Posted on 12/14/2021 11:36:28 AM PST by thegagline
Ex-NFL player Phillip Adams (pictured in 2011, four years before he retired) killed six people and then himself in April this year in an as-yet unexplained rampage
Ex NFL player Phillip Adams had 'unusually severe' levels of CTE when he killed six people in April before turning the gun on himself, pathologists revealed on Tuesday as they shamed the NFL for allegedly ignoring his pleas for help.
Adams, 32, played 78 NFL games for six different teams across six seasons before retiring in 2015.
In April, he shot and killed Dr. Robert Lesslie, his wife Barbara, two of their grandchildren and two HVAC workers at the Leslie home in South Carolina.
There is no motive for the attack and the only connection between them was that they lived close to each other.
*** Doctors also revealed that Adams had amphetamines in his system that he had a prescription for on the day of the shooting, as well as Kratom, an over-the-counter drug which can have the same effects as opioids.
***
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Maybe. But by the same token the league’s original stance was stupid. They insisted concussion created no permanent damage at all. Anybody that’s ever felt the bumps on their own shins, the permanent damage from every time you ever bumped something, or looked at the scars from various nicks and cuts on your hands know that EVERY bad thing you do to your body leaves SOME permanent damage. The idea that brain tissue is somehow magically unlike any other body part and can 100% completely recover from damage is laughable.
The league should stop being short sited. They can afford to help guys with mental problems. They could take the high road on it. Say they don’t really care if these problems are related to concussions that happened while in the NFL and they’re just going to help retired players with mental issues. What’s the most that’s going to cost them? Couple million a year? Hundred million? They make 15 billion a year. This would be rounding error.
I just posted same sentiment above. Some of the suicides I know of among vets had signs or full-blown evidence of CTE on autopsy. Some of them had survived large IED attacks inside armored vehicles or just being near a concussive blast but others had no record of such an event.
The brain remains a mystery.
Amen @ post 41.
I would include the NCAA in that. We have seen a few of these out of college.
The saddest one of all was Junior Seau and even he, a wildly popular player within the league, did not seem to cause much change.
Do myself a favor regarding hockey? My moniker on these boards is “thegagline” as in Jean Ratelke, Rod Gilbert, and Vic Hadfield. I’ve been a hockey fan since the late 60s.
As for the hockey players you mentioned, all of them are white and none of them killed blacks despite allegedly having CTE.
Show me the evidence that CTE makes black people disproportionately kill whites, Asians, Jewish people, and Hispanics.
God bless you grunt. You ain’t dumb. This stuff is real and wise soldiers know it.
Kratom makes killers?
You so consistently crack me up discostu.
it was his doctor, from the hospital, not a race crime, unless the care he received was not helping his condition and he blamed it on the doctor’s race, but nothing showed that
I think it is strange to some to equate the disorders or causes but I believe the mechanisms can be the same.
A neurologist that presented on this said (paraphrased) that we know the cause is trauma. We can document that some of them were the result of one gigantic trauma (i.e. - being flipped in an MRAP or uparmored Hummer by a roadside bomb) OR that others were the result of repeated trauma like Junior Seau or even Muhammad Ali (punch drunk). We can see the damage on scans but all of them are unique. He even talked about a football player who could not control his bladder or bowels who presented with brain damage in that specific area on a scan.
I had heard of a decorated NCO who had eaten a couple of IED’s including one that landed him in Germany like he was drunk. Same thing.... he lost bladder and bowel control. I am not privy to what his scans showed but always wondered if they were the same or very similar.
There are a lot of published papers out there but honestly I do not think we even know or understand 25% of this and opinions vary wildly. I am certainly not an expert on it nor am I a neurologist, but there is little doubt in my mind that some of this behavioral stuff might be attributed to wires being permanently crossed in the brain (my terminology) from trauma.
The brain floats in liquid and just like the concussive force or a grenade is far greater in water it would likely work the same.
I wasn’t trying to downplay CTE and its effects, but it may have seemed that way. You’re right.
Also his wife and two grandchildren from what I read.
