Injuries and self-care research

[Trish_C]

Hi everyone. I am a PhD student at the University of Calgary and an active runner. My research involves looking at self-care practices and the interplay between expert and lay medical knowledge. I am most interested in the exchange of knowledge that occurs in online forums like yours where everyone shares a mixture of experiential and medical expertise. I have received ethics approval for my project from both the University of Calgary and Red Deer College, and I am about to start my primary research, part of which involves looking at the injury forum of your website. Over the next few months, I'll be participating in the forum and then later asking for some volunteers for face-to-face interviews. Some of my observations will be recorded and reported in my research. Please let me know if you have any questions!

[La]

where everyone shares a mixture of experiential and medical expertise.

There's no shortage of that here!

[scrumhalfgirl]

Interesting! My husband (PhD candidate in exercise physiology) and I were just talking about this phenomenon over the weekend in reference to an email list I'm on (TriRudy) where there was a recent discussion about concussions.

[Jo-Jo]

where everyone shares a mixture of experiential and medical expertise.

There's no shortage of that here!

Yep....you've come to the right place

Ummm...will you give Running Mania a big thank you credit in your thesis

[jgore]

Are you interested in what lay people believe versus accepted medical knowledge, whether or not lay people change their beliefs based on the arguments or evidence presented by experts, the outcomes of particular treatments...

What is your definition of an expert? I ask because practitioners in different fields will often have very different ideas of how to treat an injury.

[Trish_C]

You've touched on a really important point in terms of multiple forms of expertise, even within the medical community (doctors, athletic therapists, physios, chiropractors, etc.). One of the things that sites like this do is allow people to share and to negotiate what we hear from experts (in this case, in light of our experiential expertise as runners) in our attempts to look after our own health. In this way, we as laypersons participate in creating knowledge rather than just accepting uncritically what various experts tell us.

[Jwolf]

Interesting project idea, Trish. I think it's important for all of us, when injured or in trying to prevent injury, to draw information from many sources to figure out what works for us. It's often frustrating because you can sometimes get opposite conflicting advice.

In some ways I feel like I could write the book on injuries; in other ways I feel like I know nothing.

[turd ferguson]

Trish, I'd be happy to participate (I'm in Calgary so the face to face is easy). Unfortunately I don't participate in the injury section much because (a) I'm not usually injured and (b) when I am injured I rarely want advice that isn't "keep running". Good luck!