After a two-year break due to the COVID pandemic, one of the world’s greatest experts in the field of Sports Orthopedics, winner of the Olympic gold medal, Visiting Professor of the Medical Faculty in Belgrade, our friend and donor, Prof. Dr. Nebojsa Popovic, together with his wife Branka, visited the Center for Sports Medicine and Exercise Therapy, during a short visit to Belgrade, and spent a pleasant afternoon in the conversation with members and associates of the Center.
Even during the pandemic, we were in contact with our Prof. Dr. Nebojsa Popovic, who has, together with his colleagues, designed the Belgrade Sports Medicine E Forum (link). It was an international webinar, (recorded material can be found on the website of our faculty) organized at a time when the largest part of the world’s population was in quarantine. During the webinar, world experts in the field of Sports Medicine shared their knowledge, experiences, research results, and current recommendations related to Sports Medicine examinations, screenings, diagnostics, and conservative and surgical treatment of sports injuries with a wide audience in Serbia and abroad. In the discussions that followed each lecture, we haven’t only exchanged our opinions and perspectives, but also have received encouragement and hope that we will soon use all that new knowledge in practice and that the pandemic will end up quickly. Prof. Popovic has organized another important webinar – Aspetar Sports Medicine Collection Online Forum Series within the Apsetar Clinic in Doha, Qatar. We also used the visit to our Center to discuss some new ideas for future cooperation and joint projects. Once again, we emphasized the theoretical and practical significance of the sports medicine textbook “Aspetar Sports Medicine Collection”, which was written by more than 300 authors, world experts in the field of Sports Medicine under the “roof” of the Aspetar Clinic, with Professor Popović as editor-in-chief. By the way, this textbook is also present in our laboratory and is an irreplaceable material for preparing for a board exam in Sports Medicine. Prof. Popović has also announced the release of his new book “Champion way” in the following weeks. We hope that this book will also become a part of our official library.
We have also shown to Professor our new equipment for physical therapy and determination of postural status and introduced him to the results of the research we conducted using this equipment. The professor enjoyed in the conversation with the “old” members of our team, but also with the new associates of the Institute of Medical Physiology, Dr. Milica Zeković, Dr. Jovana Maričić, and Dr. Aleksandra Marković, who are just beginning their professional and scientific careers in the field of physiology of physical effort, as teaching associates at the Institute of Medical Physiology.
A visit to the Olympic Committee of Serbia is also planned in the following days, during which Prof. Popović will meet with the president of the Olympic Committee of Serbia, Božidar Maljković, as well as the president of the Health Commission of the OK, Prof. Dr. Dragan Radovanovic.
The next meeting with Prof. Popovic is planned for the time of the preparticipation physical evaluation of FC Partizan, when our guest will also be Dr. Peter O’Hodge, CMO of the Aspetar Clinic. We hope that with the support of our colleagues and friends, especially Prof. Dr. Popović, we’ll be able to maintain the positive reputation that the Department of Sports Medicine of the University of Belgrade enjoys at the European and world level.
