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Kathleen Bachynski: The Hidden Dangers of Youth Sports and how to protect Kids from Brain Trauma · Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman

• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Hey folks, welcome to another episode of Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the Mack Parkman Foundation, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma and how the two forms of that repetitive impact from contact sports and military occupations and repetitive blast exposure from military combat and military training is impacting the brains of millions of Americans and causing unprecedented levels of mental illness.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: That has yet to be educated to our medical community or understood by parents, coaches and all of the stakeholders in the health care system that we trust in our lives.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: So we go out and we try to find the most amazing researchers and scientists and patients and parents and all kinds of folks that are therapists that are surrounding this issue in order to advocate for change, in order to make sports safer and to take care of our veteran populations that are out there struggling and suffering in silence.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Today we have an amazing guest, but first I got to remind you I'm going to wear you out with this Army-Navy game, the first ever Special Operations Tailgate.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: At halftime I mean during the game, from 10 in the morning, 9 to 10 in the morning on.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: At halftime I mean during the game, from 10 in the morning, 9 to 10 in the morning on.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: We're being sponsored by Blue Fusion Horse Soldiers Bourbon.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: We've got an amazing group of contractors, alumni groups from Army and Navy.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: We've got rock and roll, beer, drinks and food everything you need and it's all about veterans' mental illness and suicide awareness.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: So please attend, please take a look at our website, donate if you feel there'll be a donation to come on in, but it all goes.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: 100% of the monies goes to pay for alternative treatments to improve brain health that are now out of pocket for our veteran community.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: So really appreciate your attention.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Today we've got another amazing, great and I hope I don't butcher this name, ma'am Ms Kathleen Bachinsky.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: So close, bachinsky, bachinsky.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: All right, man, I should have asked you before I got on.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: My apologies, but Ms Bachinsky is critical to the areas that we're talking about.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: She's a postdoctorate federal at the Department of Medicine at NYU, young and Grown Health, and she researches and teaches on the topics of sports safety, public health and medical ethics all that are critical to the subjects that we talk about on this show.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: She holds an MPH in epidemiology and a PhD in social medical sciences from Columbia University.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Even as important is, she's authored articles on sports safety in a number of highly reputed publications like the New England Journal of Medicine, injury Prevention and the American Journal of Public Health, and she's currently completing a book which I cannot wait to read, as she outlines a debate on the safety of youth tackle football.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Wow, man, this is going to be a great conversation.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: Ms Paczynski-Kathleen, welcome to the show and thank you so much for agreeing to come on today.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Thank you for having me.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: I appreciate it.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Well, let's just dial.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: We're all about brains here, so let's talk about brains.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: How did you get into the brain business and I can't wait to talk about this book, but what got you here?
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, you've got, obviously, the degrees in epidemiology and in sociomedical science scientists, but it doesn't seem like you're a neurologist or a neurology major, somebody that might gravitate to this issue.
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: So what is it about brains and contact sports that got you here?
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: Well, the journey actually started with my own sports experience.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: I was a soccer player in high school and I actually tore my ACL, which is a really common knee injury among soccer players.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: And by the time I got around to studying public health for my graduate degrees, I knew a ton of other classmates, teammates, friends, who'd also had sports injuries.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: So I kind of knew, generally, let me study something related to sports.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: This really affects the health of a lot of people.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: And originally I was sort of like well, maybe let me see if I want to do something related to knee injuries because I injured my own knee.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: But in just one of those twists of fate I ended up connecting with a neurologist who specialized in brains and said well, I can't really help advise your thesis on knees, but I could help advise your thesis if you're willing to sort of switch your focus.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: We can still have it be about sports, but switch your focus to something related to brains.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: And that is what really sparked my interest, because I started this sort of light bulb moment for me was thinking about how the worst case scenario for me would be.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: I might need a knee replacement which would stink in the future, but it's totally doable.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: You can replace a knee, but you cannot replace a brain.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: We don't have surgery.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe we wish we could, but we can't, and so, to me, I thought this makes us even more important to prevent these injuries.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: They're so important to prevent because our brain is so crucial to who we are and because, unlike knees or hips, it's not something you can easily just replace or treat in the same way, and so that's what made me shift my focus and say I'm going to focus on the brain, because it's just so, so important.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: And how long have you been in the brain business?
