Sports Reporting--Celebration of Head Bashing and Bone Crushing for loss of brain function and disab

Sports Reporting makes vast stories out of Pro and College Sports, but these days the celebrations of all the head bashing and bone crushing is showing that all the rewards get washed away in later life.

The Sports Reporters have a big secret that they keep from their readers about the down side of how they make their money by not telling about the misfortunes of others.

Some of the horror stories appear in this missive about the problems of Head Banging and chronic inflammation on long term health in athletes. While NFL, Boxing, and Wresting are the worst to exhibit the health problems, the studes also point to problems from bone and joint damage leading to arthritis and chronic inflamation setting up dementia and AD in later life.

The Sports Reporting turns a blind eye to the products of their obcession to make for The Pop in the various media as well as the stadium. The sidewalk alumni of the colleges come to watch students get banged up and tossed into the air for hard landings, and they don't have a care in the world for higher education and appear to support damage to brain and later live misery for many that take the route to provide The Pop.

Many athletic students on colleges do really stupid things from armed robbery, theft, drugs, and public brawls and it appears some of these artifacts from athletics lead to head injury issues and these problems with behaviors.

This missive speaks to some of these problems with sports and athletics, and it is being shown to play roles in college sports as well as the Pros.

www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com...

Head Injuries May Trigger Dementia, Madness

They call it "the pop." It's that moment when thousands of fans are jolted screaming to their feet, an involuntary response to some act of unbelievable strength, astounding agility or brute violence. On the football field, the hockey rink, the basketball court - the pop is the product. Nowhere is it more essential or more lucrative than in pro wrestling. And in the history of the ring, only few could make a crowd pop like Chris Benoit.

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"Something good needs to come of this. You've got kids out there playing hockey and football, they get hit in the head and coaches who have no idea what a concussion means are saying 'you're just dinged, get back in there.' I think about all these soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, all the bombs going off, these guys are suffering concussions. They need to know how serious that can be. I want to make it safer for all the boys that are left. Why should they suffer the same fate as my son?"

The sciences are finding that inflamation is the source for the decline of brain function that can lead to dementia and AD. The inflamation can be from the damage of athletics setting up chronic inflammation of joints and arthritis. Part of the process is presented here:

psychcentral.com...

Brain Inflammation Speeds Dementia

A new UK study suggests inflammation in the brain resulting from infection or injury may accelerate the progress of dementia.

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The researchers found that systemic inflammation leads to the production of a protein known as IL-1β by microglia, the brain’s resident immune cells, in the hippocampus region of the brain. This region is involved in memory and learning.

The protein is known to exacerbate nerve cell damage in stroke. Inflammatory mediators such as IL-1β are routinely produced in the blood in response to inflammatory stimuli and prior studies by colleagues in Southampton have shown a correlation between elevated blood IL-1β levels, recent infection and subsequent cognitive decline.

Various peer reviewed specialize Medical Journal articles speak to the process for chronic inflamation processes that well associate with sports athletic's injuries:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

Inflammation, depression and dementia: are they connected?

If chronic inflammatory changes are a common feature of depression, this could predispose depressed patients to neurodegenerative changes in later life. Indeed there is now clinical evidence that depression is a common antecedent of Alzheimer's disease and may be an early manifestation of dementia before the cognitive declines becomes apparent. This review summarises the evidence that links chronic low grade inflammation with changes in brain structure that could precipitate neurodegenerative changes associated with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias.

And another medical journal article in support of the same causal effects of sports injury leading to arthritis issues and risk for dementia:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

Midlife rheumatoid arthritis increases the risk of cognitive impairment two decades later: a population-based study.

Inflammation has been associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and dementia.

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The presence of joint disorders, especially RA, at midlife seems to be associated with a worse cognitive status later in life. Given the chronic inflammatory component of RA, this study suggests that inflammatory mechanisms may have an important role in increasing the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia/AD.

