If it is your son, is playing football worth the risks?

Frequent Football injuries: Concussions, Joints, Discs, Ligaments, and Tendons

I love to watch football and am an avid Bengal and Bearcat fan. Yet as a physician who suffers from joint problems even from non-contact sports like tennis and golf, I hesitate to encourage my grandchildren to play football.

With the recent publicity given to concussions in football (and other sports) and the inability of advanced helmet design to prevent head injuries, all sports fans must be concerned about the collisions that traumatize the brain. From dissecting the solid gelatin-like human brain in my neuroanatomy class in medical school, I am amazed that more concussions, brain contusions, and brain lacerations don’t occur from the blunt trauma of football.

I have great empathy for the cognitive losses due to concussions sustained in grade school, middle school, high school, college and professional football. It is a real problem, the scale of which is just beginning to unfold. However, concussions are just a part of the bodily injury that occurs in football. How about all the torn ACLs, degenerative arthritic changes in the knees, hips and shoulders, ruptured vertebral discs and spinal cord injuries. These are the chronic injuries that plague a host of my friends throughout life that played football earlier in life and boasted of being on the team.

I love watching football, but I would outlaw it as a sport, if I could. However, cricket, tennis, golf and other noncontact sports don’t stand a chance in displacing football in popularity. There must be some part of the human genome that makes us all fall into the gladiatorial mindset. Some say that it is the money from TV, NCAA and Faculty Donors that makes football our national sport (baseball is our national pastime) rather than soccer; but I think our human nature is more to blame. So I am going to watch the Bearcats this Saturday and the Bengals this Sunday and marvel at the athleticism of pushing, shoving and colliding.