news
Female athletes' pain isn't just physical, it's brain-body
The British Journal of Sports Medicine published an editorial arguing that pain in female athletes is poorly understood. It says doctors need to look beyond just physical injury to integrate mental health, hormonal cycles, and social factors into how they treat pain perception.
The British Journal of Sports Medicine published an editorial arguing that pain in female athletes is poorly understood. It says doctors need to look beyond just physical injury to integrate mental health, hormonal cycles, and social factors into how they treat pain perception.
The architecture take
The body is not a machine you simply fix. This editorial in BJSM is a clear call for sports medicine to finally catch up to what we've known about chronic pain for decades: it's not always about tissue damage. For female athletes, this means their unique hormonal landscape – menstrual cycles, perimenopause, pregnancy – has to be part of the pain story. They also need to consider social and mental health pressures. Ignoring these factors isn't just incomplete, it's malpractice. I've seen too many women dismissed when their pain doesn't fit a tidy, masculine-coded injury model. This isn't a new concept, but getting it into mainstream sports medicine journals means the conversation is finally shifting from 'fix the knee' to 'understand the whole person's nervous system.' Watch for new protocols around monitoring training load and recovery that factor in menstrual cycle phases. Good.