and I know how those folks think, so it's not too difficult to picture what they might come up with on this topic.
I think a great comeback to anyone wanting to claim major league players in ANY sport -- or worse yet the owners or managers -- would necessarily be knowledgeable
or honest about MEDICAL MATTERS would be to point to the controversy reported today regarding the ongoing NFL "studies" on successive concussions players receive.
I just caught the story on ESPN, and they did some in-depth coverage on this one, as it deserves. Particularly now, when so many QBs and other players in the NFL have been getting knocked plumb UNconscious on the field and then are being okayed to return to the game as soon as the
next snap.Some are being kept on the sidelines after initial examinations by team doctors, but then are being released to play sooner than was originally announced -- or medically recommended.
Peyton Manning nearly had his head torn off by a defensive player this past weekend but was back in the game without missing a down. Ben Roethslisberger suffered a scary concussion that knocked him out cold -- and this just four months after he endured a major concussion in the motorcycle accident that came close to killing him.
And that's just two of the five or six players I can think of who were dealing with concussions this past week, some of them after having had previous ones.
Now the NFL's dubiously "scientific" studies have raised some eyebrows and some serious questions about how much the profit interests of the league ownership and management might be producing substandard and biased results.
The article is on the ESPN-NFL site, here.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2636795And a few paragraphs from it follow.
YOU GET KNOCKED DIZZY, maybe you black out, you slowly come to your senses. You feel strangely removed from your surroundings, maybe you have a seizure, maybe you puke. But you put your helmet back on as soon as you can walk straight. Any behavior, no matter how bizarre, becomes routine if someone repeats it often enough. And for decades, professional football players have adapted to concussions, shaking them off, calling them "dings," laughing about how they can't remember the number of blows to the head they have taken.
Only in recent years have scientists started to understand exactly what happens inside a brain when a head gets smashed and to explore why some players get hurt worse or cope better than others. The NFL is among those looking for answers, with good reason: According to league data, about 100 players a year suffer concussions from hits that average 98 times the force of gravity.
Pro football's powers-that-be began to study the subject formally in 1994. Following a rash of head injuries to stars such as Troy Aikman and Steve Young, then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue established the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) Committee. He named Elliot Pellman, M.D., its chairman.
<snip>
Pellman and his group have also stated repeatedly that their work shows "no evidence of worsening injury or chronic cumulative effects of multiple MTBIs in NFL players." But a 2003 report by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina found a link between multiple concussions and depression among former pro players with histories of concussions. A 2005 follow-up study at the Center showed a connection between concussions and both brain impairment and Alzheimer's disease among retired NFL players.
~~~~~~~~~~
Neurological experts are critical of the NFL studies' scientific protocols (because they don't employ them properly) and say that the NFL's studies "do not fit in with established results of other concussion studies."
Seems pretty obvious, doesn't it?
Who stands to gain? Who has the ability to manipulate outcomes? And
What are the goals of the NFL studies?You ask the same questions you ask to verify information in ANY case, and they cue you that NFL studies on concussions are likely to be "tainted," to put it nicely.
Just ask Merrill Hodge -- and plenty of other once-promising or -successful NFL players about those longterm effects of multiple concussions! And think about this: The violent impact that is a part of football, although it's supposed to be limited by rules and accepted practices, IS similar in some ways to the concussion-producing impacts we've long known boxers to be facing....
So now the same sorts of people who use specious and nefarious methods to excuse their wringing of every dollar's worth of use out of exceptional players are also expecting us to think they should be believed on the subject of
stem cell research??<insert gimme-a-break smiley here>
I totally agree with you about the RW athletes running ads to "counter" a legitimate, reasoned PSA by Michael J. Fox -- who has plenty of personal experience and knowledge about the potential benefits of stem cell research for people like him.
So the RWers want justification for their moneygrubbing abuse of NFL players even if those players end up impaired for life or suffer from longterm health problems like Alzheimer's after repeated concussions. The RWers want that justification so badly they'll even do their own fake "studies" to try to provide it.
And as if that's not bad enough, they are willing to work hard to try to
ban real and promising medical research that may produce a CURE for Alzheimer's!
Something smells reeelly rotten in this whole scenario, doesn't it.
But then we've long known just how stinky these people are only too happy to get in their efforts to (a) make more money, and (b) win -- anything and everything, and (c) gain and retain power and prestige.
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