Utilization of Complementary and Alternative Medicine among Korean Elite Athletes: Current Status and Future Implications

Effectiveness of Pilates exercises in sports

Participation in sports is spreading all around the world in an attempt of the community to stay active, healthy, prevent health issues and conditions and to ensure quality of life while there is life expectancy and population is getting more and more older. Existing protocols in rehabilitation are sometimes demanding and are addressed in athletes and people with good physical condition while population gets involved in recreational sports activities more and more. Sport injuries are very common not only in athletes but in general population as well. Pilates is a very popular type of exercise and industry around it is flourishing. Although there are indications that it could be used as an alternative in rehabilitation, research is limited in certain fields. The aim of this editorial is to motivate researchers to conduct well-designed studies in sports injuries’ rehabilitation based on the Pilates method, to explore the efficacy of the method as a complementary approach and the optimal integration strategies in diverse sports rehabilitation settings. Last but not least, it is an attempt for the need of the community to establish certification on Clinical Pilates Physiotherapists based on the principles of rehabilitation.

Baseless Claims and Pseudoscience in Health and Wellness: A Call to Action for the Sports, Exercise, and Nutrition-Science Community

The global health and wellness industry has an estimated value of US$4 trillion. Profits derive from heath club memberships, exercise classes, diets, supplements, alternative 'therapies', and thousands of other products and services that are purported to improve health, recovery, and/or sports performance. The industry has expanded at an alarming rate, far outstripping the capacity of federal bodies to regulate the market and protect consumer interests. As a result, many products are sold on baseless or exaggerated claims, feigned scientific legitimacy, and questionable evidence of safety and efficacy. This article is a consciousness raiser. Herein, the implications of the mismatch between extraordinary health and performance claims and the unextraordinary scientific evidence are discussed. Specifically, we explore how pseudoscience and so-called 'quick fix' interventions undermine initiatives aimed at evoking long-term behavior change, impede the ongoing pursuit of sports performance, and lead to serious downstream consequences for clinical practice. Moreover, pseudoscience in health and wellness, if left unchecked and unchallenged, may have profound implications for the reputation of exercise science as a discipline. This is a call to action to unify exercise scientists around the world to more proactively challenge baseless claims and pseudoscience in the commercial health and wellness industry. Furthermore, we must shoulder the burden of ensuring that the next generation of exercise scientists are sufficiently skilled to distinguish science from pseudoscience, and information from mis- and disinformation. Better population health, sports performance, and the very reputation of the discipline may depend on it.