My Take on an American Obsession--Part 2
Several posts ago I ended the "American Obsession" one with "to be continued." Now I'm really trying to build up a full head of steam to get my writing on football done before the League of Denial book has to go back to the library.
The story of a Hall of Fame football player is making the rounds in electronic media. Jason Brown was offered a 5-year $37 million contract playing for the St. Louis Rams. He walked away from football to expend his energies in the humble pursuit of farming. He learned what he knows of farming from the internet, youtube especially. His North Carolina farm is called First Fruits Farm, and he intends to give away the first fruits of all that is produced to feed the hungry. This year his first crop, five acres of sweet potatoes, 100,000 pounds, is all going for that purpose. He has almost 1,000 acres to develop further. "When I think of a life of greatness, I think of a life of service," he said. He wants to be successful in God's eyes. You may listen to the short CBS News clip here.
Most recently the National Football League (NFL) has been in the news for failing to act decisively enough in penalizing players who committed acts of domestic violence off the court. A slap on the wrist, and the players returned to basking in the adulation heaped on particularly outstanding players. This time, however, an outcry from the public did not allow these wrongs to go unobserved, unreported, and un-addressed. Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner backtracked finally and took measures more nearly in keeping with the seriousness of the players' offenses.
Long before this, even before Goodell became commissioner, when Paul Tagliabue was still in charge, however, the NFL had adopted a deeply entrenched habit of obfuscation, selective research and reporting, and downright deceptive practices when confronted with the evidence of serious brain injuries from playing football. Creating the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) Committee was the NFL's way of reassuring the world that they were taking the problem of brain injury seriously. It was a smoke screen. The head of the committee was a rheumatologist (think arthritis doctor), and the committee churned out a host of "scholarly papers" directly in conflict with the research going on by Dr. Omalou and other highly respected neurology professionals. I can't see how anyone could read these accounts without feeling revulsion and disgust. Stay tuned.
Dr. Bob Cantu was a football enthusiast and chief of neurosurgery and chairman of the department of neurosurgery at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts. He had already written dozens of articles on establishing guidelines for returning to play after having a concussion when he was hired as the sports section editor of the prestigious medical journal Neurosurgery, specializing in articles on sports and the brain. By this time he was president of the American College of Sports Medicine.
Twelve different times, other NFL doctors put their own favorable spin on research results, each time submitting evidence to Neurosurgery that football was not the cause of CTE, and, over the protests of the sports section editor (Dr. Cantu), and without the support of the professionals who had been asked to review the article, those NFL-submitted articles were published. The gold standard for trustworthiness in medical matters is being published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Neurosurgery was ostensibly just such a publication, but the peer-review process was reduced in this case to allowing the dissenting doctors to express their reservations only in comments following the article. All the real experts in CTE were in that category, and their protests were relegated to the status of other "nobodies" who had an ax to grind. The chief editor of the publication loved football and loved rubbing shoulders with some of football's big names. That interest apparently overrode all other considerations on this matter. The NFL rheumatologist's committee's viewpoint carried the day on CTE in the Neurosurgery journal. Understandably, each time a new journal article was published saying that football is safe, the credibility of doctors like Dr. Omalou suffered a blow.
Meanwhile, some former players were requesting disability compensation from the NFL, which had originally offered a retirement plan, but no additional funds for the many expenses associated with a variety of ailments of people with CTE. Quietly, and on a very different track from the NFL MTBI Commitee, those in charge of making decisions regarding disability payments acknowledged that football had, in fact, caused the debilitating symptoms some retired players were experiencing, and they began to pay disability compensation to those players. The incongruity of this was obvious--one NFL agency saying football and CTE were not connected, and one NFL agency acknowledging that they were.
On October 28, 2009 NFL Commissioner Goodell appeared in a hearing on football and brain injury before the House Judiciary Committee. It didn't go very well for Goodell. During that meeting, the NFL's worst nightmare began with a comment by Linda Sanchez, a Los Angeles Congresswoman. She cheerfully informed Goodell, that what she was hearing from him reminded her a great deal of what the tobacco industry was saying before a torrent of lawsuits in the 1990s forced them to admit, after many claims to the contrary, that there was, in fact, a link between smoking and damage to one's health. That analogy rang true on a sweeping scale, and it marked a new day of reckoning for the NFL.
I have no way of knowing for sure what all motivated Jason Brown to abandon professional football when he did, but I have a hunch that his decision owes something to the turn of events on the day Linda Sanchez spoke up. After that, when the truth became known, football players, for the first time ever, began to have free access to accurate data about the health risks associated with playing football--because the NFL no longer could squelch the evidence.
In the comments following the Jason Brown story, one person lamented the fact that Brown did not first sign the contract he was offered and get his $37 million, with which he could have done a lot of good, and only then left football to do his other deeds of generosity through farming. My hunch is that Jason Brown wisely realized that the longer he stayed in football, the more he increased his chances of sustaining brain injuries that would make a long useful life after football an impossibility. Kudos to Brown for recognizing that, and especially, applause for those researchers who persevered in the face of formidable odds to discover and substantiate that information and publicize it.
*******************
Anyone who has access to the internet and wishes to see a 2-hr. documentary on League of Denial can do so at a PBS site. Alternatively, nine excerpts from the long version are available on youtube. Here is a link to the first one. I watched all of them and recommend them. We showed the youtube version to the students at school and finished all the segments in under an hour.
