WOULD YOU PREVENT A CHILD’S CONCUSSION IF YOU COULD?

WOULD YOU PREVENT A CHILD’S CONCUSSION IF YOU COULD?

I have been shaking my head a lot lately and I know that it has to stop.  I don’t want to incur any more brain damage. Shaking your head repeatedly is akin to shaking a fresh uncooked egg inside a sealed glass jar filled with water. If you shake and bang the egg about long and often enough, you will crack the shell and scramble the yolk. This is my analogy to having your head repeatedly banged during a contact sport. Concussions are inevitable. I think that this conclusion is fairly self evident, but there is a considerable difference of opinion if you are dealing with football players or hockey players or amateur athletes. Let me explain.

The National Football League has finally agreed that the kind of head trauma that football players suffer can lead to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma. A neuropathologist has examined the brains of 111 deceased N.F.L. players and 110 were found to have C.T.E. as a result of concussions from playing the contact sport of football. The NFL no longer denies the correlation between repeated impact to the head and the disease. 

On the other hand, hockey, which also involves considerable physical collisions and blows to the head, does not agree. Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the National Hockey League states, “I don’t believe there has been, based on everything I’ve been told, other than some anecdotal evidence, any direct link between multiple hockey concussions and CTE.” For some unexplained reason, Bettman does not believe that a hockey induced concussion could possibly result in the same deadly results reported from football induced concussions. I can just assume that Bettman, a lawyer, not a neuroscientist, does not want to reduce or minimize the physical contact in hockey for fear of losing the fan base, that believes fights and bodychecks are an essential part of hockey. Serious concussion victims can eventually display symptoms such as speech impediments, sensory processing disorder, tremors, vertigo, deafness, depression and suicidal tendencies. I guess hockey just considers these results as part of the great game of hockey! 

A recent example from amateur sports shows a similar reluctance to face the issue head on (pardon the pun). The Nova Scotia School Athletic Federation decided to cancel public school rugby games across the province because of safety concerns, raising the ire of players, parents and coaches. A recent five year study in the province indicated that rugby players suffered five times as many concussions and possible concussions, than the total for all players of amateur football, hockey and soccer in the province. That kind of data would convince me to make the same decision as the Athletic Federation. 

The very next day the Department of Education, because of the huge public outcry, reversed the Athletic Federation’s decision and reinstated rugby in Nova Scotia High Schools. The reason submitted for the change was that, “the decision was made without appropriate consultation with school communities.” Consultation has again raised its ugly head. Generally, opponents to a decision, (eg First Nations on pipeline construction) are not interested in just providing input, but rather, they expect that their input is the way it has to be. They need to understand that consultation does not automatically guarantee agreement. As a parent of a student playing rugby, what argument could be more convincing than the data related to the large number of concussions occurring in the sport? Consulting with school communities does not change the data, it only provides varying opinions. If you wouldn’t accept and use the data to make the decision, then I would just shake my head and I have just promised to quit doing that!