Autonomic dysreflexia and boosting in disability sport: exploring the subjective meanings, management strategies, moral justifications, and perceptions of risk among male, spinal cord injured, wheelchair athletes.

ABSTRACT

Autonomic dysreflexia (AD) is a potentially life-threatening condition unique to individuals with spinal cord injury above the sixth thoracic spinal level. When this condition is induced by spinal cord injured athletes to enhance performance it is known as boosting. Given that little is known about this practice from the perspectives of the athletes themselves, we draw upon interview data with a sample of male, spinal cord injured, wheelchair athletes to explore their experiences of AD and boosting in relation to how they perceive and negotiate the fine line between the latter two conditions; how they experience positive benefits and manage unpredictability; how they conceptualize risk; and their moral justifications for boosting. Our thematic analysis suggests that our participants understand boosting via a process of experiential learning that involves them operating as ethnophysiologists within a boostogenic environment that can foster moral disengagement and encourage athletes to take dangerous health risks. The implications for policy and practice are considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Autonomic dysreflexia and boosting
• spinal cord injured wheelchair athletes
• experiential learning and managing symptoms
• motivations for boosting
• perceptions of risk and moral justifications

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following: our participants for kindly sharing their thoughts and experiences with us; Michael Cottingham, Nick Stanger and Kelsey Erickson for the valuable advice they provided along the way; and the two anonymous referees for their thoughtful engagement with, and comments on, a previous version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew C. Sparkes

Andrew C. Sparkes works in the Carnegie School of Sport at Leeds Beckett University, UK. His research and pedagogical interests are inspired by a continuing fascination with the ways in which people experience different forms of embodiment over time in a variety of contexts – often not of their own making.

James Brighton

James Brighton is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport and Exercise and a member of the Sport and Body Cultures (SBC) research group at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. His research interests lie in exploring the re-narrations of body-selves post spinal cord injury and the critical analyses of disability sport and fitness cultures.