While playing in star-spangled departments with whizz-bang toys is great fun, many ED, ICU, anaesthetic and GP physicians indulge in the challenges of working at sports events. It might be volunteering time as team physician for your local football club, suturing cage fighters’ injuries closed or, as in my case, hauling injured drivers out of competition race cars at circuits or in the outback. These environments can be quite resource poor. We mostly assume that what we do in our various departments is equally applicable to these other circumstances and in most cases it’s probably reasonable.
Concussion occurs in almost all sports activities, except possibly lawn bowls, or darts, and on the surface of it there seems to be little trouble managing it. Until you start to scracth the surface a bit more.
I was invited to give a presentation on concussion in motor sport at the FIA Institute’s Medicine in Motor Sport summit held in Istanbul at the beginning of this month, with the aim of highlighting some of the controversies of its assessment at an event and the difficulties in clearing a competitor for return to play. I’ve posted a video of the presentation on my Rollcage Medic site and while it is tailored towards a motor sport audience (doctors, paramedics, engineers, administrators & others) the principles can be applied to any sport. So I figured it put a link to it here for anyone who does a bit of sports medicine and might be interested. Comments are welcome.
Concussion in Motor Sport – Assessment and controversies