Football concussion brain injuries story gets even worse

Today is a fall Sunday in the US and this afternoon about a thousand large and muscular men are going to spend three hours pounding the stuffing out of each other to the cheers of the crowd. What is becoming increasingly clear is that with each hit, the players are receiving brain injuries that down the road will lead to many of them suffering from symptoms akin to dementia. I wrote about this before (see here and here) but now more disturbing stories are coming to light. [Read more…]

Football kills and you cannot make it safer

The recent incident in an (American) football game where Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest after getting hit hard in the chest during a tackle has once again highlighted how dangerous this sport is. Football authorities and fans tend to quickly label these as isolated events and any actions they have taken in the wake of them have focused on extra protective gear or changing the rules to reduce some dangerous practices.

But Irvin Muchnick writes that those remedies merely skirt the fundamental issue and that is that this sport kills.

One month and a day before Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin came frighteningly close to becoming the second in-game fatality in NFL history, he was ejected from the Amazon Prime Thursday night game for an illegal hit on New England Patriots wide receiver Jakobi Meyers. See it for yourself on YouTube. Hamlin, a defensive safety, blasted Meyers helmet-to-helmet, preventing a touchdown catch in the end zone. As everyone reading this undoubtedly knows, on the aborted Jan. 2 edition of ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” Hamlin made a clean tackle against a Cincinnati Bengals receiver, and then collapsed seconds later, likely from commotio cordis, or percussion-induced cardiac arrest.
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The fanaticism of football players and their fans

Jaime Hoffman, the athletic director of the liberal arts Occidental College, had a meeting with college’s general counsel, head athletic trainer, head football coach, and president and decided that because of the declining enrollment in their football program that resulted in too few eligible players to fully field a team and the danger that injuries posed to their smaller and more inexperienced players, that they cancel the remaining games of the season
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Isn’t regular football brutal enough?

American football is a brutal game and so it should not be surprising that it occasionally erupts into outright violence. This feature was on display recently when Myles Garrett, a player for the Cleveland Browns, yanked off the helmet of an opposing player and repeatedly beat him on the head with it until he was restrained by other players. As is often the case there were events that led up to this assault but it was still egregious by any standards. In fact, yanking out a player’s helmet can be very dangerous because the neck is violently jerked. He has been suspended indefinitely but it made me wonder at what point this kind of on-field violence moves into a territory where the perpetrator is subject to legal prosecution.
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The brutality of boxing and football

I have been writing about the dangers playing American football due to the increasing number of reported cases of brain injury due to the repeated concussions that American football players experience, and argued that there are strong grounds for schools and colleges not fielding teams since educational institutions should not be encouraging young people to run the risks of permanent damage by seeming to endorse a dangerous activity. If as adults they want to play, there is little we can do except not support them.
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Why I stopped watching football

Tomorrow (Sunday) is the much-hyped Super Bowl. I will not be watching it, just as I have skipped it in the past decade. In my earlier post about how little time is actually involved in play during a normal football game, some of the comments accused those critical of the game of being ‘haters’. It is true that I have come to dislike the game but it was not always so. If I am a hater, it is a fairly recent development. [Read more…]

Concussion in sports

The serious problem of football players suffering brain damage from repeated concussions is becoming a big issue. The National Football League has managed to strike a deal with the players union that temporarily takes it out of the courts and as hard as it may be to imagine in these days when football is so popular, I think it is only a matter of time before we begin to view it that same way we now view gladiatorial contests of the past. [Read more…]

Serious injuries in rugby

I have been railing about the serious dangers to participants in American football, especially with the rise in evidence of CTE, the long-term brain injury that results from repeated collisions that can cause concussions. It is thought that the repeated accumulation of concussions, even small ones during practices, is what leads to later serious cognitive decline in players. I feel the evidence is already compelling enough that I no longer watch games and also think that schools and colleges should no longer offer this as a sports option to their students. It is an activity that should be left for adults to choose to participate in, though they should be made aware of the risks.

Americans tend to view rugby as pretty much the same as American football, except without the protective helmets and body padding and hence think that it must be much more dangerous. I used to tell them that it was not so, that there were differences that made rugby safer. One is that there is evidence that the protective gear actually gives players a false sense of safety and encourages them to do dangerous things that they would not do without it. Another is that in rugby, it is only the player who has the ball that can be tackled, thus any given player faces far fewer collisions per game. A third is that any collision that results in contact with a player’s head results in an immediate yellow card that requires the offender to be off the field for ten minutes, to sit in a chair that is quaintly called a ‘sin bin’. If, during that time, an off-field review shows no mitigating factors, it is upgraded to a red card and the player cannot return to the game.
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Brain damaging sports

A few years ago, the serious brain injury condition known as chronic trauma encephalopathy (CTE) that was found after autopsies of former American football players made news and there were calls for reform. (I wrote several posts about this back then.) But it seems like those concerns have been forgotten and we have just seen yet another Super Bowl extravaganza with scarcely a mention of the fact that the players out on the field were likely destroying their brains, with each hard concussive hit cheered on by the millions watching the event

In an article in the New Yorker, Ingfei Chen highlights the research of medical historian Stephen Casper who has found that the revelations of brain injuries in football players that were treated as surprising new findings have been known for a long time in football, hockey, soccer, and rugby and each time the sports business complex has managed to suppress those concerns by arguing that the causal relationship of repeated collisions in sports to brain damage were not conclusively proven. The sports industry is adopting the same tactics as the tobacco industry did when the dangers of smoking were first raised. They bring forward their own paid ‘researchers’ to cast doubt and claim that the science is not yet resolved and demand standards of rigor in making causal connections that would take decades to obtain, all so that the people making money from the violence can ignore the problem.
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