Pages

Pages

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Blood Sports

Former Scotland internationalist Rory Lamont has lifted the lid on rugby players “cheating” concussion protocols and insisted many well-known figures are knowingly taking the field with head injuries. When Lamont started pro rugby concussion brought a mandatory three-week lay-off, but that was argued, largely by coaches, to be over-prescriptive in cases of minor concussion. Coaches flouted it in any case by pretending concussion had not occurred.

The 30-year-old retired last month after a succession of injuries, undergoing 16 operations and suffering “at least six or seven clean knock-outs” in games, and many more what he terms “minor concussions”. He explained “... there is a high risk of me developing neurological issues associated with the early stages of ‘Parkinson’s Disease’. But what’s done is done...Once you start losing your mind there’s no coming back from it. You can be an alcoholic and have cirrhosis of the liver, and get a new liver and come off the booze, but there’s no coming back from brain damage.”

 US experts have begun investigating  potential links between depression and suicide in former American Footballers who suffered from concussion, through the ‘Boston Brain Bank’ – the Centre for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University.  In the United States, former NFL players are now suing the league over the use of the powerful anti-inflammatory drug Toradol. They argue that the medication masked the pain of head injuries and led them to play on and suffer concussions as result. Lawsuits have been filed against the league in federal court alleging that the NFL failed to acknowledge and address neurological risks associated with the sport and then deliberately failed to tell players about the risks they faced. The players say that sometimes they were lined up in what they termed a 'cattle call' and injected with the drug whether they were injured or not. Similar concerns have been expressed in NHL, where hockey players are paid to inflict and to absorb pain and can become addicted to painkillers.

Dr Jiri Dvorak found that almost 40% of players at the 2010 World Cup were taking pain medication prior to every game. Experts say that painkilling medication can be particularly dangerous in professional sport. In high-intensity exercise like football, a player's kidneys are continuously working hard, making them more vulnerable to damage from strong drugs. And the risks of using nsaids are not just confined to the kidneys and liver. There are also worries over their impact on hearts. Dr Stuart Warden from the University of Indiana is an expert in the use of these drugs by athletes."There is an elevated risk of cardio vascular side-effects with almost all nsaids and the risk increases with duration of use."

A study published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine reveals that the risk of injury in football may have been played down, at least at the professional level. The Center for Hazard and Risk Management at Loughborough University found that players had a 12 percent risk of injury every game. More significantly, they reported that almost a third of professional players would suffer at least one injury this season.
''The injury rate, is about 1,000 times what you'd find in industry,'' said Dr. Colin Fuller, a lecturer of health and safety management at the center and director of the study. ''It works out to every employee having a reportable injury once every three weeks, which, of course, would be completely unacceptable.'' Only a third of the injuries resulted from fouls. The rest involved legal contact between opposing players.

"Soccer is not a sport. It is a knee killer" said Alwin Jaeger, MD, chairman of orthopedic surgery at the University of Frankfurt in Germany.

According to a 2006 report in the Florida paper St. Petersburg Times, for every season a player spends on an NFL roster, his life expectancy decreases by almost three years.The average American male lives to be almost 75. According to the Times report, an NFL player, whose career lasts roughly four years on average, lives to be 55.

Self-harm for the love of the sport or is it the sporting industry’s love of the profits and the players are only fodder?

No comments:

Post a Comment