About FMRI
Fight Medicine Research Institute is an independent combat-sports research initiative. Its subject is the fighter.
Our mission
Fight Medicine Research Institute exists to protect the lives, health, and futures of fighters through rigorous research grounded in the realities of combat sports. Inside the ropes, inside the cage, and beyond the final bell, the fighter’s experience and well-being drive every question we ask.
Our mission is to strengthen the evidence behind fight-stoppage decisions, emergency protocols, and standardized post-bout head injury assessment; advance research on brain injury and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); and address mental health, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and suicide prevention. We translate research into practical improvements in fighter safety, emergency care, and lifelong health.
You don’t play this game. You live it.
A different starting point
Medicine reaches a fighter from every angle: the referee, the corner, the physician, the ambulance crew, the commission. FMRI’s research starts with the one person all of them are there for.
This research is focused on the fighter, not the physician. It asks what happened to the fighter, what the fighter was told, what the fighter could decide, and what the fighter carries afterward. A fighter does not play this game. A fighter lives it, in training, in the bout and in the years after the final bell.
What FMRI is
Fight Medicine Research Institute (FMRI) is an independent, privately operated combat-sports research initiative based in the United States. FMRI is not a nonprofit or charitable organization, and this website does not solicit donations.
FMRI’s work covers professional boxing, professional mixed martial arts and bare-knuckle boxing.
What FMRI does today
- Sets research priorities. Six proposed priorities cover fight stoppage, emergency response, post-bout head injury assessment, repetitive head impacts and CTE, mental health and PTSD, and suicide prevention.
- Keeps a verified research library. Each research record is checked against its publisher or repository record and labeled with its study type, population and peer-review status.
- Writes its rules before it does research. The governance charter, the participant protection policy and the research standards are published as proposals.
What FMRI has not done
A research organization should be plain about where it stands. As of this writing:
- FMRI has not started a study and is not recruiting participants.
- FMRI holds no ethics approval and has not signed an agreement with an ethics review board. External review is planned.
- FMRI has not seated a governing body, a scientific review committee or a fighter advisory council. Its policies carry the label “Proposed founding policies — adoption pending.”
- This website names no investigators, advisers, partners, sponsors or affiliated institutions, because none has been confirmed.
- The research in the library was done by the authors and institutions named on each record.
This page will change as those facts change.
How to hold FMRI to account
Read the governance charter. Check any research record against its source. If something on this website is wrong, the Publication & Corrections Policy says how it gets fixed.