That's a good point. All right, where do I take this?
The interesting thing is that a lot of stuff we're talking about today has been in the medical literature forever. We've always known that a hit to the head can cause your brain to malfunction. It can cause structural injury. It can cause symptoms, most of which are acute, but some can become very long-term. We now know that those hits to the head can lead to degeneration and problems down the road.
We know that those hits to the head are probably worse when you're young. Kids take not only longer to recover, but there are things called developmental windows in the brain. If children have a brain injury before they're supposed to develop a certain skill—a good example would be if a kid has a brain injury before he learns to speak—they're going to be delayed dramatically and they may never catch up.
The idea that we need to protect kids is well accepted. What's interesting is that what is not accepted is the idea that we shouldn't hit kids on the head. I think that's the best way to look at this. That is not an accepted premise in North America. I like to steer the conversation there all the time.
The best thing we can do for all of these issues is prevent them. We can get into medical billing and all the nuances of what to do for you once you are in the system, but the biggest opportunity we have is prevention. We need to use our influence and knowledge to rein in sport, which in a lot of ways has become more about boosting enrolment and capitalism, creating jobs, than about necessarily doing what's best for your kid.
The idea we have today on year-round sports still boggles my mind. In my dissertation, I had to deal with an issue where I was studying a soccer team in a high school. I put sensors on their heads, and we were counting how many times they were hit on the head. I didn't imagine that the kids were also allowed to play on a private soccer team the other days of the week. I didn't realize it until afterwards, and I had to put that in my limitations, that these kids were also playing soccer somewhere else, 7 days a week, some of them for 12 months a year.
When we look at how bad the brains at our brain bank are today, those were athletes who were playing probably three or four months a year—a season a year of sports. We don't have a lot of 12-month-a-year soccer players. We also don't have “bigger, stronger, faster” in there. That's something we don't talk about either: our increased training and nutrition. If you look at an NFL team, they're 20% larger. They are faster than they were, and their brains are no tougher. The idea that.... You will hear that we've solved most of this problem and it's behind us, but that's not the most likely situation.
The worst of this is coming, which is why we're so dedicated to saying, “Let's draw a line in the sand. Let's fix what we can now. Let's stop creating this by letting kids get hit on the head, for years, while their brains are developing. Then, let's really dig in and try to help the folks who have been damaged.”
It's not just athletes; it's also our veterans. Whether it's our veterans or your veterans, they are people who have served our countries and need help. Unless we really invest and create this research roadmap and put money towards it, we won't have answers.
I'm now 40 years old, and I may need the answers at some point, so I urge you to hurry up. If it's not me who is going to be affected by this, it's certainly all my buddies.