Background: Sports medicine is a popular topic pervading the media and has a clear core focus of treating athletes and promoting exercise. While there is considerable overlap with musculoskeletal medicine, the latter is less well known and less well defined, focusing more on spinal pain problems.

Objective: This article highlights some of the similarities and differences between sports medicine and musculoskeletal medicine.

Discussion: Musculoskeletal medicine has evolved out of the need for doctors to help manage spinal pain problems at a time when the only other interested practitioners were chiropractors and osteopaths.