Concussion by Michael Lipman

Author:Michael Lipman [Michael Lipman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

17

FRANKIE

What is inside Michael’s Head?

Dr Rowena Mobbs and Professor Jennifer Batchelor had given Michael not just a clear diagnosis, but the beginning of a strategy on how to treat it. But what did ‘dementia’ and ‘probable CTE’ really mean? At the beginning, they were just words to us—words that Michael was quick, initially, to reject.

My approach was the opposite. I am one of life’s born students. If I want to know about something, I won’t stop until I have hoovered up everything I can to improve my understanding. It’s not just for interest’s sake. Knowledge really is power, and if we were going to gain some power over this disease Michael was suffering from, we needed a lot more knowledge. I thank many people, most of all Dr Mobbs, for guiding my reading in a direction that led to an understanding of the whole history of concussion in sport and where we are up to today. What follows is a digest of everything they steered me towards and everything I have been able to learn about this disease, for the benefit of Michael, myself, Summer and Joey.

Where to start? Probably the best place is the United States, where the science and the politics of concussion in sport collided earlier than anywhere else, and where the most dramatic incidents led to greater urgency in doing something about this scourge.

An American pathologist named Dr Harrison Martland first wrote about ‘punch-drunk syndrome’ in the 1920s. Concussion had been thought of as a temporary state, even when it brought on amnesia, which was not reckoned to leave the brain with a permanent or structural injury. In 1928, Dr Martland performed autopsies on 309 people who had died from head injuries and found that successive small bleeds, or ‘microhaemorrhages’, caused permanent damage to brain tissue. Looking specifically at boxers and titling his landmark paper ‘Punch Drunk’, Dr Martland described the signs and symptoms as a wobbly (or ‘Parkinsonian’) gait, vertigo and shakiness, and in some cases mental deterioration that was so severe that boxers and other head-injury victims had ended up in asylums. He focused particularly on boxers known as ‘sluggers’ for their ability to absorb a lot of hits to the head while waiting to land a knockout blow. More agile, evasive boxers who avoided getting hit so much were not as affected by punch-drunk syndrome. It was almost exclusively taking place in the brains of those who were known for their ‘courage’ in continuing to fight while dazed from the punishment they had taken.

It seems pretty obvious now—we all saw what happened to Muhammad Ali. But until Dr Martland’s work, the medical profession did not acknowledge punch-drunk syndrome or any permanent ongoing effects from repeated concussions. When boxers went to medical specialists to seek help, they were actually turned away. Dr Martland learned more from boxers themselves and their coaches, promoters and trainers than he did from other doctors.

A decade after Dr Martland’s work, a US naval medical officer named J.A. Millspaugh studied

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