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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2ppInfF
Why does it seem like nobody cares about female concussions?:
bostonpridenwhl:
this is honestly the best article ive read in a while. if you can give it a read
This is fascinating. I have some personal experience with concussions; I was on a women’s roller derby league for nine years. We started having the head of sports medicine from a nearby university come and talk to us annually about concussions, and I attended his talk for a couple of years running. He stressed over and over again that we just have very little data on concussions in women, but what little we have suggests that it’s all worse for them, and we don’t yet know why, so we had to be extremely conscientious about safety and treatment. It was a good talk, and it always annoyed me that not everyone attended. (Most of us just wanted to skate, and it was one of the rare occasions where our precious skate time would be spent doing something else.)
But my last year, at the very next practice, I watched one of my teammates fall, and the teammate behind her tripped over her, slamming her knee into the back of the fallen woman’s head. Her head hit the ground, and rebounded, and the second skater’s other knee hit her head too, sending it slamming into the floor a second time.
She said she was fine. We wore helmets, and hers wasn’t cracked or anything. It didn’t seem that bad. But I’d been right there, in the same pileup (she’d tripped me, so I was lying by her feet; possibly why the second skater had veered toward her head instead), and I had felt the vibrations in the wooden floor. At my insistence, the coach had her sit out.
She came to the next practice, two days later, and I took her aside after warm-ups, and asked her closely if she really felt all right. Welll, she said. She was a little dizzy. Her head kind of hurt. She’d thought skating it out would make her feel better but she was a little queasy.
I made her go home, made her make an appointment with the doctor.
She missed the next twelve months of skating. She had a severe concussion. She was, I should mention, a speech therapist in her regular life; she worked primarily with brain-damaged patients. She absolutely knew all about brain injuries and what they did to a person. She just thought, well, her helmet hadn’t cracked and she had no bruises. Surely, she was fine?
After that incident, we worked with the university’s sports medicine department, and made it mandatory for every one of our skaters to get IMPACT tests.
I strongly urge you, if you’re into sports at all, to consider asking your doctor about something like that. Even sports where you don’t think it’ll matter. (The way they work is that it’s a very complicated test of your cognitive skills, designed so nobody can get all the questions right. They write down how many you get right. Later, if you’re injured or for some reason worried about yourself, you go and have them do the test again, and they compare the results. It is the single most powerful diagnostic tool we have of brain injuries to date, because it’s nearly impossible to diagnose them definitively from simple physical symptoms. They affect everyone differently, and especially if it’s a subtle injury, it may be impossible to tell when someone has fully healed.)
(Your picture was not posted)
Why does it seem like nobody cares about female concussions?:
bostonpridenwhl:
this is honestly the best article ive read in a while. if you can give it a read
This is fascinating. I have some personal experience with concussions; I was on a women’s roller derby league for nine years. We started having the head of sports medicine from a nearby university come and talk to us annually about concussions, and I attended his talk for a couple of years running. He stressed over and over again that we just have very little data on concussions in women, but what little we have suggests that it’s all worse for them, and we don’t yet know why, so we had to be extremely conscientious about safety and treatment. It was a good talk, and it always annoyed me that not everyone attended. (Most of us just wanted to skate, and it was one of the rare occasions where our precious skate time would be spent doing something else.)
But my last year, at the very next practice, I watched one of my teammates fall, and the teammate behind her tripped over her, slamming her knee into the back of the fallen woman’s head. Her head hit the ground, and rebounded, and the second skater’s other knee hit her head too, sending it slamming into the floor a second time.
She said she was fine. We wore helmets, and hers wasn’t cracked or anything. It didn’t seem that bad. But I’d been right there, in the same pileup (she’d tripped me, so I was lying by her feet; possibly why the second skater had veered toward her head instead), and I had felt the vibrations in the wooden floor. At my insistence, the coach had her sit out.
She came to the next practice, two days later, and I took her aside after warm-ups, and asked her closely if she really felt all right. Welll, she said. She was a little dizzy. Her head kind of hurt. She’d thought skating it out would make her feel better but she was a little queasy.
I made her go home, made her make an appointment with the doctor.
She missed the next twelve months of skating. She had a severe concussion. She was, I should mention, a speech therapist in her regular life; she worked primarily with brain-damaged patients. She absolutely knew all about brain injuries and what they did to a person. She just thought, well, her helmet hadn’t cracked and she had no bruises. Surely, she was fine?
After that incident, we worked with the university’s sports medicine department, and made it mandatory for every one of our skaters to get IMPACT tests.
I strongly urge you, if you’re into sports at all, to consider asking your doctor about something like that. Even sports where you don’t think it’ll matter. (The way they work is that it’s a very complicated test of your cognitive skills, designed so nobody can get all the questions right. They write down how many you get right. Later, if you’re injured or for some reason worried about yourself, you go and have them do the test again, and they compare the results. It is the single most powerful diagnostic tool we have of brain injuries to date, because it’s nearly impossible to diagnose them definitively from simple physical symptoms. They affect everyone differently, and especially if it’s a subtle injury, it may be impossible to tell when someone has fully healed.)
(Your picture was not posted)
