The Love of Playing Football and the Consequences That Go with It

Brock Mower
December 11, 2016

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Introduction
In the United States, one of the most popular sports is American Football. We fill
our Sunday evenings of August to January with football games. Children starting as
young as five-years-old can play tackle football. The love of the sport runs deep through
much of our nation. Playing football, however, has some risks involved. Players break
bones, tear tendons, rip muscles, and even get permanent brain damage.
The brain damage is what I would like to focus this paper on. Brain damage from
head injuries in football is called chronic traumatic encephalopathy or (CTE). This is a
fairly newly defined type of brain damage, but CTE has most likely been around since the
invention of football itself. Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered the damage done to a
professional football player, Mike Websters brain, in 2002 while performing Mike
Websters autopsy. The damage to the brain explained by Dr. Omalu is an abnormal
accumulations of proteins called tau and amyloid. These proteins are found in the brain
of people that have Alzheimer's disease as well, but the structure of these proteins is very
different from one another. In football the cause of this buildup of proteins is due to the
multiple concussions from the impact of the brain on the skull from each tackle.
The ethical problem for the doctors is whether to tell parents that want their
children to play football that their child is healthy enough to play the game but also
knowing that if the child plays the game they could possibly get brain damage from the
sport itself. When a child is checked for wellness at the beginning of a football season,
the doctor cannot force a child to not play, however the doctor has the obligation to do
what is best for their patients health. So where do doctors draw the line between what
will be best for the patient and what the patient wants to do. The sports doctors on site

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knew how many concussions Mike Webster sustained in the time he played. With the
knowledge they have now the doctors could have helped stop him from receiving such
traumatic brain damage that led to his death.
Thesis
Doctors have many moral and ethical rules or laws that they must follow. Two of
those are autonomy and beneficence. Autonomy of a patient is the right of the patient to
make their own informed decision without any influence from the patients surroundings.
Beneficence is the moral obligation of a doctor to act for the benefit of the patients
health. These two come into conflict when the doctor is given the obligation of declaring
a child fit to play football. The solution to this problem is not a simple one. The way we
can answer the question of how to tell the parents of a child to not let the child play
football while maintaining full patient autonomy is through the use of our paradigm
boxes. Paradigm boxes consist of four aspects: Medical Indications, Patience preferences,
Quality of life, and Contextual features. After considering these four areas it might be
easier to understand what will be best for the child.
Medical Indications
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy as of right now has no treatment and can only
be truly diagnosed after death and a microscope can examine the brain. This brain
damage is not reversible. The symptoms include: loss of memory, difficulty controlling
impulsive or erratic behavior, impaired judgment, behavior disturbances such as
aggression and depression, difficulty with balance, and gradual onset of dementia. The
only known way to prevent the onset of CTE is by avoiding any situations where the
skull can impact the brain forcibly. In the case of Mike Webster, the brain trauma he

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received caused very erratic behavior, which in the end led to him to his heart attack.
There was nothing anyone could do to help the suffering Mike Webster was going
through, because the type of brain damage he sustained had not yet been discovered.
Patient Preferences
Mike Webster sought medical attention from multiple different doctors. The
doctors told him that it seemed like he had brain damage and asked if he had been in a car
wreck, Mike replied with Ive been in 350,000 car accidents, he said referring to the
tackles while playing football. The best the doctors could do for him was prescribing
Ritalin for his mood swings. Mike was never informed about the effects a concussion can
have on his brain or what could happen if he was never even treated for a concussion. As
for the case of the parents seeking a wellness examination for their child to play football,
the parents can still choose to place their child in this situation deciding the good that
comes from football like sportsmanship and leadership outweighing the risks of brain
damage.
Quality of Life
According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University,
eighty-seven out of ninety-one former NFL football players were confirmed to have had
CTE. These former football players had given permission that after they died to have
their brains given to the research of CTE. The quality of life of those eighty-seven people
that had received enough blows to the head to cause this unique type of brain damage was
diminished greatly. Mike Websters way of trying to cope with this brain damage was by
buying a police Taser and shocking himself to try and calm his nerves down. Mike was
found wondering the streets, could not hold a job, and could not even remember when he

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had any appointments. Even though Mike could perform daily functions such as walking,
talking and thinking, he could not truly be on his own anymore. Without the hope of any
cure these patients suffer and do not actually have control of their life, their own
thoughts, or even their own actions. These patients become a hazard to themselves and to
those around them.
Contextual Features
One of the businesses that have a large conflict of interest with this problem is the
NFL itself. The NFL has denied the fact that concussions can cause major brain damage
such as CTE and has not warned the players of the dangers of their job duties. The
players such as in the case of Mike Webster are acted upon by the demand of viewers as
well, they feel like their audience and team needs them to continue playing even when a
player has a concussion. With all of these outside influences the patiences autonomy is
compromised.
Alternative Options
One alternative option would be to spend millions of dollars on research to create
a helmet that could help a players brains stay more stable from the impact of a tackle. If
this idea was possible, finding a way to keep the brain from impacting the skull while
playing football, would be safer for the players and would have a much smaller impact on
their lives after football.
The problem with this, however, is that there is no technology that is even close to
this idea yet. At this time research focuses only on finding the impact forces on the
players. The research at the moment is placing devices that measures the impact G forces

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that a players head goes through. Hopefully this will lead to making helmets to prevent
concussions.

Conclusion
CTE can be prevented in both cases: The case of Mike Webster, and also the case
of parents deciding whether or not their child should play football. The risk of permanent
brain damage is not worth the good that may come from playing football. When a doctor
is confronted with the situation of declaring a child fit to play football, the doctor should
always side on the side that most benefits the childs health and wellbeing. There is no
longer an excuse for these players to have to go through what Mike Webster went though.
No parent should put their child at risk of the pain and suffering that Mike Webster and
the other eighty-seven players went through before their early deaths.

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Bibliography

Hanna, J., Goldschmidt, D., & Flower, K. (2015, October 11). Many ex-NFL
players had brain disease linked to concussions. Retrieved December 11, 2016,
from http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/18/health/nfl-brain-study-cte/

Omalu, B. (2015, December 22). Concussions and NFL: How the name CTE
came about. Retrieved December 11, 2016, from
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/21/opinions/omalu-discovery-of-cte-footballconcussions/

What Is CTE? (n.d.). Retrieved December 11, 2016, from

http://www.protectthebrain.org/Brain-Injury-Research/What-is-CTE-.aspx