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: How long have you been studying brains and the impacts of sports on them?
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: It's been about 10 years, believe it or not.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: It's been about.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I started my first research that ultimately led me in the path to doing this book around 2013 or so, and that was actually right around the time of the NFL concussion settlement.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you happen to remember this going on, but some former NFL players had sued the NFL over the concussions they had experienced and there was sort of this big lawsuit and at the time people were really focused on professional athletes Understandably, you know they're in the news, they get lots of media attention.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: And I remember thinking, well, what about the kids?
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: You know we need to look at youth football, and so all the attention was kind of on the NFL.
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: That's when I started first researching my book.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: That ended up being focused more specifically on youth football Because to me, from a public health point of view, kids are really the most important, because there's way more kids that play sports than the tiny, tiny percentage who go on to play in the NFL level.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: So just in terms of the numbers of people affected, youth sports would be the biggest, biggest numbers.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: And you would think that, given the developmental stage of a child's brain right, which is nowhere near right the maturation which we all know occurs around the age of 25, you would think that this would have been an issue.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: And this was one of my primary issues with you know, when I started interfacing with the CTE community like where have you been?
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: My son just ran off a hundred foot cliff after you know, participating in contact sports not just football right For years, and I allowed him to play, knowing the fact that I, as a semi-pro rugby player and combat veteran, thought they were safe, that I, as a semi-pro rugby player and combat veteran, thought they were safe.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: Gave them the best helmets, gave them the best everything.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: The kid never showed any outward signs of mental illness other than apathy, which we didn't recognize.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: So, in your point, all right, here you are, 10 years ago, 2014.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: We found CTE in 2009,.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: Five years into this journey and bam, you're wondering what I come across in 2020.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: What do you think caused this disregard that a disease that we know is affecting the lives of adults has to be impacting children, and probably with more severity?
• 8:01
  Speaker 2: Oh boy, there's, no, there's no.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: This is such a profound question I don't have an easy answer, but I have a couple possible thoughts on this.
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: One is that we do have some strong beliefs and they're very understandable beliefs about the general benefits of sports and sports do amazing things, of course, in terms of fun and teamwork and discipline and all those other benefits and I think we were sort of so focused on those benefits that it kind of biased us to not focus as much as we might we should have on the risks that we were just sort of assuming well, this has got to be good, this has got to be healthy, sports are great and not focusing so much on the very, very real risks that can happen when you are repeatedly colliding in a way that puts your brain at risk.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: I also do think it's a really big industry.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: I mean, we have tons of money that the NFL is, you know, billions of dollars, and there's a lot of money at stake to want to keep kind of things going and not upset the apple cart, so to speak, to not sort of question do we need to change what we've been doing for so many years?
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: Football is also very closely connected to schools so high school, college sports there's profound sense of joy and identity and community camaraderie.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: All of that is connected to football and I think that also is another kind of social factor that makes us kind of overlook the not so great things about it, because it's so closely connected to all these institutions and parts of our life here in the United States.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Well, you bring up great points.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: All right, you know that we love our sports.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: It's tied to schools, there's a lot of money, but it still does not, um, you know, allow us to look away from the health of kids.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: And I think part of the problem is up until you started looking at your book and I started researching this is that now people are thinking we have to ban these sports.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: Right, and I think that you know what I wrote in my book and what you know.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: You're probably taking a completely different path.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: My book was all focused on what's going to, what are we doing to a kid's brain?
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: Right, that you know.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: It's about making sports safe.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Nobody wants to take these sports away, but we can make them safer to a point where you might have to say delay participation till 18.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Point where you might have to say delay participation until 18, because that's when you're an adult.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: Hey, you want to smoke dope, you want to drink beer, you want to carry a gun in the Army?
