The NFL has been asserting that concussions don’t, in fact, pose a long-term health risk. This means that they’ve got access to health data no one else has – but it’s so secret that they can’t discuss it. From today’s Times, “For Jets, Silence on Concussions Signals Unease” by Alan Schwarz:
Laveranues Coles is equal parts receiver and raconteur, the New York Jets player who talks when no one else will. But upon hearing one subject — concussions, specifically the two he has sustained in the past year — he immediately lost his smile, and looked around the locker room to see who might be listening.
“I can’t talk about that,” he said. “You know I can’t talk about that.”
Then he walked away.
We note that the Jets receive government subsidies from the state of New Jersey, and the NFL exists, we understand, by virtue of a government antitrust waiver. Those matters entirely aside from any moral or legal responsibility. Back to the Times piece:
Mr. Coles is the third star receiver on the Jets to endure significant concussions; Al Toon retired in 1992 because of postconcussion syndrome, and Wayne Chrebet did the same two years ago. Mr. Chrebet, 34, has recently acknowledged he has bouts of depression and memory problems so severe that he cannot make the routine drive from his New Jersey home to his Long Island restaurant without a global-positioning system.
Mr. Coles is not the only Jet who will not discuss concussions.
The team denied requests for interviews with the coach, Eric Mangini; the general manager, Mike Tannenbaum; and the owner, Woody Johnson. Mr. Coles was forbidden to discuss his health because the team does not allow players to discuss injuries.
The Jets also declined a request to speak with the doctor who oversees the care of the team’s players, Elliot Pellman.
Concussions are an issue throughout football, but the Jets have drawn special attention because Dr. Pellman until recently led the National Football League’s commission on concussions, and he has been criticized by many medical experts for playing down the effects of concussions and for clearing players to return to the field too soon.
Experts say the most frustrating aspect of concussions in football is the silence surrounding them. Football’s play-with-pain mentality discourages players, from high school to the pros, from revealing this virtually imperceptible injury to coaches or trainers, often causing more serious harm.
They also contend that doctors on the payroll of a professional team have a conflict of interest in deciding whether to return a player to the field, and that players are afraid to disclose a concussion because it could hurt their next contract.
The experts also worry that young players who admire and imitate N.F.L. players will conclude that the subject is either unimportant or taboo.
The Jets’ institutional silence persists because the team is “tired of having people scrutinize what they do,” said Dr. James P. Kelly, the Chicago Bears’ neurologist from 1995 until 2003, and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Colorado. “They arrogantly assume that they’re doing the right thing when it’s obvious to outsiders that they mismanage situations, Chrebet being the prime example. It looks like they have something to hide.”
Mr. Chrebet sustained at least six concussions during his Jets career from 1995 through 2005. He occasionally returned to games in which he had been knocked unconscious, a practice that Dr. Pellman’s research for the N.F.L. defended as safe, but earlier this year was banned by new league guidelines.
Dr. Pellman, the Jets’ director of medical services since 1998, led the league’s committee on concussions until last February, overseeing published research whose methods and conclusions have found few supporters outside the league. He remains a member of that group.
Mr. Chrebet also declined to be interviewed for this article. He discussed his emotional and cognitive problems with The Star-Ledger of Newark this fall, and later criticized the Detroit Lions for allowing their quarterback, Jon Kitna, to return to a game after he sustained a concussion. “I think they have to look at the best interest of the player,” he said.
After sustaining a concussion Oct. 28 in a loss to the Buffalo Bills, Mr. Coles was held out of one game and presumably passed the neuropsychological tests that the league made mandatory this year. The Jets would not discuss Mr. Coles or their concussion procedure but a team spokesman provided a two-paragraph statement of the team’s concussion treatment policy, which said, “Our approach to treating concussions is conservative.” It later added, “No player has been allowed to return to a game unless he is entirely without symptoms; has normal mental status testing; and has a normal neurological examination.”
But the Jets’ handling of Mr. Coles’s concussion last season raised eyebrows.
After that concussion, in a game against Miami last Christmas, team doctors deemed him fit to return to that game but did not let him practice the entire next week. During that week, Mr. Mangini, who is routinely circumspect regarding medical matters, declined to classify the injury as a concussion, saying, “He got hit in the head.”
An example is Carolina Panthers linebacker Dan Morgan — who has sustained at least five concussions but was cleared to continue playing — and faced being cut had he not agreed to restructure his $2 million roster bonus into payments of $125,000 for each game he played.
Beyond acknowledging the team’s concerns about subsequent concussions, the contract gave Mr. Morgan financial incentive not to reveal any concussion for treatment. Mr. Morgan has missed most of this season with a torn Achilles’ tendon, and has declined interview requests by The New York Times.
Regarding the restructuring of his contract, Mr. Morgan told The Herald of Rock Hill, S.C., “I didn’t have a problem with that, because that’s just them protecting themselves.”
Teams pursue this protection despite the N.F.L.’s contentions, which are widely disputed by outside experts, that multiple concussions do not leave players more susceptible to future concussions and do not pose long-term risks. The league stated in a pamphlet tha
t it provided to all players this season that “current research with professional athletes has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly.”Mr. Kendall said that when players heard the league saying that concussions had no long-term effects, “there are a lot of rolled eyes.”
Kevin Guskiewicz, chairman of the department of exercise and sport science at the University of North Carolina , and his colleagues have published several papers based on surveys of more than 2,000 former N.F.L. players that found a correlation between a player’s concussion history and later-in-life clinical depression, cognitive impairment and early-onset dementia.
Mr. Guskiewicz, who presented his research at a league conference on concussions in June, said the league ignored his and other experts’ findings when it published its concussion pamphlet for players, noting it did not include the research citing long-term effects.
“The first half of their statement is false,” Mr. Guskiewicz said. “And the second part, if they’re managed properly? What does that mean? They’re just trying to raise ambiguity when the science is becoming more and more clear. The literature has proven it, we confirmed it in June in the presence of their entire committee, and I was flabbergasted that that statement showed up in their literature.”
An N.F.L. spokesman, Greg Aiello, responded in a statement: “We certainly respect the work that Dr. Guskiewicz and others have done on this subject and look forward to continuing to work with him. Our medical advisers, including neurosurgeons and neurologists, do not fully share his view of the science. We are conducting research on long-term effects of concussions that we hope will help clarify this important issue.”
Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the N.F.L. Players Association, is one person who had long doubted a connection between concussions and later health problems. In interviews last January and March, he contended that there was no evidence that the incidence of Alzheimer’s and other dementia among former players was anything more than normal.
But by May, as reports of struggling N.F.L. retirees mounted and Mr. Guskiewicz’s findings came to light, Mr. Upshaw appeared to change his mind. Speaking at a dinner at which he was honored by the Alzheimer’s Association of New York, he noted that one of every five people in the audience would someday either be afflicted with Alzheimer’s or be close to someone who was.
“Hopefully I won’t be,” he said, before attempting some humor. “But I probably will be, because I had the opportunity to play in the National Football League.”
Mr. Upshaw smiled at the crowd, and heard only silence.