Latest / Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman / Bruce Parkman on Contact Sports, CTE, and Protecting the Next Generation from Brain Trauma | Broken Brains Podcast

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Bruce Parkman on Contact Sports, CTE, and Protecting the Next Generation from Brain Trauma | Broken Brains Podcast · Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey folks, Bruce Parkman here.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another episode of Broken Brains, sponsored by the Mack Parkman Foundation, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma from two perspectives: repetitive head impacts from contact sports, and repetitive blast exposure for our military veterans and what this key these conditions are doing to the mental health and well-being of our veterans, kids, and athletes.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is very important because this topic is not taught.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not trained.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that makes you the front line of defense for the people that you love.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Today, we're going to have a unique approach to podcasting where I get a topic, we usually do them a little bit short, but I'm going to talk today about the problems that we're having with vulnerability, the problems that we're having with hope or the lack of hope, and why so many young men and women are taking their lives when not only do we know what could be the source of the problem, but that we can treat it.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then since we know what the source of the problem is, we're not doing anything about it as a society to address it.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this issue right now, and I'm telling you folks, you have to listen to us.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is the number one, the most the leading preventable cause of mental illness in this country.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because we're hitting the brain.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: We are literally hurting the brains of our children, our athletes, and our military.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll talk, you know, the military is a whole nother issue.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: We have to do it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: We just have to do it a little bit better, you know, and take care of these men and women when they get out instead of just leaving them with bad conduct discharges and a bag of drugs.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, we can do better for all of these populations.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: But today we're talking sports.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And what brings this to attention is um a young man that took his life uh last year named Marshall Nealand.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was a defensive player for um the Cowboys.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And like him, and there's three other amazing young men in the Division I football.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have their names in front of me right now, but they've all taken their lives.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And these young men are part of a different era.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: These are not players that started playing in the 60s and 70s and just played for a long time.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these are kids that have played in this new era of contact sports, where we start at the age of five or six, and we play and we play and we play.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, part of this is on the parents, right?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: They they they want their kid, just like I wanted my son Mac to be healthy, right?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted him to be a good kid.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't want him to, you know, to struggle with weight problems or self-identification problems.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted him to, you know, that I just wanted him to be healthy.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I I didn't push sports, but I said, you've got to play a sport.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care which sport it is.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: He played baseball, he did karate, he did rugby, he did soccer, he did hockey, he did football, he did wrestling.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And finally he picked the two that ended up, you know, costing him his life, which was football and wrestling.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, the the issue is nowadays we start too young and we play too long.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we are wondering why we have so many men and women that are struggling with mental illness that all have a history of contact sports.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Mr.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Nealand started playing at the age of seven.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: He played for a long time.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, of course, that's really nobody's fault.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, his parents didn't know, I didn't know, he didn't know.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we just played.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: We just we just kept kept playing.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And over time, as we now know, you though you that listen to this podcast, those hits over years cause damage to our brain as irreversible.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the primary outcome of that is mental illness.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yet here's where vulnerability comes in.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Is because you know, mental illness is something that we tend to hide.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're not proud of it.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm a I'm a guy, you know, Green Beret and, you know, you know, you know, all that happy stuff that I did.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I played a lot of rugby in my days.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when I had my mental illness, I mean, my wife couldn't help but notice it because I was a mess.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: But our children are hurting.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And they're hurting in a way that they don't want us to know because they think they'll disappoint us.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, Mr.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Nealand is one of those folks out there that that just played a long time.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And whether he was struggling and couldn't reach out for help, you know, we'll never know.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: But he was diagnosed with stage one CTE.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, the uh, you know, and and whether that contributed to his mental health, this the stage of CTE really is not important.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean what what's important is that his brain was damaged and he committed suicide.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: CTE is a condition, and you've heard me speak on this a whole bunch.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: We can't identify it.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: We'll probably never be able to really say CTE, you you have CTE.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's such a complex disease.
