ACL tear fears, TikTok myths and the fight for credible women’s health science in sports

Sarah Johnson remembers the distress with which female athletes uttered the words “anterior cruciate ligament (ACL)”. She remembers the word “epidemic” branded across newspapers and websites. But mostly Johnson, a postdoctoral bioengineering researcher at Stanford University and a fellow of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, remembers the intensifying demand for her and the rest of the women’s sport health research community to deliver answers. Answers that, she says, were not yet ready. “W