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Concussion in Sport: The Unheeded Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2018

GRANT GILLETT
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Abstract:

Patients with repeated minor head injury are a challenge to our clinical skills of neurodiagnosis because the relevant evidence objectively demonstrating their impairment was collected in New Zealand (although published in the BMJ and Lancet) and, at the time, was mired in controversy. The effects of repeated closed diffuse head injury are increasingly recognized worldwide, but now suffer from the relentless advance of imaging technology as the dominant form of neurodiagnosis and the considerable financial interests that underpin the refusal to recognize that acute accelerational injury is the most subtle and insidiously damaging (especially when seen in the light of biopsychosocial medicine), and potentially one of the most financially momentous (given the large incomes impacted and needing compensation) phenomena in modern sports medicine. The vested interests in downplaying this phenomenon are considerable and concentrated in North America where diffuse head injury is a widespread feature of the dominant winter sports code: Gridiron or American Rules football. The relationship of this to shattered lives among the brightest and best of young men and the relatively dated objective evidence are a toxic mix in terms of ethical analysis and, therefore, there is a malignant confluence of social forces that tends toward minimizing the injury.

Keywords

concussionbrain functionneuropsychologythe politico-economic environment of health ethics
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 27 , Special Issue 4: Clinical Neuroethics , October 2018 , pp. 710 - 716
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

Notes

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