Why Concussions Have Been Great for Sports
[Music]
[Applause]
hey guys
my name is macbolin i’m 21 and i study
neuroscience
but i shouldn’t be on this stage
and i shouldn’t be on the stage because
i thought i’d never be able to attend
college
in the fall of 2015 i sustained a series
of injuries that would force me to have
to relearn how to walk
and read again however after two years
of research i’ve identified
that this sports related injury was
entirely preventable
i seek to convince you that uncovering
and eliminating the cultural stigma
towards contact sports has been good
i’d say that brain injuries have been
good for contact sports
however to reiterate i’m not here to say
we should stop playing them
today as we walk through the basics of
concussions how to properly recover from
one
and their long-term impacts i want to
make completely clear that this
conversation made me
and will likely make you uncomfortable
as parents as coaches as fans
most importantly as players this
conversation is hard
however today we’re going to play
through it together
i ask that we all acknowledge the now
millions of athletes now living within a
jarred reality
merely due to the lack of acceptance of
an invisible injury
but remember this is not an argument to
abolish contact sports
but a cautionary tale aimed to urge you
to actively acknowledge the prevalence
of brain injury
while also understanding this isn’t an
injury we should fear with proper
recovery
but first if we’re going to care about
brain injury
we have to understand how the brain
works and thus our story begins with the
neuron
so imagine your head is a giant egg
and within your egg floats a yoke or in
our case a brain
and within that brain are millions of
neurons that act together
as a highway for messaging signals and
these messaging signals control what our
body does
and when it does it for example these
signals control our thought processes
our emotions our sexual orientations and
even regulatory function
like swallowing and breathing but when
we sustain a brain injury
the system becomes damaged dr ann mcgee
defines this damage
as a concussion a concussion is a
rotational or linear force incurred upon
the brain that causes soft brain tissue
to collide with hard inner skull
the yolk of an egg is not the perfect
analogy
but our brains are pretty soft common
concussive symptoms include headache
mild dizziness and mild memory loss
uncommon concussive symptoms include
complete mood disorders like
irritability and aggression
sleep cycle disruption and long-term
psychological disorders
such as ocd ptsd and anxiety depressive
disorder
this is the scope of a brain injury a
brain injury is not a two-day headache
that ends in a perfect recovery
as an undergraduate researcher i’ve
identified that research often doesn’t
follow this
fast and easy pattern either
but what i have identified through my
research is a lesser known more mild
form of concussion
sub-concussive blows a sub-concussive
blow is a micro-injury that often occurs
without treatment
and without acknowledgement it’s like a
small concussion
and the reason this injury scares me so
much is because
athletes have likely sustained thousands
of these injuries over their entire
athletic careers
and most athletes have absolutely no
idea what i’m talking about
referencing back to our egg imagine
shaking it
on the outside it appears completely
pristine bought on the inside
your yolk’s been scrambled but let’s
look at the math
on average a collegiate contact athlete
so a hockey player a soccer player
will sustain about 500 sub-concussive
hits in a season
a football collegiate contact athlete
will sustain about a thousand
researchers have identified that after
1800 hits
neurocognitive damage begins to present
i am not that great at math but i think
it’s pretty obvious
most of us have likely sustained at
least 1800 hits throughout our entire
athletic careers
therefore i believe the reason that
sub-concussive blows and concussions
need more acknowledgement
is not because i believe sustaining two
concussions in high school
is life-ending i believe that sustaining
thousands of blows over our entire
athletic careers
is life changing
yet as i stand here and spill all of the
beans about such a life-changing
injury i know that 33 percent of
concussions go unreported
i know that a athlete is more likely to
hide a concussion
than admit to one because unlike an egg
who you can see structural integrity
slowly deteriorate
you can’t see a brain injury
subjectivity of brain
subjectivity of concussion reporting is
one of the main reasons
that concussions don’t get reported
therefore i believe
that they need more acknowledgement
it seems as though fancy injuries such
as
spraining your ankle or tearing your acl
or tearing your rotator cuff get more
energy or more clout than the term
concussion
for all my contact athletes out there i
know you all went at the mention of a
solid turf burn
when i mention these injuries it should
elicit some form of visceral empathy
but why isn’t that empathy elicited when
i say the term concussion
lack of concussion reporting is not
solely held on the shoulders of players
and coaches
lack of concussion reporting is the
byproduct of our entire culture
turning a blind eye to an injury that’s
just in your head so i have a question
for you
how many of you have sustained a mild
traumatic brain injury
how many of you have sustained a
concussion
what if i told you these injuries were
the same
mild traumatic brain injury and
concussion are considered the same
diagnoses
culturally we’re told that sustaining a
concussion is not that big of a deal
but if we call it what it is which is a
mild traumatic brain injury
maybe we can learn to take it more
seriously
this merging of terms seeks to add more
emphasis as well as acknowledgement
to such an invisible injury and i think
it’s been good for contact sports
but remember the brain is plastic