• 5:54
  unknown: Okay.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it is a lot easier to see the damage that's being caused that ends up in a CTE diagnosis, which only can again be diagnosed when the brain's taking out of the skull.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Which leads us down a path where we keep trying to find biomarkers and find ways to diagnose CTE because that's what people know.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: When they when they hear about contact sports, like, ah, CTE, you know, chronic traumatic, encephalopathy.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And they're right.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's I mean, that's that is the the buzzword out there when it for when it comes down to uh you know um you know tragic endings or you know, you know, whether they uh you know, football players, lacrosse players, hockey players die too young, they die too violently.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's always it always comes back to CTE.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, what we know about CTE now is, you know, it's it's definitely a disease.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: I call it a condition because it's diagnosed posthumously.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it's the it's the outcomes of what eventually gets labeled CTE that we need to be concerned about, which is the damaged brain and the mental illness.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And in this case, you know, when we talk about you know Mr.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nealand, what you know what is alarming is that he just recently passed in November of last year.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, while CTE was diagnosed in 2009, since 2020, we have had and made amazing progress in dealing with brain health.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you know, whether it's you know hyperbaric oxygen, whether it's the psychedelics programs, whether it's a lot of the electronic technical modalities, okay.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: We know that we can improve brain health.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Can we cure it?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nah, I mean, I would say that might be a bit too far.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm pretty sure my brain still is impacted, but I am better than I've ever been before because of the way that I've been able to treat my brain.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: The issue that is alarming here is that why did Marshall Nealon not know that he could treat his brain?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Or why did Marshall Nealon, like all the other NFL players, and not just NFL, I mean, this is not an NFL problem, this is a societal problem.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Why did he not know that he could improve his brain health or that his mental illness was or was could be attributed to the contact sports that he played and that he loved so much?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And while again, we may never know, it shocks me that we keep losing these young men when there is hope out there.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's part of, you know, the stigma that surrounds mental illness, that you can't tell people that, you know, that there's and eventually by being alone, you know, I mean, being alone is one of the largest contributors to an early death.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And suffering with your own mental illness all by yourself leads to a point where you just can't or don't want to be here anymore.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what's happening to a lot of our young men and women nowadays, is that they lose hope.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yet there is hope.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much hope out there.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yet, for as long as we're going to allow these children and young men to play these contact sports, we have to be prepared for the consequences.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: We are still to this day, despite Marshall Nealin, despite the thousands of athletes that kill themselves every year.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like school shootings.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: We just don't care.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it don't affect me.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to pay attention to this.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Mr.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Nealin and all the other young men and women, we just had a young man take his life, you know, whether it's my son, I'm dealing with several children right now that are either incarcerated for the rest of their life.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, we just got a call from one family, 22 years old, in jail for the rest of his life.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Started playing football at six.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Another young man has been institutionalized for seven years with severe mental illness.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he started playing lacrosse at four, made the juniors team, and then eventually started falling apart.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And because nobody was trained or aware that mental illness is an early indicator of damage to the brain, and that damage to the brain could be caused by contact sports, nobody asked the family that that question.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: That child has been institutionalized, medicated, and has had a lot of irrelevant therapy for seven years.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this happens all over this country, folks.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: You can't unsee it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: I've got NFL for buddies right now that would say, yeah, I don't know, I'd still do this, I'd play it all myself.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'd do this all myself.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: I had one of my NFL buddies call me up, and his nephew, who was a quarterback for a major university, all of a sudden started falling apart.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Bad.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was really bad.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Incarcerated, severe mental illness, severe drug addiction.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And now he's like, I see it.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that contact sports are bad.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: We love our contact sports.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, heck, I just watched a bunch of World Cup soccer.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, back in my day, I thought soccer was kind of a girly sport.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: But you look at the ball hitting those guys in the head at 100 miles an hour plus.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's a contact sport.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we love our sports.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: But we also, like everything in life, need to learn from the lessons that God shows us.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to make decisions on how to make them better.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that leads to the whole purpose of our foundation, and we'll talk about that a little bit.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to go back to this point of vulnerability and this point of hopelessness and despair where these men are disappearing.