Concussion Reflection…

Concussion Reflection

Football is the number one sport in the United States, and people will pay hundreds just to watch it. Football bring people together with it’s common interest to everyone, like football watch parties, tailgating, gambling, and going out to bars and sports bars just to watch. It brings smiles to millions of faces but isn’t as safe as those who watch it thinks it is. Although, football is so entertaining, more and more people are suffering harsh side effects from the long lasting injuries to the brain. These harsh side effects are causing people to even commit suicide. Football is such a popular sport reaching millions of people’s attention and they don’t even realize the effects that it is causing the players, they just care about who wins and who loses.

Football is known for the most physical sport in America, and millions will pay big money just to watch it. It’s one of those things that Americans grew up watching, it’s like a tradition. From a young age, children are trained to play football with the intentions of making it to the National Football League. Not only are young men playing but more and more young females are too. We’re talking about as young as four and five year olds playing this game of football not knowing the risk their taking every time they are in a head to head contact with someone else. We are talking about these young aged kids who’s bodies aren’t even fully developed yet.

Several cases are showing that these athletes are a waiting major health issues later on in life, if they continue down the road of football. Studies show that the physicality of playing football is causes more and more injuries to the head, causing long term brain damage over time. Starting at a young age up until the mid thirties, people are injuring their brains constantly, and after their football career they are noticing changes and becoming sick before they can even start another career. I’ve seen players as young as forty six commit suicide because of their mental health, not from anything else but playing football since they were kids. This isn’t something that people and their families should have to go through, but they NFL doesn’t want the people to know these things, because they would be losing money.

Being a Doctor for the National Football League, means doing anything to keep the show going on. Even if it means giving the football player who has just been knocked out, a pain reliever and returning him back to the game. This is what I’m trained to do, keep the people who are watching happy. But if the player is seriously injured I have to refrain them from going back on the field, I run test on them to see if anything shows up and if not then the continue to play. By doing this we are just setting the player up for more problems in the long run because somethings don’t show up right away on these tests that we have been doing her years, or we haven’t been looking for the right thing. See, I’ve been working with Mike Webster for a while as he played for the Pittsburgh Steelers and I was the team doctor, so I got formula with a lot of essential players. He was such an amazing player and person, we were close, but after a while he started having some serious mental health issues. We ran test on him and nothing seemed to be wrong or unusual, but something was different because of the way he was acting. He was constantly in pain, he heard voices in his head and he was filled with anxiety. Not too long after my last encounter with Webster, he committed suicide in the back of his pick up truck. The people in the city had went crazy as he was one of the greatest players who played in this city.

Dr. Omalu, a new pathologist in the city of Pittsburgh did an autopsy on Webster to see the cause of death of such a young man, Mike was only in his fifties. He noticed something unusual with him, so he order additional test to further understand his death. Dr. Omalu receive several backlash from doing so but he was on to something. After he noticed that something was wrong with Webster’s brain we contacted more people to get the word out. More and more football players had seemed to be killing themselves, so the same tests were order for them as well. It was a pattern, the same things wrong with Webster’s brain was the same thing wrong with these other professional football players. He was definitely on to something big, and the NFL didn’t want to admit to the people that the test were showing effects from playing football.

Informing people of what the physicality of football and what it does long term may bring back lash but its something that the people need to know. I worked closely with Dr. Omalu in trying to make people aware of what was going on, but he was receiving a lot of backlash simply because people thought that he didn’t know what he was talking about because he wasn’t from the United States of America. They had thoughts that he was trying to take away everything that did when it came down to football but this isn’t what he was trying to do. Dr. Omalu received so much hate that he just moved away from the town and started a new life. More and more people continued to die from these injuries of their brains, but he was the only one who really knew what it was. Dr. Omalu did come back and told his story about his discovery and they finally listened, because he was the only one who had a reliable reasoning behind these deaths.

Football is a American tradition that has people entertained and willing to do whatever it takes to be involved. But football has its flaws that may out weigh its pros. We’re talking about long lasting affects that causes our favorite football players to go insane and commit self harm or harm to others. But we have the answers and want to share it with the people so these things don’t continue to happen. The people need to know the truth, and Dr. Omalu and I have the factual evidence to prove that football is the cause of these serious brain injuries called concussions.