In 2013, Rowan Stringer, a 17 year-old-girl from Ottawa, died after suffering head trauma during a high school rugby game.
Rowan was tackled hard during a game, flew through the air, and hit her head and neck on the ground. She stayed awake for a few moments after sitting up, then slipped into unconsciousness. Rowan was taken to hospital, where she died.
But, the real reason Rowan died was not that particular head injury, it was because medical professionals had trivialized and minimized previous damage done to her brain by sugar-coating her injuries by using the term concussion.
Instead of doing their very best to help and heal her, the best and brightest chose to trivialize her brain injuries, and instead of running every test they could to determine what had occurred inside her skull, they basically gave her some pain relievers and sent her home.
And, that horrifying lack of concern and treatment is what ultimately led directly to her death.
Concussions are brain damage.
Period. They should never be called anything else.
Diagnosing a brain injury as mild without thorough medical investigation, is at the very best an educated guess, right on par with predictions from Jo Jo's Psychic Alliance. The very moment the word concussion is used, all serious medical investigation and treatment stops, because hey, "it's just a concussion."
How many more children have to die? How many more lives have to be destroyed before those entrusted with our care stop referring to an injury to the brain with all the seriousness of a stubbed toe?
The bottom line is that we now have irrefutable scientific evidence that use of the term concussion is responsible for repeated human death and suffering, and yet the most educated people on Earth still irresponsibly continue to use the term to deliberately demean, dismiss, minimize, and trivialize brain injury.
The term concussion should be banned from all medical use. It kills, and almost even worse, leaves patients misdiagnosed who are permanently damaged, but who will never get the help the help that they need, only because a medical professional chose to demean and dismiss an injury to a body part vital to all human function. This really, really needs to stop.
Will Lewis
Prince George
