Variation in physical development in schoolboy rugby players: can maturity testing reduce mismatch?

Objectives This study set out to pursue means of reducing mismatch in schoolboy rugby players. The primary objective was to determine whether application of previously reported thresholds of height and grip strength could be used to distinguish those 15-year-old boys appropriate to play under-18 school rugby from their peers. A secondary objective was to obtain normative data for height, weight and grip strength and to assess the variation within that data of current schoolboy rugby players.Design Cross-sectional cohort study.Setting 3 Scottish schools and ‘Regional Assessment Centres’ organised by the Scottish Rugby Union.Participants 472 rugby playing youths aged 15 years (Regional Assessment Centres) and 382 schoolboys aged between 12 and 18 years (three schools).Outcome measures Height, weight and grip strength.Results 97% of 15-year-olds achieved the height and grip strength thresholds based on previous reported values. Larger mean values and wide variation of height, weight and grip strength were recorded in the schoolboy cohort. However, using the mean values of the cohort of 17-year-olds as a new threshold, only 7.7% of 15-year-olds would pass these thresholds.Conclusions Large morphological variation was observed in schoolboy rugby players of the same age. Physical maturity tests described in earlier literature as pre-participation screening for contact sports were not applicable to current day 15-year-old rugby players. New criteria were measured and found to be better at identifying those 15-year-old players who had sufficient physical development to play senior school rugby

Biomedicine: an ontological dissection

Though ubiquitous across the medical social sciences literature, the term “biomedicine” as an analytical concept remains remarkably slippery. It is argued here that this imprecision is due in part to the fact that biomedicine is comprised of three interrelated ontological spheres, each of which frames biomedicine as a distinct subject of investigation. This suggests that, depending upon one’s ontological commitment, the meaning of biomedicine will shift. From an empirical perspective, biomedicine takes on the appearance of a scientific enterprise and is defined as a derivative category of Western science more generally. From an interpretive perspective, biomedicine represents a symbolic-cultural expression whose adherence to the principles of scientific objectivity conceals an ideological agenda. From a conceptual perspective, biomedicine represents an expression of social power that reflects structures of power and privilege within capitalist society. No one perspective exists in isolation and so the image of biomedicine from any one presents an incomplete understanding. It is the mutually-conditioning interrelations between these ontological spheres that account for biomedicine’s ongoing development. Thus, the ontological dissection of biomedicine that follows, with particular emphasis on the period of its formal crystallization in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century, is intended to deepen our understanding of biomedicine as an analytical concept across the medical social sciences literature