To be continued
The story of a Hall of Fame football player is making the rounds in electronic media. Jason Brown was offered a 5-year $37 million contract playing for the St. Louis Rams. He walked away from football to expend his energies in the humble pursuit of farming. He learned what he knows of farming from the internet, youtube especially. His North Carolina farm is called First Fruits Farm, and he intends to give away the first fruits of all that is produced to feed the hungry. This year his first crop, five acres of sweet potatoes, 100,000 pounds, is all going for that purpose. He has almost 1,000 acres to develop further. "When I think of a life of greatness, I think of a life of service," he said. He wants to be successful in God's eyes. You may listen to the short CBS News clip here.
Most recently the National Football League (NFL) has been in the news for failing to act decisively enough in penalizing players who committed acts of domestic violence off the court. A slap on the wrist, and the players returned to basking in the adulation heaped on particularly outstanding players. This time, however, an outcry from the public did not allow these wrongs to go unobserved, unreported, and un-addressed. Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner backtracked finally and took measures more nearly in keeping with the seriousness of the players' offenses.
Long before this, even before Goodell became commissioner, when Paul Tagliabue was still in charge, however, the NFL had adopted a deeply entrenched habit of obfuscation, selective research and reporting, and downright deceptive practices when confronted with the evidence of serious brain injuries from playing football. Creating the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) Committee was the NFL's way of reassuring the world that they were taking the problem of brain injury seriously. It was a smoke screen. The head of the committee was a rheumatologist (think arthritis doctor), and the committee churned out a host of "scholarly papers" directly in conflict with the research going on by Dr. Omalou and other highly respected neurology professionals. I can't see how anyone could read these accounts without feeling revulsion and disgust. Stay tuned.
Dr. Bob Cantu was a football enthusiast and chief of neurosurgery and chairman of the department of neurosurgery at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts. He had already written dozens of articles on establishing guidelines for returning to play after having a concussion when he was hired as the sports section editor of the prestigious medical journal Neurosurgery, specializing in articles on sports and the brain. By this time he was president of the American College of Sports Medicine.
Twelve different times, other NFL doctors put their own favorable spin on research results, each time submitting evidence to Neurosurgery that football was not the cause of CTE, and, over the protests of the sports section editor (Dr. Cantu), and without the support of the professionals who had been asked to review the article, those NFL-submitted articles were published. The gold standard for trustworthiness in medical matters is being published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Neurosurgery was ostensibly just such a publication, but the peer-review process was reduced in this case to allowing the dissenting doctors to express their reservations only in comments following the article. All the real experts in CTE were in that category, and their protests were relegated to the status of other "nobodies" who had an ax to grind. The chief editor of the publication loved football and loved rubbing shoulders with some of football's big names. That interest apparently overrode all other considerations on this matter. The NFL rheumatologist's committee's viewpoint carried the day on CTE in the Neurosurgery journal. Understandably, each time a new journal article was published saying that football is safe, the credibility of doctors like Dr. Omalou suffered a blow.
Meanwhile, some former players were requesting disability compensation from the NFL, which had originally offered a retirement plan, but no additional funds for the many expenses associated with a variety of ailments of people with CTE. Quietly, and on a very different track from the NFL MTBI Commitee, those in charge of making decisions regarding disability payments acknowledged that football had, in fact, caused the debilitating symptoms some retired players were experiencing, and they began to pay disability compensation to those players. The incongruity of this was obvious--one NFL agency saying football and CTE were not connected, and one NFL agency acknowledging that they were.
On October 28, 2009 NFL Commissioner Goodell appeared in a hearing on football and brain injury before the House Judiciary Committee. It didn't go very well for Goodell. During that meeting, the NFL's worst nightmare began with a comment by Linda Sanchez, a Los Angeles Congresswoman. She cheerfully informed Goodell, that what she was hearing from him reminded her a great deal of what the tobacco industry was saying before a torrent of lawsuits in the 1990s forced them to admit, after many claims to the contrary, that there was, in fact, a link between smoking and damage to one's health. That analogy rang true on a sweeping scale, and it marked a new day of reckoning for the NFL.
I have no way of knowing for sure what all motivated Jason Brown to abandon professional football when he did, but I have a hunch that his decision owes something to the turn of events on the day Linda Sanchez spoke up. After that, when the truth became known, football players, for the first time ever, began to have free access to accurate data about the health risks associated with playing football--because the NFL no longer could squelch the evidence.
In the comments following the Jason Brown story, one person lamented the fact that Brown did not first sign the contract he was offered and get his $37 million, with which he could have done a lot of good, and only then left football to do his other deeds of generosity through farming. My hunch is that Jason Brown wisely realized that the longer he stayed in football, the more he increased his chances of sustaining brain injuries that would make a long useful life after football an impossibility. Kudos to Brown for recognizing that, and especially, applause for those researchers who persevered in the face of formidable odds to discover and substantiate that information and publicize it.
*******************
Anyone who has access to the internet and wishes to see a 2-hr. documentary on League of Denial can do so at a PBS site. Alternatively, nine excerpts from the long version are available on youtube. Here is a link to the first one. I watched all of them and recommend them. We showed the youtube version to the students at school and finished all the segments in under an hour.
To be continued
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
5:42 PM
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