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: Well, you can play contact sports.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: But here's the risk profile of these sports and here's where you should look.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: But I do hold the research community at fault for this.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: I do think that it was them as researchers to understand.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: I know they do know the NFL, knows Everybody knows that.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: If it's you know all about, you know football then let's focus on the players and we kept spending more money on research.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: And another question to you is that this whole focus on concussions, this whole focus on concussions, absolutely took the entire research and you know the media, you know focus off the real problem, which is what you mentioned earlier those little hits that we take when we head soccer balls and we play football and we play hockey and lacrosse, rugby, gymnastics from the G-Force that these young girls are doing.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: I mean there's times that Simone Biles hit her head on a bean.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: So what is your takeaway on that, on this whole focus on concussion and CTE, when we basically needed to focus completely on something else?
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: I mean, I completely agree with you.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: I think it's those repetitive impacts that just accumulate and it doesn't have to be like one super dramatic hit.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: It's those smaller repetitive impacts over and over.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: They're actually easiest to diagnose.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: They're still not that easy to diagnose, but they're more readily visible.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: It's very hard to observe, you know, if somebody doesn't have any immediate clinical symptoms of what's kind of going on inside their brain.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: But the other aspect of this I think and again that connects to the history, the sort of deep roots of football is the focus on concussion would allow us to not make more fundamental changes.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: The idea is if we could just prevent these like really big hits and just kind of tweak things around the edges so those most dramatic, you know big, big concussions aren't happening, maybe we don't have to change anything else.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: And unfortunately I think that's kind of wishful thinking.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: I think we maybe want to just think, oh, we can just, yeah, tweak these little things.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: We don't have to sort of confront the more inherent risks that you're describing and unfortunately, just inherently, if you're colliding over and over, your brain is going to move around and that's because it's not attached to your skull, it sits in fluid, it can move and if you're colliding there's the risk for the brain to move around and it's those forces that movement, if you do that over and over and over again, that can set you up for greater risk of long-term problems like CTE or other degenerative conditions.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: And so once we acknowledge that, once we acknowledge there's a real inherent risk to repeated collisions over and over that are not just about tackle football but also boxing or checking an ice hockey or heading a soccer ball over and over anything where you're repeatedly exposing your brain to those impacts, then you have to start taking stronger steps to protect people.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: And I think that's kind of where we're at.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: You know, when I started, you know, researching for the book, I could only find two or three papers that even mentioned subconcussive trauma.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Now you look out there and you just type in repetitive head impacts, rhi or subcussive trauma, and the amount of research focused on this is enormous.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Now, and even you know Dr Ann McKee and Chris Nowitzki and all the you know basically the people that have kept the argument for CTE alive and have gone up against the NFL and NHL and everybody else.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: Now you know, everybody understands that it's these little hits that are the root cause of CTE.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: They're the root cause of the mental illness epidemic, the brain changes.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: I mean almost all the negative outputs.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: And football is a great sport.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: I love to watch it.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: I used to.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: I can't.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: It's hard now.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: But you know I was at a football game not too long ago Amazing comeback.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: I'm like nobody wants to take this away from fans and kids and everything.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: But at the same time, when you start talking about RHI, you cannot prevent it without eliminating basically the contact aspect of the game, which is inherited football.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: But if you took it out of practice and you delayed exposure we can make.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: So where do you think that's going.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: I mean because you said you know, like you say, it's hard, like wishful thinking.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: Now that we understand that it is RHI, where do you think you know contact sports has to go?
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: I mean, where do they go from here?
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Because if they keep going the way they are, you know, no-transcript.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think you already kind of summed up the two most important things to do then.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: Like, when you get a bit older you can start to learn it a little bit, but you have to wait until over age 14 to actually be doing practices where you have heading the ball.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: Is that a rule now?
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Because I know it's 11, so it is now 14 before you can actively head the ball.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: I think it's kind of like a graduated driver's license program where it's like not at all the floor 11 and then like that is, that's good partial, you know, 11 to 14, and then like complete after age 14.
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: And I think it's totally reasonable to sort of you know debate or argue like what should the exact age cutoff be?
