Folk will always get involved in things they don't have the training for - for various reasons they get drawn into it and it happens in every profession. If nothing else, it's indicative of the fact that there is a gap to be filled that covers a broad range from dealing with day to day musculo-skeletal aches and pains experienced by the amateur sports person (or indeed, non-sporting individual), to improving elite sporting performance.
One of the main problems is that very few people know what Sports Therapy encompasses, or have even heard of it. Even though I've been involved in sport all my life, I'd never heard of it until I came across Active Health and I have to admit that I was initially very sceptical. Until it's explained, it's very difficult to see where it fits in alongside physiotherapy, which most people equally misunderstand and tend to see as a general 'cure-all' for muscular aches and pains, even though they are frequently disillusioned.
In my view, one of the most important roles for the STO is to educate people via the media. Until folk know what to expect, they won't be able to differentiate between practitioners and make the right choice for their particular circumstances. Secondly, I think the level of training required before anyone can call themselves a Sports Therapist needs to be increased and/or more clearly defined - not to 'degree level' I hasten to add, because this means very little nowadays and Sports Therapy is essentially a vocational discipline rather than an academic one (nothing wrong with that) - but to my mind it should include some sort of supervised 'on the job' experience with sports teams etc in the same way that physios have hospital experience.
Even though Sports Therapy is not a clinical discipline as such, the boundary will never be clear cut, so even trained therapists are going to find themselves drawn into grey areas, not least by their clients. Therapists need to understand how to work with and support clinicians at one end of the scale and coaches at the other. Unless this forms part of their training, there will be a lot of toe treading going on and sooner or later there will be the sort of publicity no-one wants. Get it right and it could save the NHS millions!