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: We just had a young man, uh, Brant McCarthy, who founded a foundation after his brother took his life that focused completely on this issue of stigma, of removing the stigma.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay if you're hurt.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay if you're struggling.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay if you're mentally ill.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're all mentally ill in a way.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I mean, ask my wife, right?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm I've been labeled a little crazy.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're all a little nuts, okay?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And and sometimes there are causes to mental illness that are genetic, that are environmentally cost.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: But in this case, in this case, we do this to ourselves.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: We do this to our children.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't have to.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And yet when we're struggling, and and I know what it is like to be not completely hopeless to that point.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, after my son died, I was suicidal.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll give you that.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: That'll make you suicidal.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: But from a mental illness perspective, you know, I haven't been to that point where it just, there's just no other way out, and that this death is an option.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think our young men and women know that there is hope, that there is light, that they can find a way, and we can help them.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So while we've got an entire untrained medical community and psychiatric community and suicide preventional community that are dealing with hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people every day, none of them are being asked the question Did you ask Did you ever play contact sports?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: So while we have that untrained population out there, we have this complete lack of knowledge, other than podcasts in the occasional news article that, oh my God, another young player is gone, another young woman or a young man is no longer here.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: We also have a completely untrained population of parents and athletes that have no idea of the same issue, but more importantly, that it can be treated.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: So when we take the problem and we have an untrained caretaker community and an untrained, you know, you call it a victim community, a population of athletes and parents, we have got a huge mess on our hands that can be resolved.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: But we've got to get the word out about this issue so that our men and women and parents and athletes and coaches cannot identify this.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because guess what?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: 99.9% of us are not going to be making money playing these sports.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: We do it for fun.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Fun, folks.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: F-U-N.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Fun should not hurt.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Fun should not harm.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: And fun should not kill.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to put the fun back in sports.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't have to hit every day.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to head the ball.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to check.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: We don't, it's, you know, we got to get off this macho thing that, you know, oh man, we got to go, we got to go hit.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Sports is supposed to be fun.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was in the Netherlands I read a sport.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: They don't even keep track of scores until the kids are 13 or 14, because it's all about being fun.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: When we play contact sports, we put an enormous amount of stress on our bodies, and trust me, I know.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Man, I've had broken bones, broken joints, you know, cracked orbital sockets.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: I got all this is scar tissue, you know.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and it was fun.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I felt like a man, you know, it's all good.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: But you can do that just for the game.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have to do that every day in practice, and we don't have to play the darn contact sports all year, route.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: We got to get back to having fun.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I mean, I won't even go to a Super Bowl anymore because there's a 50-50 chance that my team might lose.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: And who wants to spend thousands of dollars and sit there in despair when I can sit in my living room and say, ah, they lost, you know, and turn off the TV, right?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Going to the Super Bowl ain't fun when you lose, right?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: We've got to get back to having fun and loving on each other.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Our children, our athletes, our parents.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: We are a community that cares about sports.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's practically a religion.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you like it or not, religion is based on the concept of love.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so shouldn't be our contact sports.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if we love our children and we love our athletes, then we need to take better care of them.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to make better decisions with the science and the research that's at our disposal.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, on one hand, as I ramble all over the place on this thing, you know, we have a path forward that's been identified, not just by our foundation, trailblazers like Karen Ziegel for the Stop CTE Organization, and uh Kristen Nowinsky and Ann McKee with the research and and voice that they have created on the issue of CTE.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we are aware of the problem, but we have to solve for it.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like anything.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we we bring it up all the time on the show.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we never wore helmets in the 70s.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I remember driving in the back of the pickup truck or sitting in the backseat of our Chrysler Imperial 300, five kids in the back seats with no seat belts and cigarette smoke so thick you couldn't even see.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I went to church, I mean, they never went to church.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I would have gone to church as a child.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I used to go to school smelling like an ashtray for my whole life.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, things have to change.