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Outside Outpatient Ethics: Is It Ethical for Physicians to Serve Ringside?

Since 1983, when a physician proposed that the American Medical Association (AMA) endorse a ban on the sport of boxing, organized medicine has maintained a consistently hostile posture toward America’s most popular martial sport. Organizations from A to nearly Z—the American Academy of Neurology to the World Medical Association—have summarily condemned it. Discussion is so poisonous that physicians have compared boxing with legal execution and feeding Christians to lions. Controversy reappeared at the AMA annual meeting during summer 2002. After extensive debate, a policy endorsing the American Association of Ringside Physicians was defeated. The argument against endorsement was predicated on two premises: (1) boxing undermines the goals of medicine by subjecting participants to serious injury or death, and (2) attendance at ringside gives implicit credence to a sport that is seen as an assault on medical values. We will examine this argument here, and then offer rebuttals, in which the moral authority of medicine to define and control risky behavior will be denied.