How do you differentiate between the mild and spicy salsas at a Mexican restaurant? It’s obvious: one has a jalapeno and one doesn’t, or one tastes clearly spicier than the other. When it comes to the severity of a concussion, however, the ability to differentiate between a severe injury and a mild one is much more unclear. How the brain will be affected by an injury and develop a concussion is impossible to observe at the time. Due to this, there is a growing concern in the sports world about how the best way to regulate and prevent repeat concussive injuries in players.
Currently, if you’re diagnosed with a concussion, you are removed from play for only a week, in football. For players, a week seems like a death sentence for their careers. For your brain, a week is the bare minimum amount of time necessary to repair itself for most concussions. But when even a doctor can’t tell you how bad your concussion really is or how long it will need to completely return to its normal state, how long should players be pulled off of the field? Fans and players will not want them off of the field longer than necessary, or at all. No one wants players to get injured, but they also don’t want miss a single game with their star players. There is an ethical question of whether it is up to the players here to decide to risk their brain’s health in order to keep playing, or not and maintain proper brain health. An obvious choice would be to improve safety equipment or to implement stricter regulations when a player is allowed to return to play after injuries.
Plenty of time and money is invested annually into the best helmets and equipment for players to keep them as safe as possible in play, but the players themselves have to be responsible enough to own up to their injuries. An injury to the body is obvious and if a player can’t walk, they can’t walk. An injury to the brain is not something you can look at and assess, even if you saw the tackle that caused it. The only way to assess whether players have a brain injury that’s severe is to ask them post-tackle and to ask them. Unfortunately, a player is at liberty to be honest and say he’s experiencing neck pain, or lie, say they’re feeling completely fine, and return to the field and further risk their brain to injury. Most players at the end of their career would not have their children exposed to the same risks of brain injury, leading most to interpret that this game can have some serious long-term problems with the way football is going right now. A change is necessary, and in order to prevent repeat concussions and long term brain damage, it’s time to choose whether it’s better to be safe than sorry or not. To be safe, any player with trauma to the brain, whether the player is experiencing pain or not, should be pulled out of games for a week or two to ensure that they are healed totally and completely. The risks of returning too soon would be impaired memory, thinking ability, and motor ability. If a player is willing to risk how well he can think for the rest of his life, just to play twenty more minutes of a game before getting another injury, then that’s the poor choice they choose to make.
Brain Tackles: Concussions in Football