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we are not moving fast enough right now for me or anybody else in order to produce the change that reduced the amount of Marshall Nealon's and other tragedies that are taking place in this sport.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: And not just the sport, in sports, contact sports.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we have that path.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's all about reducing the amount of head exposure that our athletes suffer.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And when we take a young man like Marshall Nealon and we put him in a helmet at six years old, you know, and we don't understand what we're doing to the brain.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: But now we understand how complex a brain is.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: It is no wonder that we have these problems.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we're treating them, you know, unfortunately, like some unpreventable issue that we just got to deal with.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I refuse to accept that because it's preventable.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And because I loved my son.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I love a lot of these men that God has brought into my life, and I just lost another one.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I and I love these children that the parents bring to me that are incarcerated or that are you know that are institutionalized.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because they are flipping innocent.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: They have done nothing wrong.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, neither have their parents until now.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because once you know about this, then it's upon you to use the knowledge that God has provided you to make better decisions.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's that innocence that drives us at this foundation because we are losing the human capital at an enormous cost to this society.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: When we look at the issue of brain optimization and what we could have done to Marshall Nealand, and what we could do for these children that are in jail and that are being institutionalized, is that we can lower literally every negative social ill that exists.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, studies have been done in the state of Florida that indicate that 84% of our inmate population have had a history of 4.2 TBIs.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: How many of our incarcerated population has played contact sports?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Heck, right here in Bradenton, we finally converted the first tackle team to flag football here for the local police activity league.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: They're still teaching eight year olds how to box.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: We've got to get smarter on this.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: We are hurting innocent boys and girls that deserve better.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: And when we know that there is a Solution ahead, we've got to lean into it and we've got to fix it.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we do that?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, awareness.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: We should be able to find the Marshall Nealans before they show up in the paper.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: We need to let our vet our athletes know that when you're struggling for mental illness, it could be because you've played too much contact sports.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sorry that you've dedicated your life to a sport that might take it from you if you don't get some help, but you got to stop playing and focus on a new career.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to build awareness, not only with our athletic populations and their parents and coaches and all that.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And coaches, you got to get off your butts, man.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: These children's brains and their future are a lot better than your W in your column.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: But we also got to educate our medical stakeholders, our nurses, our doctors, our psychiatrics, our psychologists, our suicide prevention personnel that this is an issue.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: We see it across the board, not just the military and first responders, but every contact sport that's out there.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I've said this before on this show.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: There are no baseball players or basketball players in CTE Bank.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, there is one baseball player.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: I just found out he was a catcher.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: That took a lot of hits.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: But we have to do a better job with awareness and then selecting the sports that we play.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: We have to let people know that mental illness is caused by contact sports or can be caused, let's say it that way.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: But more importantly, it can be treated and not with a bag of drugs.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: Which takes us to the next problem is we have to identify these folks.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: We have to build awareness and then identify these folks.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where assessments that can be conducted at any general practitioner level by any mom and dad for crying out loud.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Look up uh traumatic uh encephalopathy syndrome, TES.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Four different questions.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Does your child have a mental illness or does have they played a contact contact sports a lot?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Do they have mental illness?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is it progressing?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Is there any genetic associations that could be associated with it?
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: If the first three are yes, the next one's four, then there's no, fourth is no, take your kid out for a while and go get them evaluated.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to identify these folks.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there are new technologies out there.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you're if your child is struggling, there are scans right now that can identify abnormalities of brain.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that combined with the mental illness is probably a pretty strong indicator that your child should stop playing these sports.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: Go play a different one.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: They don't have to stop playing sports.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: They just need to stop playing contact sports and give their brain a rest and then get the treatment, which is the next part of this whole pop problem, is that most of the treatments for brain health right now are pharmaceutical intervention, which does nothing to help these individuals when their brains are damaged, when they're impaired.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, when you're mentally ill, nobody is trained on this.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: So nobody's going to ask you, have you played a lot of contact sports?
