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you wrote in head games about two incidents which NFL quarterbacks brett favre and
kurt warner
suffered a concussion during the game yet finished the game anyway per their
coaches decision
who makes the decision is it the coach is it the trainer is it the medical
the team doctor and who should make the decision
today medical professionals are the only ones making the decision
and that hasn't always been the case so if you do have a team with multiple
medical staff your most senior person or your expert should be making that
decision
athletic trainers are incredibly well trained on this issue and often better
than a lot of doctors
but historically we've been letting coaches make that decision
and there's a lot of reasons why that was
that some of it was ignorance but not all of it
some of it was that at the pro athlete level the doctors have a huge conflict
of interest
and a lot of them like being the team doctor and if they hold the star quarterback out in
the fourth quarter they would be fired and the fact that there haven't been
doctors fired every season out of the n_f_l_ means that they've been doing
what the coaches have asked even if it was against their better judgment and there's
overwhelming evidence of that and i know this from
you know friends of mine that have played in the NFL
so um...
yeah unfortunately we've been leaving medical decisions about the most important organ in
your body up to
coaches who are paid millions of dollars to win
now you mention team doctors
how do team doctors who frequently as you revealed in your book pay for the right
to be the team doctor
how do they contribute to the concussion problem
it's amazing the power that that team doctors have contributed to the problem
because
everybody models themselves off of the pros whether it's doctors themselves the players
coaches
and so you know the best example is is wayne chrebet in two thousand five who was
knocked unconscious
playing for the new york jets
face down on the field for a minute
every published guideline since dr. cantu first published guidelines in '86
says they're knocked out they're not going back into the game
it was even his eighth diagnosed concussion in the n_f_l_
but the team doctor who happened to be the head of the n_f_l_'s concussion
committee elliot pellman who was not trained in concussions is a
rheumatologist
put wayne chrebet back into the game ten minutes later and he finished the game
and what that tells everybody watching which is a
you know these are the most popular things on television is that kids know that they
should be tough and get back in there the doctors believe that that's if the
NFL doctors are doing it that must be the standard of care
and and therefore they were kind of complicit in perpetuating this myth that
you recover from a concussion if you wake up from being knocked
unconscious when that you know you could say you look at various points in
time where that shouldn't have been based on the literature it goes pretty far
back we should have we've probably known this for a long time
this excerpt is
brought to you by the massachusetts school of law