Barbaric Practices

When a doctor says that he believes that someday we will regard our current cancer treatment protocols as barbaric, I take notice.  "Slash, burn, and poison" is the crude characterization I've heard elsewhere of standard cancer treatment.  Most of us feel that we can't do much personally to move matters to a better place.  When cancer hits close to home we usually grit our teeth and do what the experts tell us needs to be done.  Often it seems to work out fairly well.  But not always.

I see current cancer treatment and football as having this in common:  Some day we will regard both as barbaric.  In today's newspaper, George Will said virtually the same thing.  Because of the preponderance of evidence that engaging in the sport results in very high occurrences of catastrophic brain damage over a football player's life, even when no visible signs of concussions are observed,  Will suggests that the 50th Superbowl should be called the 50th Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Bowl.

Chronic Traumatic Enceophalopathy (CTE) can only be definitively diagnosed after death, so it's impossible to know how many people still living are suffering from this injury-caused disease.     CTE is degenerative, resulting eventually in brain shrinkage.  Deposits of tau proteins create dead zones, where no neurological functions can be carried on.  Symptoms show up over many years of time following the last instance of brain trauma and range from personality changes to physical disabilities and debilitating pain.  Dementia almost always develops unless death comes early from another cause.  This is a good explanation of CTE.

The columnist George Will is no wild-eyed writer.  Conservatives consider him one of theirs.  I consider him evenhanded.   You can read his column here.

I grinned several times yesterday when yet another friend shared on Facebook a picture of a Heidi-like carefree-looking young lady running across a green meadow.  The caption said, "This is me, not caring about the Superbowl."  Aside from the fact that the spritely thing in the picture did not look the slightest bit like me, I couldn't have honestly posted the picture myself.  I don't "not care" about the Superbowl.  I care so much that I think watching it would make me feel ill.  Witnessing the activity that results in the destruction of once healthy brains (to wild applause, no less) would have that effect.  For me, watching it would be an ethical violation as serious as standing by without protest when  little ones are being offered lead-laced drinking water.  Will says it like this:  It would be nice, but probably fanciful, to think that even 1 percent of the expected television audience of more than 110 million will have qualms about the ethics of their enjoyment.  

God bless George Will for his truth telling.