Truth Doesn't Have a Side by Bennet Omalu

Author:Bennet Omalu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

The NFL = Big Tobacco

My alarm went off at 3:00 a.m. the morning I set out to start writing my first Mike Webster paper, which was going to be the very first case study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a football player reported in the medical literature. I took a quick shower to clear my head and sat down at my desktop computer. Then nothing happened. I stared at the screen, unable to force any words out. Once or twice, I managed to write a paragraph, but I immediately deleted it. None of the words I wrote sounded like what I wanted to say. It was very frustrating. Finally I gave up and went in to the office and lost myself in my work. I tried not to think about the paper.

The second morning, I woke up early, again, but just like the day before, I could not write anything worth keeping. The words I pecked out on the keyboard never formed a cohesive thought. This was very unusual for me. Mike Webster was not the first paper I had submitted for publication, nor would it be the last. In addition to writing academic papers, my job demanded that I write scholarly works on a regular basis for the courts or attorneys or Dr. Wecht. Never before had I struggled so much to put my thoughts into words.

When I had the same experience on the third day of writing, I knew this was more than a case of writer’s block. Suddenly the cause dawned on me. My spirit whispered to me, Bennet, give it a name. I could not force words onto the page because I was trying to describe a condition and a disease that remained nameless. In a way, the lack of a name kept this disease detached and distant. It was like a stray animal that comes to the house. When the animal is just a cat or a dog, it annoys you and you try to get it to leave. The moment you give it a name, that animal becomes part of your family. The nameless condition I tried to describe was no different.

Okay, I need to give it a name, I thought to myself. But what? I spent the next two weeks contemplating that question. In my mind, the name had to meet four criteria. First, it had to be intellectually sophisticated. Second, it needed to have a good acronym, which would help it stick and make it more likely to permeate society. Third, the name also had to be generic enough to give me some wiggle room if my concepts were proven wrong and yet specific enough to actually describe the disease I had observed.

Finally, I recognized this was ultimately an occupational disease, and being an occupational disease, it was only a matter of time before it ended up in a court of law. As such, it had to fulfill what is known in the American legal system as the Daubert standard.1 The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.