No worries and it was not specifically directed to you. This is a subject that fills me with a lot of sadness because it’s easy to downplay it for other reasons or causes. Everything is so polarized today that it automatically becomes a “race issue” or “your cause here” when it could be something far more complex.
I could tell you a lot of stories about vets who flipped and some did not even have the incidents documented but you hear about it from their comrades. It’s sad and there is a lot of debate about it.
In WWI and even in WWII there were soldiers who had the crap shelled out of them that just started walking away from the battlefield who were executed as deserters. Like everything I am sure some of them were “cowards” but you also wonder when you read the stories about the ones who barely reacted or interacted with the investigating officers if they were wounded in the brain.
They would have been better off had they been bleeding from every orifice but they were tried, convicted, and executed immediately.
People break in the head all the time for a variety of causes and we write it off to things we can rationalize. I do it too but the older I get the more I believe the evil we see may be far more complex than we know and its easier to just not think about it.
Kratom...meth...diminished mental capacity..anger...stupidity....brain damage..synergism...could easily be the final straw...people with mucho opiates very difficult to reason with. People who use kratom judiciously may benefit from it’s opioid effect..
Many of these football players started playing when they were 6-7 years old. Wonder how many of them had concussions going back to when they were very young?
No parent should allow their son to play football until they are in high school.
At least the NFL has finally started a concussion protocol for players with head injuries. Once a player gets a certain number of concussions, they should be medically disqualified with a substantial pension.
The difference between you and other people like you, is miles away from a guy who played football and may have had a concussion at one time.
I take opioids I’ll have to ask my wife if I’m homicidal
—”may have had a concussion at one time.”
If only that were so.
If you know any jocks ask them about the guys that “shake it off” and get back out there for the team.
It doesn’t go away, they add up, like hits on a nail.
More than a few kids are screwed up just in high school.
Helmets help but do not prevent concussions.
And to broaden your knowledge on this subject, check out contrecoup concussions.
I recall the neurosurgeon explaining it to me...
It does not take all that much of a hit.
I’m reading a book about WWI - what a useless tragedy that was. It seems as though it could have been prevented. (And now those Germans are forcing globalism on the rest of the world. They never give up, do they?)
A lot of sports-related head injuries are certainly preventable. This is why I snark about school athletics. Education and pitting young people - whose bones are not yet fully developed - against each other in contests where they literally crack their skulls together on purpose don’t go together, or shouldn’t. If your kid’s only hope in getting to college is that he’s willing get out there and bash his skull against another kid’s skull until they both have brain damage, then college is not going to do him any good and the students who are there just to learn are being shortchanged, at the very least.
Let’s face it: The NFL is junk. It’s going to be picked apart by angry families (who didn’t have a problem with putting their kid into school athletics and encouraging him to be as aggressive as possible) saying that they didn’t realize their family member was being harmed in his job that pays him a million dollars a season and they haven’t been enriched enough by this activity so they’re going to gouge.
‘Everything is so polarized today that it automatically becomes a “race issue” or “your cause here” when it could be something far more complex.’
You certainly got that right.
However, I really doubt if the speed freaks currently victimizing my neighborhood are all military vets suffering from CTE. Maybe one or two of them - but most are simply criminals, deserving of only a scant amount of sympathy. It was them I was mostly thinking about. If the constant babbling, shrieking, stalking, and threats are in fact a cry for help, I must frankly admit that whatever sympathy I have for that individual will be expressed in a very basic way.
I don’t have any kids so I’m not sure what I would do with a kid who was really gung-ho about sports, esp football. You don’t want your kid to be a weakling, no matter how smart he is, right? Athletics are important in the learning process.
That’s why sports in my opinion shouldn’t be a part of school, except for “phys ed,” i.e., running, jumping, low-contact stuff. If parents have to take the responsibility of forming and participating in leagues with their kids it’s on them if the kids start getting hurt.
But I don’t really know. If I had a kid and he was good at sports and wanted to play football, I would feel like a crud for stopping him. (Or trying to get him to play soccer instead.)
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