BODILY issue- Sport for Health Flashcards
What were the three main ideas covered in this lecture?
- The taken-for-granted assumption that sport is good for your health
- The medicalisation of leisure
- The transhuman ambition to become ‘better-than-well’
What is the link between exercise and medicine?
‘Exercise is Medicine’- a global health initiative- managed by the American College of Sports Medicine- committed to the belief that PA promotes optimal health.
What does conducting a proper sociological analysis of sport entail?
Some identifiable features of doing sociology. The features that are relevant to this lecture include: establish that this is a social issue; establishing that some social constructions are involved; establishing that these social constructions follow rules set by certain powerful people; recognising the existence of ‘folk devils and moral panics’; differentiating between personal troubles and social issues; and debunking myths.
What’s the historical background/ context of this issue?
A social issue? Are social constructions involved?
Sport, exercise and health are symbolically interconnected in contemporary society. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Historically, sport hasn’t always been associated with health, and sports performers weren’t always moralised role-models.
As public health concerns have shifted from infectious to non-communicable diseases, lifestyles factors have increasingly been targeted. Indeed, medicine is no longer about just curing aliments, it’s now also about prevention and optimisation. There are lots of claimed benefits of exercise, they are almost universally accepted and tightly woven into our understanding of what it means to be healthy. And, of course, there is lots of money to be made too.
FIRST CLAIM: From Malcolm and Pulled (2017)
‘Neither sport nor exercise are necessarily, universally and unproblematically good for public health’
It is good for you in some ways, and bad for you in others.
Asked to accept that sports is like a medicine/ pill.
We cannot measure its effects in the same controlled way so we are usually left with a ‘more is better’ idea and we seem to forget the ‘side effects’ like acute and chronic injuries, asthma attacks and concussion
FIRST CLAIM: From Malcolm and Pulled (2017)
‘Neither sport nor exercise are necessarily, universally and unproblematically good for public health’
Malcolm, D., & Pullen, E. (2017). Is exercise medicine?. Handbook of Physical Activity: Policy, Politics and Practice. London: Routledge.
Available here: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315672779 -4/exercise-medicine-dominic-malcolm-emma-pullen
What do they say?
Malcolm and Pullen (2017) note:
“it is fundamentally problematic that ‘exercise is medicine’ ignores the research which shows that both acute and chronic injury is inherent to the structure of exercise and sport in particular.”
“Prescribed for entire populations regardless of symptoms, in general rather than specific does, with a subtext that there is no limit to what is good for you.”
What’s a related issue to CLAIM 1:
Thinking of exercise as medicine = put the responsibility of being healthy on the individual, because exercising is a lifestyle behaviour that individuals have to do through personal effort.
Explain how CLAIM 1 makes exercise a personal trouble?
This undermines the well-known idea that health and illness occur on a social gradient. Instead of trying to address the social forces and structures that cause ill-health, we create an additional stratification and point the finger and the ‘lazy’ sectors of the population.
In Malcolm and Pullen’s (2017) words, this looks like “victim-blaming of the non-compliant and the reproduction of health inequalities.” Public health would be better if we focused on structural inequalities.
Define what ‘medicalisation’ is?
Taking something that wasn’t medicine and making it medicine.
Means taking something and making it a COMMERCIAL product- changing it, a process of making something new.
PA- no longer something we do for enjoyment, but as a way to live longer.
SECOND CLAIM:
‘Turning leisure activities into health-enhancing activities could have harmful social consequences’
- MEDICALISATION
This claim strongly relies on an understanding of medicalisation: the notion that the domain of ‘medicine’ is expanding into all aspects of our everyday lives as well as blurring the lines between being ‘ill’ and being ‘at risk of illness’.
No longer is medicine only enacted in hospitals and GP surgeries. The success of modern medicine has produced a tendency to turn to medical and pharmaceutical solutions (e.g. birth and mental health) all too easily.
SECOND CLAIM:
‘Turning leisure activities into health-enhancing activities could have harmful social consequences’
Give an example of medicalisation?
The push to get older adults more active, for example, makes older people seem like the societal problem (they are unwell, costly and not contributing to the economy) while also creating “a market for emergent moral entrepreneurs who claim to have the solution to the problem they have in part created” (Pike, 2011).
= FOLK DEVILS
SECOND CLAIM:
‘Turning leisure activities into health-enhancing activities could have harmful social consequences’
Explain how this claim links to a moral panic?
The health and fitness industry is more than happy to agree that there is a problem to panic about because they can offer a solution.
Nike’s Designed to Move campaign, for example, stated that sedentary time during working hours was a key problem, and yet their solution was not to change working practices, but to encourage leisure time activity (which requires buying Nike shoes, no doubt).
SECOND CLAIM:
‘Turning leisure activities into health-enhancing activities could have harmful social consequences’
How does this capitalise on inequalities in health?
Fitbit and AppleWatch are now major players in this industry too. So now our leisure time is no longer a time to escape, but instead a time to do a different kind a work: body work that you will quantify and for a line manager who is always watching.
Health insurance companies are now giving better offers to people who do 10,000 steps a day. This is concerning because this is merely a risk factor – not actual illness – and it could quite obviously create more health inequalities.
THRID CLAIM:
‘There are social forces that push us towards the ambition to be better-than-well rather than preventing illness.’
(TRANSHUMANISM)
Just as there has been a shift from infectious disease to non-communicable disease, we are now arguably witnessing a shift towards transhumanism.
This idea, among many other things, is about moving towards the next stage of human enhancement. Being healthy may soon not be about being disease- free but about being better-than-well: using technology, gene selection and new medicines to optimise ourselves and live longer.
THRID CLAIM:
‘There are social forces that push us towards the ambition to be better-than-well rather than preventing illness.’
How is exercise linked to trans humanism?
Exercise is implicated in this transhuman movement. It can already apparently slow down the aging process, enhance your cognition, give you a better sex life and help you to sleep better. This movement raises spiritual, cultural and ethical questions about the future of human societies.
= become post-human
THRID CLAIM:
‘There are social forces that push us towards the ambition to be better-than-well rather than preventing illness.’
Give some examples of this?
Elon Musk- technology- striving to be better
Gene selection- new medicines don’t only solve problems, but make it better than solved.
Prosthetics
Conclude what this lecture states?
Sport and exercise may in fact have health-enhancing effects and we should not be overly sceptical or dismissive about it.
How can a sociological approach be applied?
Remind us that: the alignment between sport, exercise and health is a relatively recent phenomena; referring to exercise as ‘medicine’ can obscure its very real dangers; emphasising that we have good health.
As a result of this exercise undermines the need to address structural inequalities; exercise is part of a wider health ‘panic’ from which private companies can profit; exercise is implicated in a broader socio-technological movement towards human enhancement.
What are the three claims that sport may not be so good for health?
- ‘Neither sport nor exercise are necessarily, universally and unproblematically good for public health’
- ‘Turning leisure activities into health-enhancing activities could have harmful social consequences’
3.’There are social forces that push us towards the ambition to be better-than-well rather than preventing illness.’
