appreciate that .. Parental worries about rugby and American football injuries
Charles Wallace April 6, 2015 1:36 pm
George North is treated for a concussion suffered while playing rugby for Northampton Saints last month
As any fan of American football knows, while the sport is still immensely popular, there have been concerns and a host of lawsuits recently about the health of players who have suffered repeated concussions. Now similar health worries are being raised about the possible dangers facing young people playing rugby.
The concern was underlined recently by two incidents. In one, George North, a 22-year-old wing for Wales and Northampton Saints, above, missed last Saturday’s European cup match .. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/32149963 .. in France after suffering two concussions in seven weeks. Rugby union suspended North’s opponent .. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/rugby-union/32140282 , Wasps player Nathan Hughes, for three weeks for the tackle.
In another, less noticed incident, Connor Lynes, a 14-year-old from Hull in East Yorkshire, collapsed in a coma earlier this month a few hours after he was tackled during an under 15s rugby league match. He had a bloodclot on the brain and his recovery prospects were not clear.
As these two injuries illustrate, rugby is facing some immense challenges that should be considered by parents of younger children.
Michael Carter, a paediatric neurosurgeon in Bristol, raised concerns about injuries faced by young rugby players recently in the British Medical Journal .. http://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h26 . While adults such as North presumably know the risks they are taking in rugby, Dr Carter told me that the same does not apply to younger players.
The current culture encourages a “gladiatorial” atmosphere around rugby, which raises special dangers for young players during a tackle and in the scrum. “In many schools participation in rugby is compulsory,” Dr Carter says. “The problem is rugby is not just a contact sport, it’s a collision sport.”
Dr Carter says that in his experience and that of his colleagues, injuries among younger players tend to cluster at the beginning of the rugby season because the players are usually out of shape and unaccustomed to the sport after a lengthy lay-off. He says organisers should schedule the beginning of the season to allow the players to become fitter.
One way to reduce serious injuries would be to adopt the system currently used in France, where “touch” rugby without violent tackles is popular with younger athletes, he says. Another possibility is to more closely match rugby sides by age, height and weight to make sure that smaller players don’t get hurt by much older and larger opponents.
Of course, rugby is a macho sport much like American football, where leaving the match because of pain and reporting injuries officially is regarded by some as unmanly.
But Dr Carter says British rugby needs to keep more detailed records about rugby injuries as New Zealand does if it wants to improve the safety of the sport and know what remedial action to take.
“We have to get a handle on actual instances of injury,” he says. “A significant issue is the under-reporting.”
American football fans were shocked last month when Chris Borland .. http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/12496480/san-francisco-49ers-linebacker-chris-borland-retires-head-injury-concerns , a star linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers, announced his retirement at the young age of 24. Although he earned $1.5m last year, Borland said that after consulting his physicians, he didn’t think football was “worth the risk” of repetitive head trauma. And Borland had suffered only two concussions in his entire career, once playing soccer as a 14-year-old.
Is Bareknuckle Boxing Safer Than Gloved Boxing IN a 2007 article in the The Independant (UK), sports historian Nicholas Hobbes explains that gloves were introduced to make competitions bloodier and briefer. Gloves distribute a blow, but they also add weight to a punch, making it more destructive: http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=110126765
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