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: But I think that's a great starting point.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: And then, similarly, in in ice hockey, you can't body check when you're an elementary school age hockey player.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: You start learning the basic techniques like how to skate and handle the stick and the puck and so forth, but you're not allowed to body check until you're a teenager.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: And I think, similarly, football may have to follow a similar path where it's flag or touch or some other non-contact options that are promoted for the youngest kids.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: So I think that's number one.
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: And then number two, as you pointed out, is you can have practices where it's like no pads, you know no collisions and have many more regulations on how much are you allowed to actually collide.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: So even if you were to start playing tackle football in high school or after age 18 or whatever we decide, the crop should be that there should be more oversight so that there aren't kids or young adults that are practicing like two hours a day, every day, that are being exposed to constant hits.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: So I think you've already actually beautifully identified the two most important things from my perspective.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: And again, that doesn't mean we're like getting rid of all sports.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: It means we're restructuring sports, especially for the youngest kids, to set them up for a lifetime of health.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: Thank, you and that's the goal.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: And that's what I talk to people.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: It's like look, it ain't about winning.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: I mean, I love sports.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: I played semi-pro rugby.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: I still play.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: I'm 62.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: Oh, I play twice a year now because I spend like four months recovering every time we play.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: But there has to be a starting point and one of our arguments is that the prefrontal cortex, which is the CEO of the brain, if it doesn't start, you know, maturing till 14, then that's science.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: Okay, why are we going to damage this development of the area that that brain starts developing from?
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: Why would we even consider that an option?
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Right, I mean, this is literally right impact.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: We know that if you put a helmet on a kid or you check in soccer, or head in soccer, check in hockey, tackling rugby, whatever wrestling you know, hitting the mat repetitively, you are damaging key components of the brain.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: How do we know this Like?
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: This is science.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: This is black and white.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: Why is this so hard to you know?
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: You know for people and it's not the people that we talk to, they get it 100% but for society right now.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: You know this is.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: This is huge and we have to have a starting point.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: Um, uh, to that, and I think that, to your point, soccer and hockey have made changes.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: We have to make changes to football.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: It's the only sport you can't.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: You know, it's just like hey man, we, we, we, we're going to have to do this, um and and and, and do that.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: So you have a background in public health.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: So where does this go in public health?
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Does this have to be litigated?
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: Uh, are there?
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Are there going to be legislated actions?
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: You know what do you think I mean?
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: How do we get ahead here?
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: Cause you know what do you think I mean?
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: How do we get ahead here?
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: Because you know, like I said, once the lawyers get involved, nobody wins, Right?
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: But the lawyers, they're really good at that, right, you know?
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: they're very good at that man.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: But you know how can we affect a publicly, a public health, and we're writing legislation right now for informed consent because we have no awareness, no parent is aware of this Right.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: But in your mind, from a public health, public policy perspective, where does this need to go?
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: Regarding football or any contact sport, to tell you the truth, Great question.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: I think, as a public health person, we always end up looking to cigarette smoking as an example or as a model, because that's something else that was so deeply culturally entrenched.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: Like you watch movies in the 1950s and all the Hollywood stars are smoking, it was such a big part of our culture when we learned that smoking was really harmful.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: There wasn't one single thing.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: It had to be a combination of things.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: One, of course, was the education and the informed consent piece that you talked about.
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: Some of that was actually just putting cigarette stickers excuse me, on cigarette packages.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: Like this is dangerous, this could cause cancer, and we had Surgeon General's warnings and I wonder if something analogous to that is where we need to go, where it's like there is going to be a warning.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: Does it go on the football helmet or like where does it go?
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: I don't know, but a specific warning that's like this is dangerous for the brain.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: And, as part of informed consent, no parent or, you know, young adult, whoever is playing, should make that decision without having all of that information.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: So it's our responsibility in public health to educate and provide that information in the most effective way for people to see it.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: The other big thing, of course, that we did with cigarettes was limit where you could smoke them, so you can't smoke in hospitals or airplanes, and I think that connects to limiting tackle football for the youngest kids that we do have to put some guard rails on and some limitations to protect health.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: And again, we never banned cigarettes entirely and it's very unlikely, we would buy.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: You know that's a great point.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: We never ban cigarettes and we're not banning football or any other contact sport but we are trying to create a safer society, a better society, and, gosh, these are our children.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Once you understand what we're doing to our kids' brains, this becomes a no-brainer for 95% of the population, except for those that just don't want to hear.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: And you always got that.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: 10% is I'm just not listening to you, right?