So, if the point of colleges is to provide education and higher learning, it appears the athletics programs are going in the opposite direction and setting up the persons for health problems in mid and later life. The Sports Reporting on the game, sans the downside effects of hard knocks atheletics, appears a big part of the problems for why so many athletes have serious problems in later life and do seriously bad things along the way.

The Eyes Wide Shut Sports Reporting partnership covering up long term pain and suffering of Athletics


The road to dementia/AD in athletic sports is paved with injuries and various surgeries. Athletic injuries set up the damage to cartiledge that become arthritic complaints in later life that involve inflammatory tissues. The chronic inflammatory effects set up the cellular cytokine response that lead to dementia.

It appears the news on the NFL, Boxing, and Wresting all have a huge signature of highly affected athletes as the proof. The basic problems extent to any atheletic sports that involve injuries, and easily into college sports. College sports of Football and Basketball are all showing considerable associations with long term health effects, and even many hard driven coaches from sports in college show the pattern. One case in point is the Coach Pat Summitt's early playing injuries, where she is now the poster Coach for Dimentia.

Many of the better research institutions have identified the pattern and it even has NFL players seeking compensation for insufficient protections from harm to the body. Sports appears to have a need to see violence, and this selling violence takes a long term toll.

www.sciencedaily.com...

Inflammatory Response To Infection And Injury May Worsen Dementia

Systemic inflammation – inflammation in the body as a whole – is already known to have direct effects on brain function.

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"Doctors and carers need to pay increased attention to protect people with dementia from potential causes of systemic inflammation," says Dr Cunningham. "These include preventing infection, protecting them against falls and carefully weighing up the risk-benefit ratio of non-essential surgery."

Ethically, Sports should have the same protections as industrial safety, and money making in putting on sporting shows needs to end the sidelined injury problems that exist long after the games. To do otherwise is exploitation of the athletes as the fans come to watch the damages there as much as in NASCAR racing.

It gets down to Sports Reporting should be honest enough to tell of the problems of these events on the atheletes in the long term, else the reporters exploit these players for the fans that want to see violence in sports. Sporting events should not be an excuse to have a huge number of persons having these long term illness effects and call that anything close to civilized entertainment.

It gets down to the Sports Reporting makes money off the long term health damage effects on athletes, yet works to continue and sustain the problems rather than speaking up about the injury problems. Such is the very definiion of exploitation. These days Sports Reporting is more a PR process where the coaches and players team up with the reporters that will give them the best play to build them into sports Stardom. The games the coaches and the schools play for allowing reporters to get their stories might as well have them as paid PR persons rather than calling them anything close to being reporters that should be telling both sides of the story with a degree of independence.

Today, sports reporting has a huge problem that they have Eyes Wide Shut to keep from reporting and speaking on their exploitation of players.

A crack in the armour of resistance on sports injury leading to dementia appeared only recently with Ralph Wenzel. The issues of football head bashing and concussions have the strongest connections for dementia. But the very same stresses and damage to other parts of the body also connect to the inflammation issues that set off the cytokine responses that lead to dementia:

www.nytimes.com...

Ralph Wenzel, Whose Dementia Helped Start a Debate, Dies at 69

A guard for the Pittsburgh Steelers and the San Diego Chargers from 1966 to 1973, and later a successful teacher and coach, Mr. Wenzel began having significant memory lapses and other cognitive problems in 1995 at age 52. Those symptoms worsened to the point that he could no longer work, communicate or feed himself; he began living in a home for dementia patients in 2006.

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In a profile in March 2007 in The New York Times, Dr. Perfetto said that in more lucid times, Mr. Wenzel had assessed his total number of on-field concussions as “more than I can count.” During one game, he was knocked unconscious for 5 or 10 seconds, stumbled to the wrong huddle, took a few plays off and then returned to the field.

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“The denial is disrespectful of the players and the families that are suffering,” she said, “and it endangers current players and children.”

Without citing Mr. Wenzel specifically, the league soon acknowledged that the dementia exhibited by retirees like him could be football-related. The league began not only revising its policies and safety rules pertaining to head injuries, but also advocating similar changes that have improved safety at the youth level.