our brains unlike an egg who can never
recover have the ability to rewire
our brains have the ability to
circumvent
a damaged system neurons do not have the
ability to recover
but structural units within the neuron
do
as an example let’s talk about my own
jarred reality
in the fall of 2015 i was a sophomore in
high school fighting for time as a
varsity goalkeeper
in one of my first games i laid out to
save a ball and as my body collided with
the ground another player took her
cleats and embedded them into
the side of my skull
my body was left in a heap of confusion
and my skull
was deep into the turf field a foul was
called
i was not subbed out and my only support
was a teammate asking if i was okay
of course i was okay because that’s what
i’d been accustomed to believe
so i stood up in a hazel blurred vision
and i took the free kick
i’m hoping by now you’ve identified that
because i’m giving this talk
i likely wasn’t okay
six months after my initial injury i was
in a very similar play when i was
punched so hard in the face i landed on
the back of my neck
two months after that i was in a
high-speed car accident
after all three of these injuries i
continued to convince myself
as well as others that i was completely
okay
of course that’s when i couldn’t walk in
a straight line
and would collapse when i closed my eyes
others finally began to acknowledge my
scrambled yolk
throughout my entire athletic career i
had been primed to continue playing
after sustaining brain injuries
and the only reason i stopped is because
others finally identified
my invisible injury this identification
would prompt a visit to a neurologist
if we’re being honest i did not schedule
the appointment my mom did
this visit would prompt a year and a
half long recovery plan
including cognitive vestibular and
behavioral therapy including a mirror
out of mris
all the hope of regaining my lost
function
and i remember being so angry
why me other friends other athletes have
sustained way more brain injuries than i
had
well we don’t know we don’t know why
some athletes can sustain one hit
and be done for life and others can
sustain thousands
what we do know that repetitive head
injury
exponentially increases the recovery
time as well as severity of
injury i had to relearn how to walk
because i sustained thousands of
cumulative blows over my
entire athletic career
but let’s slingshot back into my own
story
two months into my recovery process my
dad and i were working on re
working on my reflexes he was supposed
to
toss a ball at the palm of my hand and i
was supposed to be able to catch it
the ball would strike my palm my fingers
would delay
and slowly close leading to a dropped
ball
and a dropped confidence i felt i’d
never recover
as an athlete who aspired to play in
college the inability to catch a lofted
tennis ball
was pathetic that week i told my dad i
would never be able to go back to high
school because fun
fact i’d been pulled out of high school
for six months because i couldn’t handle
the
academic rigor of senior year
that later week i would tell my whole
family
that i’d never be able to attend college
because if
i couldn’t catch a lofted tennis ball
how was i going to be able to understand
advanced behavioral neuroscience
but understand our brains are plastic
our brains have the ability to rewire
i’m standing on this stage
if you toss a tennis ball at me i might
catch it
the medicine i needed was time
it takes time for the brain to heal
therefore we need to take our initial
injuries wildly seriously
so athletes like you and athletes like
me
never have to endure the exponential
timeline of recovery
of compounded blows
but i’m not the only one thinking this
and i’m not the only one advocating for
it
the u.s soccer federation has deemed
repeatedly heading the ball is dangerous
and has thus
passed legislation preventing young
athletes from doing so
i believe this has been a great victory
in the sense that it has prevented
unnecessary sub-concussive blows
others believe it’s diminished the game
but i believe what drives us to play our
games
is the ability for us to make our own
decisions is the ability
for us to solve our own problems
so what’s another problem to solve
therefore i believe that sub concussive
blows and mild traumatic brain injuries
have been good for sports
because they prompted us to start a
conversation
about these invincible injuries this
knowledge
has prompted protocols diagnoses and
research plans that have helped players
like me return to the game i love
because it would be hypocritical for me
to stand on the stage and say we should
never play contact sports again
as an individual who had to relearn how
to walk read and re-identify who i was
i chose to continue playing a sport
as a now four-year collegiate athlete i
work with my teammates my coaches
my athletic trainers and my dean of
athletics all to make sure
my egg doesn’t get scrambled
we work as a team to make sure we are
all safe
mild traumatic brain injury and sub
concussive blows are preventable by
not getting your eggs shaken but i
believe it’d be naive to say that this
shake is likely inevitable
therefore like we go to the grocery
store and open up our eggs to make sure
none of them are damaged
we need to occasionally check on our own
egg make sure it isn’t damaged either
so if you only take away a few things
from this grocery list of items
remember that concussions and
sub-concussive blows
are cumulative and they exponentially
increase in severity and recovery time
when we sustain them over
and over and over again
we need proper treatment you need to
admit to the injuries you can’t see
we need to quell the avid resistance
taught to youth athletes to not admit to
these invisible injuries
but most importantly it is our job
as players coaches fans and parents
to identify ways we can decrease the
prevalence of brain injury
within our own sports to make sure so
many eggs
don’t go unnecessarily scrambled
thank you