As a sports enthusiast—and especially as a professional football
fan—concussion is one of those words that always gets my attention.
There are about 300,000 sports-related concussions nationwide each year,
and it’s believed that about 85% of concussions go undiagnosed.
Concussions are dangerous even when diagnosed and treated with proper
medical care. But if a concussion goes undiagnosed it can become even
more dangerous, since most athletes are willing to simply shake their
heads and go right back to the game. This can aggravate their condition
and the long-term effects can get even worse.
Many great players have had their careers cut tragically short because
of too many concussions. And even players whose careers never suffered
because of them complain about many mental problems later in life. They
get constant headaches, are unable to focus, and it’s believed some of
them suffer from mood swings.
These professional players have medical teams dedicated solely to their
health. Every possible concussion that occurs on television receives a
lot of media coverage, and rules are always being changed to protect the
players. But what about the people who don’t get coverage, the athletes
that get hit and are told to “toughen up and get back out there”? It’s
not just the big, tough, 300-pound linebackers that get paid millions of
dollars for playing a game that do it. It’s also the high school
students that play for a chance to get a scholarship to a good
university and a miniscule chance of going on to play as a pro.
High school athletes don’t have medical teams whose only job is to make
sure that they’re not too badly injured to keep playing. They don’t get
state-of-the-art protective gear given to them by league sponsors. And
they don’t get any type of neurocognitive testing to help detect and
treat concussions. At least not until now. Dick’s Sporting Goods is
working with a program called Protecting Athletes through Concussion
Education, or PACE, in order to help protect high school athletes by
donating one dollar for every pair of shoes sold in the stores or online
to the program.
Dick’s also hopes that by using former pro athletes like Jerome Bettis,
who suffered through many concussions during his career, to get their
message across, kids will stop and listen. Besides staring in television
commercials, Bettis also went to Dick’s stores around the country where
kids could meet a role model who’s gone through what they have.
Hopefully kids, their coaches, and their families will learn to notice
the signs of a concussion and get treatment right away. Even though we
still can’t prevent concussions completely, we can prevent them from
getting worse.
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