Now, these issues show up in the peer reviewed research for dementia and the issues of the damages linked with sports are going to be on the rise.

More studies are on the rise:

sports.espn.go.com...

Report: Autopsy Reveals Sixth NFL Player Suffered From Head Trauma-Related Brain Damage

Over the past two years, researchers have examined the brains of seven former NFL players, including McHale, all of whom died by the age of 50. Six turned out to have had CTE, which is characterized by the buildup of toxic proteins that form dangerous tangles in the brain, and that at the moment, can be found only by autopsy. CTE can cause victims to lose control of their emotions and impulses and to suffer memory loss and depression and can eventually lead to dementia.

So, the problems are being outed and the bulk of these problems have yet to hit the fan. But, the issues of contact sports and those sports that cause injury to bones, joins, and impacts to the brain are on the firing line.

Soon the NFL gets accused of hiding the correlation of injury to dementia:

www.huffingtonpost.com...

NFL Concussions Lawsuit: Ex-Players Claim Facts On Head Injuries, Dementia Were Hidden

PHILADELPHIA -- NFL officials conspired to hide evidence linking concussions to dementia and brain disease, seven retired players charge in the latest lawsuit filed on the subject.

The fraud and negligence lawsuit filed in Philadelphia accuses the National Football League of publishing nonscientific papers written by biased members of its medical committee, while denouncing valid research that suggested a link.

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The suit seeks more than $5 million on behalf of the seven named players, four spouses and other ex-players who may join the potential class action.

Now the serious doctors and measurements for safety and concussion monitoring come into view:

www.kevinmd.com...

Football is linked to dementia, and why it should be banned from high schools

Featured are Dr. Ann McKee, neuropathologist at the Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts and Dr. Bennet Omalu, forensic neuropathologist and San Joaquin Valley (CA) chief medical examiner. Drs. McKee and Omalu have done some interesting autopsy work which suggests that chronic traumatic brain injury leading to dementia suffered by football players is much more common, even among high school players, than previously realized.

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You might counter that this is simply the result of a few bad-luck hits on the field, but research involving the University of North Carolina football team suggests otherwise. Players at UNC wear impact sensors in their helmets throughout the season. Results from these investigations suggests that even routine hits during practice can add up to cause concussions and, theoretically, set the stage for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. (On the first day of training camp one UNC lineman was recorded as having been hit in the head thirty-one times!)

Back in 1905, Gladwell reports, the question of whether football should be played in our nation’s schools was raised to the level of the White House, when President Theodore Roosevelt called an emergency summit to discuss the issue. At the time, a professor at the University of Chicago called football a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.” And in December of 1905, presidents of twelve prominent colleges met in New York and came within one vote of abolishing the sport at their institutions.

What does this mean for football in America? Nothing. Fans are willing to spend a lot of money to see men slam into each other’s heads on the field.

It would appear that the true definition for football happened long ago, when common sense in education was allowed to rise above the issues of damage to intelligence and going against issues needed for higher education.

It appears well defined as: “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.”



So, now one can see why Coaches are very devisive in picking what Sports Reporters to associate, and they pick the Sports Reporters that won't speak to the serious health issues of various sports.

Sports Reporting these days is really about the marriage of Reporting to PR for the teams or colleges, and only the reporters that keep up the hype and The Pop get to make the money and play up getting others hurt. Many Sports are no different than NASCAR, where the fans come to see the wrecks. Many fans come to see what teams knock down the players with hard ball recovery, leg breaking tackles, or players slammed to the ground so hard they get concussions.

Now some of the other sports, Rugby, are beginning to wake up to the problems they have been trying so long to maintain an Eyes Wide Shut method to deal with.

www.dailymail.co.uk...


Rugby players could be at greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s than the general public after a study into the similar sport of American football found ‘vastly higher’ rates of the illness.
U.S. researchers found that former gridiron stars aged between 30 and 49 were 19 times more likely to suffer from the condition than average.