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: I just I don't want to listen to you because then I have to face this, like you know, dealing with PTSD.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: I don't want to deal with my trauma, right?
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: So from a public policy perspective, that is a great analogy.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Let's go run down the cigarette row.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: It worked.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: But we've got to, you know, then.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: But I think it should start with informed consent.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: And we did have a joke here we were going to grade a whole bunch of stickers and just start sticking them on helmets, you know.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: So what would be the communication pathway?
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: You thought, you know, we've got to educate, right, We've got to educate parents.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, how way.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: You thought you know we got to educate, right, we got to educate parents?
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: How would we get that word out?
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: What do you think you know we could, what could we do to get that word out to our parents?
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: And I do think, yeah, the stickers is one starting point.
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: I also think something that's even opened up the conversation to the point that you and I are having this conversation are the former athletes themselves, whether they're retired NFL players or their families or other loved ones speaking out and, in a way, the public health analogy there this reminds me of is mothers against drunk driving and just having people affected by drunk driving or, you know, affected by the issue, whether it's in school assemblies or conferences or television spots or being profiled in documentaries.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: It's been so powerful to hear from former NFL players who had said these are the symptoms I'm now experiencing.
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: I don't know if I would want my own child to start really young.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: I might like to see the age raise up to 14.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: Having role models and spokespeople Even Gronkowski's come out again age raise up to 14, having role models and spokespeople.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: Even Gronkowski's come out again in Fort Thru, I mean.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: Gronkowski, for Gronk to say that I mean, come on, if we get him and Brady out there just saying, look, let's just wait.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: I know Drew Brett Favre has come out on the issue.
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: Well, let's pivot this to your book.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: All right, you're getting ready to write an amazing book and I think it might have been you that sent me that article from like 1903 or 1909.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: Right, let's talk about that.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: I want the audience to know how far, how long ago, we have been wrestling with the issue of children and contact sports and the impact on the brain.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about that article.
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: This blew my mind when I found it.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: So I was looking into this history and I'm like let me see what people were saying at the beginning of football.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: Football kind of got started in the late 19th and early 20th century and I came across this 1907 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association and they were looking at the fact that, tragically, that year there was a number of children that had actually died playing football, on top of, of course, all the devastating, catastrophic injuries.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: And they actually summed it up and this is by like a major medical journal and they said football is no game for boys to play, it's just too dangerous.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: And that kind of blew my mind that people were saying that over 100 years ago.
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: And I was like that has to be the title of my book because I want to represent how long we've had this conversation that even over 100 years ago there were doctors looking at this and saying this is just too risky, this is too dangerous for kids.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: We need to look at other options, other versions of the sport, other ways to approach it, but what we're doing right now is just not safe.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: And that's before we even had brain scans.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: We had any medicine.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: It was before SSRIs, you know, and I think I don't know what the count was, but earlier this year I mean it was just like a month or two ago we had already had 11 or 14 kids, boys, die in football this year, and it wasn't just from head trauma but it was, you know, dehydration.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: It was a combination, but it's still related to a sport where, if contact was diminished or eliminated, we could protect their brains and the lives of these young men and women that are no longer here.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: And we have huge, you know well, we have parents that are just, you know, devastated by the loss of their children.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: But you know, that article really hit me home because you know it was there and, and I think wasn't this like a topic about it, like it came again up again like the forties or something where they were looking at, you know, banning football, talking a little bit about the history of the discussions that we used to have as a society about this issue before football became a religion.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, right, yeah, because I would say it wasn't really until like the 60s or 70s, with like Sunday night football and TV, that really kind of changed the game Football wasn't quite as prominent.
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: It was actually much more prominent at the college level.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: It was sort of like the you know West Point and you know Harvard, yale those are kind of the big teams but there really wasn't a lot of like middle school or elementary school kids playing football.