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Just so you know, we know less about the brain than we know about, we know more about the outer space than we know about the brain.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this is very, very relevant.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: We meet nurses and doctors all the time at this foundation who, when they see our bracelets or they hear our story, they go, Why don't I know about this?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not, I'm not making that up.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: We hear it all the time.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: Pediatric nurses going, why don't I know about this?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: This should be part of all, if we're going to keep playing these stupid sports, and I say stupid from a perspective of damaging brains, not that playing them is not fun, then we need to educate our stakeholder community.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Build awareness, but then we got to provide treatments that heal the brain.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, we're aware of a multiplicity of treatments that could have helped Marshall Nealand, that could have gotten him out of his dark hole, that could have given him hope, that could have given him light.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: And hundreds of other NFL players have taken this path.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: But Mr.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Nealand didn't know about it.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, these treatments are not FDA approved, though they are evidence indicative.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're not evidence, you know, evidence-backed, they're evidence-based treatments where thousands and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have uh been through these treatments.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's died.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: So why aren't they available?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that goes into a whole nother show we can do on pharmaceutical, pharma, big pharma, and you know how nobody wants to see disease cured because it's an industry.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it is.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, surgeons like to cut, doctors like to prescribe, and pharma wants mental illness to last forever.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants to see this end.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it can.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: It ended for me.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I know if I would have had my son right now, I could have ended it for him.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so we need to work on these treatments and we need to make sure that they're covered and that parents can get support.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what I wanted to talk to about today.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, somebody sent me Marshall Nealand's, you know, they just kind of reminded me about this, and we had some time to do some quick episodes on a on a plethora of issues that you know bother me and bother you.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we have a foundation out there to let you know that there is hope.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Our entire foundation in his cause.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want this foundation to exist anymore.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: We want to be that foundation that work themselves out of a job by making sports safer.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we can do that.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to create, we got to educate and create awareness, we got to identify these folks, and we got to treat them.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, we could, you know, I mean, and and then of course, you know, the the the the the the the path ahead, well the how we do how we solve this problem forever, is basically not allowing kids to play contact sports, I'd say, you know, till later on in life when they're an adult.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna roll the dice in high school, at least till high school, when the brain starts to myelinate, then pick one sport and then take the contact out of the darn practice.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: The contact in practice is 80% of the problem.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Take it out of practice, we've done some good things.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: That kid's gonna be okay.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna be dinged up if he plays football in college in the NFL, but it'll should be treatable, you know, and hopefully he made a lot of money.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna enjoy it, he's not gonna be a wreck.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we do have a path ahead, and it's full of hope.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: But I wanted the um leverage, you know, on the on the unfortunate passing of Marshall Nealand as a way to outline this whole problem from start to finish.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, and I hope you got some out of it.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: So next time on Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the Mac Parkman Foundation, or as I say, the official podcast of the Mac Parkman Foundation.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for your time today.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: And please remember that we have our summit on September 16th and 17th this year.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's the only summit on repetitive brain trauma in the world.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, General Brian Fenton is our key our keynote speaker.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have two tracks, one on veterans, one on kids and athletes.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have professionals across the spectrum.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's turning into an amazing event.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and don't forget our book.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: We just renew it.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, it's not 88 pages anymore.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's more like 253, but it's all good information.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's out on the website here in about uh two weeks, the updated BERC.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: So please get that.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's for free.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's now in Spanish, and we hope to have an audio book here pretty soon.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to talking to you again, and I thank you for your time today.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: And please remember your children, your child only has one brain, one melon.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: Please take care of it.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Till next time.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: God bless you all.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: From Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parker.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.