The study, commissioned by the governing National Football League, also found that 6.1 per cent of retired players aged over 50 had received a dementia-related diagnosis.

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‘I think this complements what others have found — there appears to be a problem with cognition in a group of NFL football players at a relatively young age,’ he said.

And studies now look even at head butts of soccer balls.

ajs.sagepub.com...

Acute and Chronic Brain Injury in United States National Team Soccer Players

However, reported head injury symptoms, especially in soccer players, correlated with histories of prior acute head injuries (r = 0.63). These findings suggest that any evidence of encephalopathy in soccer players relates more to acute head injuries received playing soccer than from repetitive heading.

Now that there is an abundance of health effects associated with athletics and injuries associated with sports, the lawyers are on the job with new advanced detection devices that can show the injury and improve the Eyes Wide Shut issues of sports trying not to notice problems.

www.braininjurylawblog.com...

Early Detection Technology for Brain Injury
A recent article in the New York Times highlights how researchers are working on a new, relatively inexpensive way to spot injuries and monitor brain diseases using magnetic sensors that can spot changes in brain waves. This compact and portable detection device, part of the field of optical magnetometry, is constructed as a form of headgear roughly the size of a sugar cube, and works by having sensors measure changes in the brain’s magnetic field. The device’s size, portability, and affordability allow for a wider range of applications that may someday be mass produced and used on athletes to monitor collisions and subsequent brain injuries in sports.

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Are concussions more dangerous for girls?
A new study reports that girls are 68% more likely to suffer a concussion during sports-related activity than boys. A study released by the Journal of Athletic Training showed that girls, during high school and college who played basketball or soccer, suffered significantly more concussions than their male counterparts. The report also stated that boys returned to play sooner than girls did after having suffered a concussion.

There is tons of good reference and news material on this site.

Concussions make their impact felt on the Basketball Courts. In the old days it was ignored and bushed off, but now with the many athletic persons injured it has become a big deal. With all the brawn and bulk of athletics, then didn't invent any way to toughen up skulls and brains. Now BasketBall takes the Light as matters like Arthritis and Dementia come into view.

www.nytimes.com...

As College Basketball Grows, Concussions Are a Side Effect

Concussions are often associated with more violent sports like football, hockey, even soccer. But as basketball has become more brutish, the number of head injuries has increased.

A study of all divisions of N.C.A.A. sports by the National Athletic Trainers Association showed that head and facial injuries in basketball increased by an annual average of 6.2 percent from 1988 to 2004. Concussions represented 3.6 percent of all injuries reported. Female basketball players were three times more likely to get a concussion than men.

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“Anecdotally, I would say we’ve seen an increase in that time in the number of concussions in basketball, especially in women’s basketball,” said Kevin Guskiewicz, an athletic trainer who is chairman of the sports science department at the University of North Carolina.

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“That’s the way it was back when we were kids: you had a headache and you went on,” Temple Coach Fran Dunphy said. “Today, and I think it’s right, we need to be aware of it. It’s an acute situation.”

The N.C.A.A. added points of emphasis to the rule book for this season to curb excessive elbow swinging and to allow officials to stop the clock when someone was hurt. And the N.C.A.A. will hold a concussion meeting this spring.

It isn't only the college courts that have these problems with head injury and others, even the high school level is a large part of the problems:

abcnews.go.com...

Basketball and Concussions: How to Protect Your Teen
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Popyer's experience is a cautionary tale, one that is echoed in research released Monday by Nationwide Children's Hospital in Ohio: the number of young people suffering from head injuries while playing basketball is on the rise.

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Collisions are most likely to be responsible for a head trauma, either ball to head, player to player, or as in Popyer's first concussion, head to floor, says study co-author Lara McKenzie PhD, principal investigator at the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital.

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Most recently, a study released last week found that ER visits for concussions occurring in youth team sports have risen sharply since the late 1990s. Sport-related concussions accounted for half of all concussions seen in teens, researchers found, and team sports, such as basketball, accounted for more than a third of those sports concussions.