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: And in the 1940s what changed is you started to have organizations like Pop Warner or other leagues start to shift their focus towards younger kids and that was really new.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: So that started this new round of conversation, because in the 1940s people were saying, well, we were used to 18 or 20-year-olds playing football, but this is the first time we've seen like eight-year-olds or 10-year-olds playing football.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: Is this really safe for kids?
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: So there's this whole round of discussion.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: The American Academy of Pediatrics actually in the 1950s came out and recommended against football for kids under age 12.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: Oh really yes, specifically boxing and tackle football.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: They said, under age 12, you shouldn't box and you shouldn't play tackle football.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: And what's amazing to me is we kind of listened when it came to boxing, like we don't really have, you know, school boxing for kids.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: Unless you're in the police activity league, and I'm trying to get them to listen right now.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: Nuts.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: But we sort of ignore the pediatricians and I think there were a bunch of cultural reasons for that there was.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: You know, president Eisenhower at the time was a former football player himself.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of people that really love football and were like, well, this is a great sport, seems like it should be okay for kids, and they kind of ignored the pediatricians.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: The other big thing that happened was the development of plastic football helmets.
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: Football players used to wear leather In fact, if you heard the term leatherheads, that's kind of what you're talking about but they developed or invented plastic helmets at mid-20th century and in the 1950s people were starting to shift to wear plastic helmets and the concern there is that you can kind of use your head as a weapon in a way with a plastic helmet that you couldn't with a leather helmet.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: So people were actually using their head more, leading with their head more, getting more head injuries, and so there was, I think, this really interesting historical moment of is this safe for kids?
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: Are the plastic helmets safe or not?
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: Where it could have gone in the other direction and instead and I agree, I think there's an abdication of responsibility from the medical field, from others.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: But I think there's this.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: We really love football and let's just, if we have doctors on the sidelines, it should take care of it.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: I like we kind of just tried to again with some wishful thinking say, well, if we just fix the design of the helmet and make it a little fancier and have doctors nearby, we're just going to keep doing what we're doing.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: And so that's kind of what ended up happening.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Abdication of responsibility and I think exactly what there is.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: When I started digging and I found out you know well the issues, right, it is our HI and we wrote that book back in 2021.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: I was researching it and it's like why I cannot believe that I don't know this.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: I don't know this as a parent.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: So in your book, I mean you outline the history of the argument.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: Are you outlining, you know, recommendations?
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: You know, for you know the sport.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: You know, and you know we'll get to the medical components of that.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: But you know, talk to us about your book and the arguments that you're making, because you know we've had books before, but what we lack are books written for parents that are written in English.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: They are not scientific journals that parents don't want to read.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: So you know, it sounds like you've turned this into a story of some sort.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and most of the book is sort of the history, but I kind of bring it up to the present day and in the present day, so you might remember, I said the American Academy of Pediatrics updated and issued, actually a new statement on tackle football and they didn't recommend it against it for kids.
• 30:36
  Speaker 2: They didn't say no, kids shouldn't play.
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: Instead, they said well, we acknowledge that tackling is associated with more concussions and more overall injuries and more catastrophic injuries, but it should be up to families to decide.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, uneducated parents, exactly.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: Right Without accurate information, and so my argument is it's actually the responsibility of the doctors to provide that and make recommendations.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: We don't say, oh, it's up to you to decide whether or not to give your 10-year-old a cigarette.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: We say no, smoking is so dangerous that you can't give your 10-year-old a cigarette, and we're providing you information on how risky it is.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: And then, with all that information, when you're an adult, maybe you can still choose to smoke, but we're not going to let 10-year-olds do this.
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: I think we need to take a similar approach to tackling.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: We have to provide all the information, and I think we're also at a point with the research that we have to say we really shouldn't let the youngest kids be colliding with each other over and over, and so my perspective is save the full body collisions for later.
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: We shouldn't have again heading in soccer.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: We shouldn't have body checking in hockey or tackling in football for elementary school.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: I would like to see all of that delayed, and that, to me, is a really important recommendation, because this is cumulative damage.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: So if you start at a really young age, that's so many more years that you're exposing your brain, at a crucial period of development, to repeated trauma.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: So we need to raise the age to protect kids and I think it's the responsibility of medical field public health to lead with that message and provide that information to parents.
