Stepping-up the Game 

This is a brand new small project that I'm enrolling in. 

Sadly, I have a very pessimistic view of the track that Sports and Exercise Medicine is currently taking. Filled with pseudo-scientific dogmas and myths based on fairly old and obsolete beliefs, it's a very difficult setting for Science and evidence-based practice to get in. Authority and Antiquity fallacies rule the state-of-the-art of the current daily practice, where Research and Clinical Practice have a long time turned their backs on each other (this if they have ever been looking at the same direction).

This lead me to this idea. Stepping-up the game is a project meant to disseminate the ideas of some of the best clinicians-researchers, critically pondering their arguments and trying to convey not their ideas per se, but the way they master critical thinking and the line of thoughts from some of our best thinkers - while some of them still having on-field experience.

This will likely make us think better with the tools they'll provide us, enabling us to then reason and apply better the always-limited amount of knowledge at our disposal.

Luckily, all professional involved in Sports and Exercise Medicine come from a common scientific background. This makes it unavoidable to discuss the state-of-the-art when it comes to how - and if - we are in fact being evidence-based when such information is already available, and if we are being precise and critical enough looking for it when it is not.

Even more concerning is the fact that we are often forgetting the need of being as much evidence-based as we can - the benefits it brings us and possible dangers if we don't follow it.

• Research : to raise awareness for the clinicians on why having an evidence-based approach is important, and to alert researchers on the necessity of providing meaningful and concrete information.
• Clinical Practice : To develop better and more efficient tools and strategies to apply on a daily basis by clinicians, as well as provide researchers with an insight of what's going on in the clinical setting so they can help formulate better questions, better hypothesis, and better study designs.
• Communication : To enhance the communication between clinicians and researchers and then being able to provide these common professional insights in a structured and simple manner to the major stakeholders, both financial as well as social and reputational, leading to a better decision--making.

Some of this issues have been addressed in this 2018 BJSM article, in case you want to further read on the topic.

Interviews

To meet the goals proposed, the means found were to interview and defy some of the best experts in bridging the gap between clinical/practical setting and research setting.

The discussions are listed below.