Newswise — For many, the recently released movie Concussion is providing an opportunity for a wide-ranging public discussion of the issue of concussions in football, and many other related issues.
Those issues include the ways in which the National Football League (NFL) has chosen to address the health problems of retired players; concussion protocols and return-to-play rules for current players; the appropriate age at which a young person may reasonably be permitted to begin to play football; and the overall future of the sport – sometimes with an emphasis on improvements in equipment; sometimes with emphasis on changes to the rulebook; sometimes with emphasis on how much information players and their parents need to make an informed choice about participation in football at whatever age.
It’s possible to think of such issues simply as publicity problems for the game of football. Or as a legal matter brought on by the $750M-plus class action suit filed by a group of former NFL players in 2012.
For WFU Center for Bioethics, Health, and Society scholars Nancy M. P. King and Richard Robeson, the abovementioned issues have always been bioethics issues. Historically, the field of bioethics has given a great deal of attention to performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sports, and little or no attention to some other aspects of sports culture that are of obvious of concern to bioethics elsewhere: informed consent, autonomy, research ethics, and the “company doc” syndrome, among others.
They have published widely on the bioethics of sports – and football in particular – the most recent being “Loss of Possession: Concussions, Informed Consent and Autonomy,” in the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics (Fall 2014). A forthcoming volume to publish Feb. 2016 will contain a King-Robeson chapter on research ethics in sports.
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