Awareness is rising on the issues for BasketBall injuries, but for those long retired athletes from the earlier days, their prodnosis is going to be bad. More and more sports linked dementia will be found and the red flags for overly aggressive flags on the court will have been the grim reapers early warning,

Some band-aid approaches to the worsening problems on the BB Courts:

blogs.edweek.org...

Louisville Basketball Players Equip Helmets for Concussion Protection

In an attempt to prevent multiple concussions, a number of men's basketball players from the University of Louisville have been wearing mixed-martial-arts helmets in practice this year, according to the Associated Press.

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The helmets being used by Louisville players, made of vinyl-covered foam, aren't nearly as motion-limiting as football helmets. Three players who have all suffered multiple concussions—guards Peyton Siva, Tim Henderson, and Elisha Justice—all wear the helmets in practice during any contact drills, although they're not mandatory for the full team.

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Given that there were an estimated 13,987 annual trips to the emergency room for traumatic brain injuries (including concussions) in youth athletes 18 and under over the past decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it's easy to see why Hina's adopted a better-safe-than-sorry approach with the Cardinals. Just because basketball doesn't condone direct hits like football or hockey doesn't mean that basketball players are immune from the risks of concussions.

Now concussion detection methods are coming into the arenas:

probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com...

Explaining the NBA’s new concussion policy (why Kobe likely sits)

Before the season started, Kobe (and every NBA player) took a computer test that had them answer questions about numbers sequences, patterns and the like. From that test, a baseline is established of a player’s reaction times.

After a concussion, a player has to take that test again and perform about as well as he did before the season, a determination made by the league’s neurologist at the University of Michigan.

The player must be symptom free (as determined by the test) for 24 hours before a game and have shown no ill effects from a series of increasingly challenging physical tests he is put under, from a stationary bike to agility drills. Basically, when he runs hard do the symptoms return?

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NBA Commissioner David Stern was asked about the new policy before the All-Star Game and was supportive.

“And we recognize that there might be some pressure sometime in individual circumstances to accept a player’s determination to go back into a game, saying he was ready to do it, and put himself at risk, and we’re not going to do it,” Stern said.

While these are perhaps steps aimed at prevention, the research points to concussions making cumulative damage to the brain that only manifest in later life. So, just where the threshold for protection can be placed won't be known for decades to come.

In Sports Reporting one will find a large number of reporters that will try to put anyone off that speaks about injury and concussion issues in Basketball not being there and something that applies only to footballers.

Such isn't so, and these PR hype persons for the teams allow these injury problems to worsen.

The real news is Basketball injuries are a worsening problem, and worse in women's basketball.

The real story on Basketball is there is no element of worker safety used or even addressed, as might be for OSHA. What many coaches have done is recruit inner city athletes that are more aligned with street fighting than academics. So, in cases like the Univ of Tennessee the BB team is often called the thugs, due to this recruiting of street fight oriented players.

BB is more about force and power with no concern given for the other side's players.

dailycaller.com...

College basketball concussion rate higher than any sport

The game has adapted to the size and strength of its players, becoming more about power than finesse.

A typical game in power conferences such as the Big 12, Big Ten and Big East can look like a wrestling match under the basket, players hitting the floor on nearly every possession, often landing in piles. These collisions offer a multitude of ways to get hit in the head: stray elbows, by the floor or an opponents’ knee, even on someone else’s head, like Zeller.

It appears basketball coaching these days doesn't follow the common sense of look before you leap, as it applies to diving in nature. The emphass is pluge on with reckless regard and recover the ball without regard to safety, yours or the other sides. This takes its toll on athletes and it is overboard coaching and reporters that sell the sensation effects over those of player safety.

www.columbian.com...

Concussions can be life-altering for student athletes.

The lives of Sarah Parsons and Zach Brady once revolved around rebounds, tackles and college applications … until multiple concussions derailed their athletic dreams and nearly kept them out of college.

