialty, imaging sports injuries has received a great deal of press. It is not our intention to repeat this press; we will look at sports injuries in a different way.

Specifically, what we asked Dr. White to do was to look at specific sports and then to enumerate the injuries associated with them. This is more like what we would need to know in a real-life interpretive session, and I think that Larry White’s approach is quite unique in the radiology literature. Not only has Larry looked at sports injuries from this clinically oriented perspective but also he has picked some sports that, although not uncommonly performed, are by no means the most popular athletic endeavors in the United States. I think this adds considerably to the interest of this issue.

In this issue we do cover some of the better known sports, including American football, soccer, and skiing, but also some of the lesser known sports including weightlifting, rock climbing, and, to some degree, golf and racket sports. There is one overview title in this issue, as we often have in Seminars of Musculoskeletal Radiology, that addresses imaging of the overhead throwing athlete. This is a motion that has overlap in several different athletic endeavors.

Larry has assembled an esteemed group of contributors, including several who not only study the sport they are writing about but also participate in it much more successfully than either David or I would.

Larry first proposed this concept at one of our editorial board meetings. When everyone heard it, it was a “eureka” moment, and the final product of Larry's idea is even better than we had any right to expect it to be, and we thank him for it.