Handling of medical knowledge in sport: Athletes' medical opinions, information seeking behaviours and knowledge sources.

Medical care in sport comprises a variety of treatments, from scientifically proven biomedicine to complementary and alternative medicine. Information and knowledge about these diverse treatment options is spread by different sources. Thus, athletes encounter information of varying content, quality and background. This exploratory pilot study addresses athletes' medical opinions, their health-related information seeking behaviour and the knowledge sources they utilise. Questionnaires were used to examine n = 110 German athletes (n(male) = 69, n(female) = 41; mean(age) = 24.28 ± 4.97 years) at high performance levels (national team and/or European championship and/or World championship n = 22; first national league and/or German championship n = 51, second national league and/or State championship n = 37) from various Olympic sports. A cluster analysis regarding the athletes' attitudes towards sport medicine exhibited four different types of athletes: 'the autonomous athlete', 'the open-minded athlete', 'the functionalistic athlete' and 'the conservative athlete'. In general, our findings show that the most used and trusted information sources are physicians and physiotherapists. However, medical information is trusted the most if it is experience- and field-tested, and comes from the athletes' sport-specific network. Our findings also suggest that professional medical knowledge management in competitive sport is needed.