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Instead, her presentation captured a piece of, if not all of, the enormous challenges her brain injury caused.

Sarah missed four months of school following her concussion. In hindsight, she probably should have missed more, her mother said, so her brain could have a chance to heal.

Sarah fell behind in class and socially, struggled with depression and had to learn to speak again. Today, her difficulties continue. There still are days when her mother can't allow Sarah to drive a car, she said.

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Zach used to crank out an A-grade essay in an hour, he said. This spring, it took him 10 hours to complete a three-page paper that didn't even pass his own standards. Reading the jumbled reasoning his own brain churned out "was devastating," Zach said.

"I wish I just had a bunch of broken bones, and it could heal," he said.

Luckily, Zach had racked up a lot of extra credits in previous years, because he barely got any as a senior. Zach took summer classes and in August, graduated with the minimum number of credits allowed by the state.

So one finds that all too often sports athletics runs counter to higher education's goals.

Coaches desire to win, at any cost, costs these players.

A doctor echos how athletic sports cares only for the moment and not for the athletes

m.startribune.com...

Dr. Steven Miles lives in Minneapolis

The name for dementia caused by repetitive concussions is "chronic traumatic encephalopathy." Doctors identified it in 1928. In 2009, a 42-year-old former Illinois wide receiver, Mike Borich, died of that dementia. The NCAA ignored student concussions until the media put such cases on the front page. The NFL bravely warned the NCAA to address this problem in January 2012.

The contradiction between a college's athletics pounding a brain while its classrooms are educating it for a career seems too obvious to mention.

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Boards of regents should insist that sports physicians be employed by student health services -- not by athletic departments. Sports-medicine physicians are skilled, caring professionals, but they should not have the clinical conflict of interest that comes from being employed by athletic departments. Recent scandals show how the prestige and revenues of athletic programs can compromise the operations of athletic-department professionals.

Regents should insist that athletics departments be publicly accountable for injuries. They should require departments to publish statistical data of sports-related hospitalizations, fractures and surgeries, as well as all data from helmet impact monitors for practice sessions and games. Annual or biennial reports could be released without compromising individual students' privacy.

Regents should ensure that student athletes have health and disability insurance that is sufficient to cover the treatment and consequences of sports-related injuries. The cost of such insurance will motivate athletic departments to protect students' health.

It appears the whole system fails as even the reporters wont provide a balancing effect, let alone the college regents or boards.

So, the costs of the many students sold faked up dreams that deliver them a lifelong risk for health problems is washed into the gutteres in favor of all the big money for tickets paid by an illiterate sidewalk alumni.

It appears sports is pretty well going in the opposite direction from education and well being. College Sports even interferes with private enterprize using the state Govt to engage in entertainment business rather than education.

These days the Sports issues of concussion and injured joints is in the news for deaths and long term injury leading to dementia in later life.

Football and Basketball have about the same dynamic as child abuse with many bruises and the issue of shaken baby syndrome. While most states object to this sort of abuse in children via state agencies, it appears to be licensed by the state in the issues of football and basketball leading to the same outcomes health wise.

The bottom line is basketball is a sport that has no protection from injury and the ball rebounding can become as bad as a football game pile up to gain posession of the ball. Basketball doesn't even have a seat belt level of protection, yet kids without seat belts is child abuse.

Football and Basketball does not even have the same level of protection from injury as OSHA requirements, but technically these athletes are employees of typically the state for state colleges. How is it that general insanity seems to be the rule, when the protection rules for Children are thrown out the window for sports?

These days, it is obvious that sports injury takes its toll on atheletes with arthritis and later life dementia. Pat Summitt being a prime example of the effect in basketball. The problem can't really be fixed as the scar tissues from injury don't improve over time and worse with age. How is it that parents can put their kids at risk in sports and cause the same type injury as shaken baby syndrome and the violence of child abuse?

www.newsday.com...

