A couple thousand retired professional football players have filed a lawsuit against the National Football League, accusing the $9 billion league of failing to deal with the brain trauma and concussions that seem to be so common.
The lawsuit highlights not just how the NFL dropped the ball, but also how neurologists did the same thing — medical doctors who for many decades considered concussions to be less than serious injuries and failed to take them or their consequences seriously.
At least that's according to a study cited by Medical News Today and co-authored by health care and law expert David Orentlicher, who teaches at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis:
"In reviewing the response of the National Football League to concussion, one can easily think that the league was too slow to worry about the medical consequences of head trauma. But the extent to which its response was unreasonable is unclear. If many medical experts did not worry about concussions, it is difficult to fault the NFL for not worrying either."
The study by Orentlicher, entitled "Concussion and Football: Failures to Respond by the NFL and the Medical Profession," has been published by the Social Science Research Network and looks at the evolution of the medical understanding of concussions.
Source: n.p. "NFL Not Alone In Handling Concussions As 'Benign' Problems Says Health And Law Expert." Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 21 Jan. 2013. Web. 24 Jan. 2013. MNT