Quote:
Originally Posted by Cotton Hill
CTE is on the verge of becoming the medical equivalent of a moral panic at this point IMO.
Have they done proper control studies on CTE? Like if you just got a bunch of random physically active dudes who weren't athletes and studied their brains for this condition, how many of them would still have it? I'm asking honestly, maybe they have done such studies, I haven't really bothered to look.
When I was a kid I fell out of a tree pretty high up and landed flat on my back, also hitting my head. Later that night I woke up with a horrible, horrible head ache. Almost certainly had a concussion without even knowing what one was. Pretty certain that's the only concussion I've ever had. If they looked in my brain, would they find CTE?
Without basing it on much of anything, I just get the feeling that CTE as a condition is way more common and easily acquired than people think and that it is now serving as a convenient scapegoat for any type of undesirable behavior athletes are engaging in.
I mean, if close to 100% of NFL players have this condition, then obviously any time they look for it (which is almost always after something bad has happened) they are going to find it. Aren't the vast majority of ex-NFL players who played very long careers not walking around deranged from CTE?
From what I understand, medical science is still trying to get a handle on CTE and until they can detect it earlier and in living people, they are still sort of guessing a lot. I want to know how easy it is to acquire, and then if acquired, can it be proven to be actually be linked to increases of suicide and homicide and all that other stuff.
I'm not a doctor and don't pretend to know anything about any of the science. I just sense a certain hysteria surrounding it that doesn't seem to be based on science.
or ya know, using common sense that having children and young adults smash into each other at full speed, sometimes using their heads, is proly really really bad for their brains.
and yes, they have found a staggering correlation between cte and dementia, alzheimer, and violence, and severe depression.