Concussions and serious head injuries are getting a lot of attention lately and for good reason. Football is the most common sport for concussions. Players have a 75 percent chance of getting one. A professional football player will receive an estimated 900 to 1500 blows to the head during a season according to concussiontreatment.com. As football season approaches, the concern for serious head injuries and how to avoid them is becoming a priority among athletes, coaches, and parents. As a mom and a nurse, I know the importance of preventing and treating injuries – especially concussions.
Other big concerns are knowing how to spot a concussion and how to recover properly. Some warning signs are brief loss of consciousness after the injury, memory problems, confusion, drowsiness or feeling sluggish. Others include dizziness, double vision or blurred vision, headache, nausea, sensitivity to light or noise and balance problems. Even when a concussion has been properly diagnosed, many athletes do not heal properly, leading to many of the long-term effects of head injuries.
If you break a leg or wrist and allow them to heal in the proper time, it’s like the injury never happened. But if the brain doesn’t heal properly, athletes return to playing violent contact sports with the potential to repeat the injury before recovering from the first one. Boxers get six to eight months to nurse their injuries after a fight. In football, we see injured players return to the field within minutes of getting hurt.
We know younger athletes will disguise their injuries to avoid being cut from their team. That’s where it’s imperative for parents to be involved. You have to make sure your child takes the necessary time to recover. That means more than just sitting on the bench. It requires lying still, often in a dark room with no TV, no cell phone, and no video games.
No one wants to be responsible for long-term injuries to a child. Doctors and coaches are much more cautious when it comes to making sure very young athletes are fit to play again after suffering a concussion. But in the NFL, the pressure is enormous for players to protect their source of income. Many mask their symptoms and are not truthful with their doctors. These players know they are one play away from losing their starting position or getting cut and they want to continue playing for as long as they can.
For the 2015 season, the NFL is instituting a rule change aimed at protecting players from themselves. If the independent certified trainer spots an injury that has gone unnoticed by the officials on the field and the team’s medical personnel on the sideline, he can call down to the referee with a medical timeout and the player will have to be immediately removed from the game to be checked out.
I think even more can be done. The NFL Players Association, the union that represents players, has to go after the league for increased protection. In most professions, if you are hurt or disabled while working, you are given time to recover without fear of losing your job. When professional athletes are injured, they should get the same consideration. I know players who have gone back before they have recovered. As a nurse, I can look them in the eye and tell they are not ready to return to the field.
The culture around football needs to change. Preserving players’ health should be paramount. That will never happen as long as athletes prioritize their livelihoods over their lives.