There aren't many opportunities to talk about federal changes. I would say there are a lot of recommendations.
I think that's an incredibly important point. In college, I remember being required to go to a gambling thing for sports. Every athlete had to go to a gambling issue, even though there was one case of people gambling on their own games in all of the United States.
I can promise you that if they're in a contact sport, 10% of those athletes are going to be diagnosed with a concussion over the next coming season. Probably 30% to 50% of those who have it are not going to say anything. The idea that you wouldn't mandate a concussion conversation but you'd mandate anything else is potentially bad, short-sighted policy.
I do think the idea of mandating.... You know, we're not born understanding our brain. Unless we actually sit there and talk about it, we're not going to appreciate it. I didn't realize until I was a couple of years into this work that we don't have pain nerves in our brain. That's why we don't feel anything. That's why we're so reckless with it. The feedback you get is that you have to interpret this mild headache as a brain injury, even though you get mild headaches from having the flu or other issues. You're right that we need to ask more of ourselves. We also have to understand the pitfalls that are coming.
I'll quickly give you one interesting study I just came across. A former colleague of ours, Christine Baugh, recently was able to survey four division 1 college football teams and found that their likelihood of reporting concussions diminished the more concussions they got. If you survey doctors, they'll tell you they start retirement conversations at three or four diagnosed concussions.
This survey found that they'd tell you about the first concussion. They'd tell you about the second one, and they might tell you about the third concussion. Fewer than half would tell you about the fourth concussion. Not a single athlete in this entire group had more than four diagnosed concussions, even though many of them admitted to having more than 15 concussions.
There are a whole lot of social aspects to this that we have to prepare people for. It is just very complex.