Athletes should weigh several things before purchasing and consuming dietary supplements to protect their health, reputation, and the spirit of fair competition.

Dr Amy B. Cadwallader joins Ethics Talk to discuss her article: “Seven Points for Athletes to Consider Before Using a Dietary Supplement.”

Young athletes benefit from participating in decision making about whether to participate in contact sports.

This month theme issue editor, Trahern Jones, a fourth-year student at Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota, spoke with Dr. Edward Laskowski about the use of performance-enhancing drugs and substances among athletes today.

Distinctions between treatment and enhancement, and between supposedly authentic and inauthentic tools, often inform judgments about what is morally acceptable in sport.

Physician-assisted doping of athletes has transformed high-performance sport into a chronically overmedicated subculture and spread so-called hormonal rejuvenation to the general public.

Enabling an athlete to harm herself, even in the pursuit of sporting success, is not acceptable behavior for a doctor.

One major difficulty in collecting data on which to base injury prevention strategies is the lack of large epidemiologic studies and comprehensive injury surveillance.

It is unclear whether the decreased risk of injury associated with prohibiting a teenage boy from playing football outweighs the benefits to his health and well-being of allowing him to participate.

The only studies in which hGH was shown to have a positive effect on athletic performance were in anabolic steroid users, so testing for hGH alone may not be accomplishing the intended goal.