Electroceuticals for Paralympic Athletes: A Fair Play and Classification Concern?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Electroceuticals such as brain computer interfaces and spinal cord stimulation (SCS) represent transformative strategies for neuromodulation. Research has demonstrated that SCS can ameliorate motor and autonomic cardiovascular dysfunctions, particularly in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI). Notably, SCS has been shown to augment aerobic exercise performance. Owing to the nature of their injury, athletes with SCI are often predisposed to low resting blood pressure and impaired physiological responses to exercise. Therefore, some athletes intentionally induce autonomic dysreflexia ("boosting") to gain a competitive advantage - an act banned by the International Paralympic Committee (IPC). However, the emergence of electroceuticals facilitates an alternative performance enhancement strategy that could be considered unfair without equal access opportunities for all athletes. Currently, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the IPC have not acknowledged the potential impact of electroceuticals in parasport. Herein, we present an argument that the use of SCS meets the criteria for it to be placed on the World Anti-Doping Code Prohibited List (or at the very least be monitored) because collectively: SCS can enhance sport performance, represents a potential health risk to the athlete if misused, and may violate the spirit of sport. Acute and chronic use of SCS may also lead to classification changes, and increased opportunities for athletes to intentionally misrepresent, thereby raising concerns for the IPC. The growing access to electroceuticals (e.g. via clinical trial participation or private healthcare implantation) more than ever increases the likelihood of an athlete using SCS to gain an unfair advantage in parasport.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".