{"id":1200,"date":"2012-10-19T08:31:47","date_gmt":"2012-10-19T13:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/?p=1200"},"modified":"2012-10-19T08:31:47","modified_gmt":"2012-10-19T13:31:47","slug":"concussion-a-word-not-easily-defined-and-why-that-spells-trouble-for-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/?p=1200","title":{"rendered":"Concussion: A Word Not Easily Defined and Why that Spells Trouble for Football"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Stuart Dean<\/strong><\/p>\n

Concussion<\/em> is a word increasingly used on and off the football field in discussions of current and former players and recent and old plays.\u00a0 It would seem everyone knows what this word means, but its meaning is far from clear and that is potentially a very serious problem for everyone involved in football.\u00a0 In fact, what concussion<\/em> means could fundamentally change how football and other sports are practiced and played.<\/p>\n

I want to begin with what should be most obvious.\u00a0 If you see a player get knocked out you do not need a medical degree to come to the conclusion that he has suffered a concussion.\u00a0 But getting knocked out is not the only sign of a concussion.\u00a0 Not every concussion is a knock out.<\/p>\n

How can that be?\u00a0 Take a look at the word itself: concussion<\/em>, as is the case with many medical terms, comes to us from Latin, where it referred to any number of types of \u2018shaking\u2019.\u00a0 Analogous to how \u2018shake\u2019 is used in English, it could be used figuratively to describe an extortion attempt as a \u2018shake down.\u2019\u00a0 There is no magic, though, in using Latin derived terminology: it does not automatically make your meaning any more precise or scientific than it might otherwise be.\u00a0 Simply put, a concussion is the brain getting shaken up.\u00a0 Indeed, one type of concussion is regularly diagnosed by its relationship to shaking: \u201cshaken baby syndrome\u201d is associated with concussions in infants.<\/p>\n

If you think modern medicine can be much more precise than describing a concussion as a type of shaking of the brain that causes injury you are in for a big surprise.\u00a0 There is no one definition of what constitutes a concussion.\u00a0 To be sure, on one end of the spectrum of symptoms that everyone agrees constitutes a concussion is loss of consciousness.\u00a0 But exactly what is on the other end of the spectrum, that is, at what point a shaken brain begins to be an injured brain is not at all clear.<\/p>\n

That is why anyone involved in sports needs to be concerned with this issue.\u00a0 It does no good to come up with yet another term, as some doctors have done, and speak about a \u2018sports concussion.\u2019\u00a0 Your brain does not act any differently when it is shaken on a football field or in a car accident.\u00a0 Any sort of shaking of the brain has the potential to cause injury.<\/p>\n

Therefore it is vital to consider the key variables.\u00a0 Age is one.\u00a0 As noted above, infants constitute a special case because, for example, the neck muscles take time to develop in order to keep the head from moving violently when the body is shaken.\u00a0 But for children generally, because the brain is still developing, a concussion can be far more traumatic than it might otherwise be in an adult.\u00a0 Another variable is the number of concussions.\u00a0 All the evidence points to concussions having a cumulative effect.\u00a0 Indeed, it is widely recognized that suffering a concussion increases your vulnerability to suffering another.\u00a0 The amount of time between one concussion and another does not appear to be a significant factor.\u00a0 Quite unlike the conditioning of muscles, sinews and bones, there is no such thing as conditioning the brain to being shaken.\u00a0 Every concussion is a bad concussion.\u00a0 Perhaps most important of all the variables is precisely what is most variable of all: what constitutes a concussion is inherently subjective.\u00a0 When it comes to concussions no two individuals are alike.\u00a0 What might appear to be the same shake, the same \u2018hit\u2019 for one person might have an entirely different effect on another person.\u00a0 Current imaging techniques or blood tests are generally not useful for diagnosis of any but the most traumatic of brain injuries.\u00a0 Doctors rely to a great extent on what patients tell them.<\/p>\n

The implications of all this for sports generally but football in particular are enormous and yet continue to be largely unacknowledged.\u00a0 Far from practice making perfect, when it comes to football the more you practice the more likely it is you are going to suffer a concussion.\u00a0 Given the age and cumulative damage variables discussed above, this should be especially troubling for those who promote football among adolescents and preadolescents.\u00a0 As it relates to the NFL this means that a longer season is inherently a more dangerous season.\u00a0 A longer football career is a riskier career.<\/p>\n

From a legal perspective the age, cumulative effect and subjectivity variables make brain injury from football induced concussions fraught with liabilities that are inherently difficult to predict, manage or quantify.\u00a0 How can anyone ever be certain when brain injury in a given player actually begins?\u00a0 How can concussions be prevented in a sport where success is very much defined by the hit or the tackle?\u00a0 How can a dollar figure be put on dementia when its very diagnosis depends so much upon the perception of the person experiencing it?<\/p>\n

For now, the NFL seems to be trying to manage the unmanageable.\u00a0 It is attempting to fence off the issue by contending that current plaintiffs in brain injury litigation against the NFL should be bound by one or more collective bargaining agreements.\u00a0 Teams are expected to handle concussions with special procedures as they occur.\u00a0 It seems dubious at best as to whether the implications of concussions can be contractually limited or managed on a case by case basis.\u00a0 Is it not possible, indeed likely, that practically every play of every game results in one or more players suffering a concussion of some sort?\u00a0 Furthermore, surely some of the brain injuries suffered by the current plaintiffs began to occur long before their tenure with an NFL team.\u00a0 There does not seem to be any way the NFL can differentiate such injuries from those incurred or exacerbated by NFL play.\u00a0 But given not only how the NFL, but those with an economic interest in the NFL–such as broadcasters and their respective sponsors–promote, glamorize and indeed glorify football at all levels of play it is hardly obvious how it is possible to fence off one set of brain injured plaintiffs from another or one set of potential defendants from another.\u00a0 Why should the NFL be immunized from liability for all those who play football merely with the hope of playing at the NFL level when such a hope is deliberately fostered by the NFL?\u00a0 And is it only the NFL that should be liable?\u00a0 What about all the schools and colleges that promote football?\u00a0 What about broadcasters and their sponsors?<\/p>\n

Those are troubling questions.\u00a0 They need to be answered.\u00a0 And they will be answered in one way or another, in one court or another.<\/p>\n

Stuart Dean is currently an independent consultant and writer in New York City who, among other things, also teaches yoga.\u00a0 He received his JD from Cornell and previously worked at a major law firm for 7 years and a major investment bank for 6 years.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: Stuart Dean Concussion is a word increasingly used on and off the football field in discussions of current and former players and recent and old plays.\u00a0 It would seem everyone knows what this word means, but its meaning is far from clear and that is potentially a very serious problem for everyone involved in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,102,12,4],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1201,"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200\/revisions\/1201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nflconcussionlitigation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}