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: You know two points on that, because you said something I want our audience to understand Cumulative damage.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: This doesn't go away, all right, once the brain is damaged.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: Okay, you know the brain, and science has shown that when the brain heals, it never heals 100 percent, just like we know, if you break a leg and it heals your predisposition to break in a leg, at that point again the leg just is not 100 percent.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: It's good, you can go back to playing football, but you are predisposed and the bone is still weaker because it has been broken.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: The brain is no less different and we're talking about a very high, highly complex, you know, gelatinous, you know organ that continues to get damp, you know, and so you know.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: That was the first point, you know.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: The second point is that we have to delay.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: I mean it's and for you know, you keep, I keep going back to the abdication of responsibility.
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: But we're not, we're not asking and nobody, none of us, are asking for contact sports to go away.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: We understand the benefit of contact sports.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: You cannot find the team, the camaraderie, the team, the reason.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: My son played contact sports because he just wanted to be with the boys, right, and there was so much, even if they lost which they lost, right, they love being together.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: You can't take that away.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: We have to enjoy it, but we have to make it.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: You know, we have to take care of our children because it is our children.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: And now we, you know, in an age where, on the VA side, right now, if you have a damaged brain, none of the modalities that have been proven to improve brain health, like grow, you know, stimulate brain health to deal with the image, whether it's all the technical modalities, psychedelics, brain supplementation none of them are covered by science because they're not FDA approved.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: Well, we are, because they're not evidence backed.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: We have more evidence that tackling in football and heading in soccer is not beneficial to the health of our kids.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: Why are we not?
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: Why, you know, and it's going to be people like you and I and you know, in the mouths of, you know, hundreds of thousands of parents out there.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: I said look, are you kidding me?
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: We don't know this, you know.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: And so I think your book is going to be you know, hugely, you know popular and wildly just accepted as another piece of evidence that we just need to stop.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, you have the background as a doctor and how are you going to release the book?
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: Are you self-publishing, are you going through a publishing company, or when is the book going to be out?
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: I'm actually very happy to say it's been published and it's from yeah, and it's from the University of North Carolina Press, so it's a university publisher because it's got the research in it.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: So they reviewed the book and they make sure that you have all your footnotes and then everything's been documented.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: And I was very happy to connect with the University of North Carolina because they have an interest in publishing research that relates to sports and health.
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: So it was a good fit.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: So it's out there.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: I apologize.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: So how do people find the book?
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: You can either get it on Amazon or you can go directly to the University of North Carolina Press.
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: The publisher will sell it directly from their website or, if you prefer, you know Amazon shipping.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: It's on Amazon as well.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: Well, we need to put this all over the place.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is the kind of information parents they need.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: They have no information right now, and when they read that there is a scientific justification for doing this, it's not just oh, it's too violent and you're you know's too violent and you're acting like a girl or whatever.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: Their issues are right.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: You just don't like the sport.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: People get crazy about this.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: We deal with them all the time on social media, but they're looking.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: The parents are like where do I go for this information?
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: How do you think the CDC and NIH could take your book and create, you know, psas or anything like that?
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: Because we are absolutely in touch with people that want to impact how we play contact sports and I think that your book could have an incredible amount of impact on how we address that.
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: But we've got to come to the CDC and NIH.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: With some, you know, hey, with some you know do-outs, right.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: What do you think they could do for parents right now?
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: Because if you look at their, you know it's all concussion once again, right, concussion, concussion, concussion.
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: There's nothing on repetitive trauma.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: They try it in age, put a little bit of thing in there, but what can they do?
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, there are national agencies and they're completely overlooking this or, I think, ignoring it because of the money, the power and, you know, the desire to not upset the apple cart.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: So what would your recommendations be to our national agencies to get this out to?
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: parents.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: That's their job, right yeah, and you're spot on.
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: I think the current information is so concussion-focused, and it's not wrong, but it's overlooking the repeated head impacts.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: So most of what the CDC has right now is sort of like you know, get checked out, if you have symptoms of a concussion, return to play guidelines.