Scientist links dementia, sports injuries in kids

It is quite clear the issues are brain hemorrhage, and this process causes brain damage and scar tissues that will worsen with time. How can the state say they want to protect children in one breath and say it is fine for parents to sit and watch the same damage occur to their kids in sports?

www.wate.com...

Dr. Tom Terrell, with UT Medical Center, says new technology is helping medical professionals diagnose concussions. "It's a more sophisticated form of MRI that's picked up micro hemorrhages," he explained.

The long term prospective for sports injury is written on the walls of experience and the message is that parents that sign away rights for protection from injury should know they also admit to child abuse and long term damage for their kids.

www.wsmv.com...

Much of the recent discussion centers on research being done at Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. Researchers there have examined the brains of former athletes and discovered evidence of a degenerative brain disease in many of the cases they have studied.

Now there exists a mountain of evidence that allows legal issues for the damages to kids and athletes to be proven in the courts of law. And again the question is why would any parent watch to sign away rights for harm to their children, when concussions and injury are a given outcome in football and basketball.

education-law.lawyers.com...

School Liability for Athletes' Concussions
La Salle University paid a $7 million settlement to the family of football player Preston Plevretes, who died after receiving a second concussion during play before his first concussion fully healed.

The lawsuit claimed the university didn't take steps to protect him, and coaches and staff didn't follow proper concussion guidelines and allowed him to return to play too quickly.

This lawsuit caused many changes in the way school athletics are viewed. Many institutions and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have updated their guidelines regarding concussions.

The question then becomes, why are not employees of the state not given the same level of protections as OSHA worker protection standards to prevent injury and not license for injury? At the University of Tennesseee the law school abhors violance and injury on one breath and ignores the very same theme in sports. One can even see the efforts to say they protect athletes with over the top video records for what is going on. Yet, the rule is sports, like basketball, have zero protection from injury and concussions are common. The injury problem is a given in football and the issues of concussion cause serious injury from the very first event and kills brain cells from bleeding and scar tissue formation.

With issues of sports making many athetes into pill poppers for pain, and several into addicted drug addicts, how can the state want the school to have its own pharmacy to dish out more drugs with little public insight. Pain pills in football can become an addiction, either by faked-up methods or real. Players use drugs to play football, and this process increases their potential to damage themsleves and others.

sports.espn.go.com...

It got worse in high school and even worse in college. By the time I was a senior in college, I was an addict. I played my whole senior season with a broken finger on my throwing hand. It was really badly broken. Just taking the snap, throwing the ball, handing it off, getting tackled -- everything that goes along with playing quarterback -- it was very painful.

Throughout that process, I became hooked on pain killers. I got them from the team doctor. I went through the prescriptions pretty fast. After he had been giving them to me for quite a while, he said he couldn't give them to me anymore.

I was hooked on them and I was playing football, and there was no way I was going to cancel my senior year by going to rehab. I started getting them from people, buying them, getting them off the street. I wasn't the only player on the team that was doing it, so we knew people. It wasn't, like, super sketchy or anything. We knew people who had them, and we were Tennessee football players, so they pretty much just gave them to us.

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I had a really bad stress fracture in my foot, but I think the reason it got so bad was because I was using so many drugs. I had no idea what was going on with my foot; I was completely out of it.

I was under the influence pretty much every day, every practice. I mean, I was a drug addict, so it's not like I stopped using drugs for any reason. Did the Jets know? I don't know. That's all they knew me as. I was a drug addict from the first day I stepped foot on the Hofstra campus [site of the team's training base until 2009].

One can find that even the UT police helped to cover up this athletes drug addictions, and these cover ups via the police of colleges is common place. Then the same questions for their own in-house diagnostics that doesn't allow for more independent outside doctor assessments. Why should injured players be allowed to play under the influence of drugs? This all appears more of an attempt for damage control, as UT's money making exploitations of athletes depends upon keeping the process for injury hidden. And to a large extent the sports reporting helps to hide the issues of health and drug addictions associated with sports and athletics.

www.timesfreepress.com...

