Bell Ringer: The Invisible Brain Injuries

Injuries are a part of sports. They are inevitable, and impact athletes in a wide variety of sports. The movie, Bell Ringer: the Invisible Brain Injury, says the concussion has been gaining attention in the last few decades. The concussive injuries from sports have become a major issue currently being addressed by sports leagues everywhere. Frequently, athletes who sustain head injuries namely concussions are put right back into the game without further evaluation (Bell Ringer). Countless times the athlete does not need to go back in or has no reason going back into the game and could be at serious risk for another injury to the head. As an athlete gets concussed after the first head injury, the second one is usually way more serious than the

original one and the process to recovery could take twice as long or more (Cifu). "We often hear about concussions in professional football, but they can be a problem in any sport, at any age," AETN Executive Director Allen Weatherly said. "AETN produces programs like 'Bell Ringer' to help inform Arkansas educators, students and families and positively impact health and safety in our state” (Bell Ringer). Concussions in the sports world are more common than concussions outside sports. Yet it does not mean they are more important or dangerous. All concussions should be taken with complete and urgent care (Cifu).
For example, ever since the media spotlighted the dangers of concussions in football, peoples’ perceptions of the sport have certainly changed.

Some have even expressed a new belief that simply watching football games conflicts with one’s inner morality.USA Today columnist, Robert Lipsyte explains, “it wasn’t until recently, as the roster of damaged brains was revealed, that watching football began to feel more like a guilty pleasure.” Lipsyte is certainly not the best source, but is also not the only source in the country to express this new belief about football. Carroll and Rosner, in their book, The Concussion Crisis: Anatomy of a Silent Epidemic, give the example of Whitey Baun, who after exposure to the devastating consequences of concussions, noted that, “the hits that once roused him out of his living room chair now made him wince”(39). It is important to mention that what both Lipstyle and Baun said, do not leave them as the only ones who felt that way. Players have come out recently over the last couple decades, stating that they had no real treatment for these concussions and are now feeling the effects of several TBIs and they want compensation for

it.
Ever since the true dangers of head blows have been discovered, one might have thought that leagues, professional sports like the NFL, would have acknowledged the dangers of concussions, and since done everything they could and can to protect these players from these dangerous head injuries. But this isn’t true. The NFL had denied the strong correlation of higher rates of brain disease with those retired in the league since as late as 2007 (Breslow). Julian Bailes and Kevin Guskiewicz released a study on the risk of depression in retired NFL players based on a survey of more than 2500 former players. The paper, published in the Official Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, stated that, “… Professional football players with a history of three of more concussions are at a significantly greater risk for having depressive episodes later in life compared with those players with no history of concussion.” (Timeline). Carroll and Rosner followed a discussion between HBO interviewer and Dr. Ira Casson, the chairman of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, in their book. In this little excerpt from the interview, Casson is being asked several questions and can see the denying of knowledge that the NFL claimed to not have.
The interviewer asked if there was any proof to suggest a correlation between multiple head injuries among “pro football players” and depression.
Casson replied with a ‘No.’
“…with dementia?” ‘No’ “…with early onset of Alzheimer’s?” ‘No’ “Is there
any evidence… that links multiple head injuries with any long-term problem like that?” ‘No.’ (qtd.

in HBO, The Concussion Crisis 247)

“Neurological surgeons have treated head and spinal sports injuries since the specialty was formed in the first decades of the 20th century (Stone p. S3).” Stone and his colleagues go on to say that in the last half century or so, neurosurgeons and scientists, especially hailing from, The American College of Sports Medicine, had come to be more immersed in the rising sports concussion problem, particularly in American sports per say “football and ice hockey, with the former having the greatest number of participants” (Stone,

S3).
Physician, Katherine Chretien admitted that there is indeed “mounting medical evidence of repetitive head trauma causing chronic brain injury and an early form of Alzheimer-like dementia.” It is important to understand that claims like these are not at all unsubstantiated by scientific research. Each of these claims can be explained by recent advances in neuroscience. In their book, The Concussion Crisis: Anatomy of a Silent Epidemic, Linda Carroll and David Rosner see the evidence in a study by Douglass Smith, who is a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. In a scientific study, Smith made a link between head trauma and onset of Alzheimer’s disease. And in an interview discussing that recent study, Smith noted that characteristics similar with those of Alzheimer’s disease appear in the human brain after just one severe blow to the head. Specifically, a quote from Smith shows him saying, “with a single brain injury you can get both pathologies…[Patients] have hallmark pathologies of Alzheimer’s even though they are young”( The Concussion Crisis 177). In other words, Smith finds evidence on how trauma, or even one hit, to the brain can help lead to the earlier onset of Alzheimer’s in one’s life.