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: All of that's certainly important, but what I would really like to see is specifically the message about avoiding repeated head impacts, whether or not it causes a concussion, just avoiding those repetitive hip head impacts.
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: One thing I've sort of thought about is that in um baseball, there's something known as a pitch count where, in order to protect your elbow, you're not supposed to pitch more than a certain amount and you're supposed to kind of keep.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: You're gonna open up that.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: Okay, go ahead.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: What you got well yeah, and so my thought is we need a similar message about like limiting hits to the head, limiting impacts to the head.
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you'd call it a brain count or like what the right phrase would be it's a just about concussions, it's about those repeated collisions.
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: That's the kind of messaging I would really like to see get focused on, because I think that's the core of the issue.
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: That's fundamentally where the problem is.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: And I want parents to know that we can count these heads.
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: They're called accelerometers.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: However, every company that's come out with an accelerometer for parents has mysteriously gone out of business.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: Right, you can buy accelerometers.
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: Riddell sells them.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: These other companies will sell them to teams, but none of the information is released to the parents.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: How horrible is that?
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: Hits to the brains of our children, but the parents are not made aware of the number of hits, nor does the the impact that that could happen on their brains.
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: This is it's criminal.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: It is absolutely criminal that that is going on right now in this country.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: Yet when you go and want to buy your own accelerometer to wear it, we have been told that the coaches would.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: If it was available, the coaches wouldn't allow it on the field because that would involve the parent in the sport.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: Right, so it's, it's.
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: It is nuts that we have the knowledge that our kids are being damaged, that we refuse to share that knowledge with our parental community.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: And then, when the parental community is aware of it and wants to even monitor, in the hopes that their kid, even you know, could play Right, they, it's like no, no, even you know could play Right.
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: There's like no, no.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: So who's banning what here?
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: Right here, we are trying to save contact sports, make it safer, and they want to ban the technology that could be safer.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: It's.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: It is absolutely a nightmare, and so, man, I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show, and the title of your book is a sport that no boy should play, or what's the title of your book?
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: It was in my bio.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: No, you're good.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: It's no Game for Boys to Play.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: Now, if we are going to have this halftime show at the Army-Navy game, we're going to be more focused on veterans right now, but, as we have other events focused on contact sports and making them safer, nobody's talking about banning sports.
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: We're about making them safer for our children, saying go on and have productive lives, still be professional athletes.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: But, as my NFL buddies tell me, 95% of the retired NFL community are hurt, they're broke and they're not having any fun.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: So why even play the game if that's what you're going to end up with, right?
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: So let's make it productive.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: Let's make NFL football the game that you want to play and you're going to make that bling and you're going to be educated on how to take care of that bling, and then you're going to enjoy that bling, because that's what the dream is.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: And then we find out from so many professional athletes that this dream is a nightmare, and it's a shame because they have given up their lives to this sport that takes from them and takes from them, and then, when they're done with them, they're like ah, get out of here, buddy, you know it's wrong.
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: And books like you can help us change the way we look at contact sports.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: Kathleen, thank you so much for coming on the show.
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: I cannot thank you enough.
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: I mean a historical look at a question that we don't even start, we're not even starting to understand.
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: That was literally discussed a century ago, over a century ago, right?
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: The impact where there was not even any science behind it, just the knowledge that this can't be good.
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: We had no scans.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: It's so important we're going to push your book everywhere in the hopes of getting parents educated so we can make these changes, so these sports can be safer for our kids.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: Thank you, and just thank you, so much for raising awareness.
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: It's so important.
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: I really really appreciate it.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: No man, we're going to put your name all over the place and your book.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for what you do and just to remind everybody about the Army-Navy game coming up December 14th, Take a look at our website.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: A lot going on there to help our veterans and veteran athletes and we will continue to push Kathleen's message on our show.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening today.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: Hope you enjoyed the podcast.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: Please make recommendations.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: Reach out to the foundation If you have anybody who loves coming on the show, because guests like Kathleen is what makes the show so important when it comes down to repetitive brain trauma.
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: So thank you very much and we'll see you next episode.
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: You.