The training area includes a rehabilitation clinic, which features a balance unit so UT's medical staff can conduct individualized baseline concussion tests for each athlete. There's two examination rooms, including a diagnostic ultrasound unit for MRIs and an X-ray room, that will allow the Vols to keep everything in-house. The building even has an in-house state-licensed pharmacy.

It appears the formula for sports these days is to try and hide the obvious and control the damage from the lawsuits that are sure to come from a known process of abuse to the body and non-existant protection from serious short and long term injury. Basketball players don't even get seat-belts to avoid concussions, but to ride in a car without them is child abuse.

The question also becomes, why have not the parents and the schools been charged with abuse and methods that lead to long term injury?

In the case for UT's poor examples, It might be time to have President Jimmy Cheek, Chancellor Joe Pederson, Governor Bill Haslam, and the UT Board to play football and basketball and get knocked out a few times and see if the risks for sports is really acceptable, and see if these processes are about higher education, when the issues is more about promoting brain damage.

Another issue that appears linked with head injury and violence issues being exhibited is the Lady Vol arrested for beating out the windows of a vehicle with a ball bat and they shooting at the car in a fit of rage. Lady Vols get lots of head injury due to the hard driving issues of Pat Summitt to build up her coach statistics, but it comes out with problems in life due to mental issues such as this, and more physical issues such as constant inflammation and brain damages in later life.

Perhaps the issues of Pat Summitt pushing her knee in players guts and screaming at them with veins bulging became the example for Holdsclaw to follow.

Now she is arrested and in a good amount of trouble due to the values training that Pat Summitt appeared to have instilled in her.

www.tennessean.com...

Holdsclaw produced a handgun, fired inside the SUV and fled the scene, the report said. Police said they later recovered a 9mm shell casing at the scene. Lacy was not injured, police said.

This just adds one more case example for UT athletics programs being associated with hoodlums that do all sorts of crimes. imho

This is also one more case for head injury issues due to concussions that often have outcomes of violence in those so affected.

Pat Summitt got rich pushing players too much, and this is a better example for her successes impacting players.

There is a strong relationship between head injury (aka Concussions) and violence, such as this UT Lady Vol gone wild in Atlanta.

www.sportsletter.org...

Connection between concussions and later violent behavior
As reported in ScienceDaily, the results of an eight-year study from the University of Michigan School of Public Health reveals that

Young people who have sustained a head injury during their lifetime are more likely to engage in violent behavior ... Further, the research found that young people who suffered a recent head injury (within a year of being questioned for the study) were even more likely to report violent behavior.

The report appears in the current issue of Pediatrics and seems to support earlier studies that have connected violence to head injuries.

While the research did not restrict itself to sports injuries, "it does support some of the sports research that's been going on with concussions," according to Sarah Stoddard, a research assistant professor at the School of Public Health.

Of course the Coaches and Universities got richer off of telling players to push to the point of getting knocked in the head lots, but the outcome for too many players is the connection to violence issues, later life chronic illness rates being higher, and even Dementia.

Just one more cause in point for Women's Basketball, which has the highest rates for concussions of all sports, takes its toll in later life for lots of athletes, both female and male.

This is good work on your behalf. More people need to be aware of the dangers of repeated traumas. Thank you for bringing this to the attention of ATS.

Hi,

Thanks for the comment and glad you see the reason for making all this appear in better view.


The lastest is another UT football type lands in the Drunk Tank for not only being drunk, but for being under age drunk. Such happens a lot at UT.

www.wate.com...

KNOXVILLE (WATE) - A UT football player was arrested for underage consumption and public intoxication on Sunday morning, according to the Knoxville Police Department. Brendan Downs, a sophomore tight end on the UT football team, was at Whiskey Dix around 1 a.m. on the Strip. The manager of the club escorted Downs outside for drinking in the club underage.

Downs created a disturbance by being loud and using profane language once he got outside. Police said an officer who was working an extra job in the parking lot of the bar then arrested Downs.

Such a fine image of a higher learning university, which isn't really about anything but party time.