It's a funny thing about what is and is not common medical knowledge, and my late mother is a bit of a touchstone for me in that regard. She was born in 1924, and I guess you could call her an educated housewife, in that she went to college until her scholarship ran out.
But while raising 4 kids on dad's blue collar paycheck, she kept reading and reading, and now that I look back I realize how much science sunk into me -- not from school but from her. DDT? Asbestos? She knew about those things in the early 1950s and told me when I was quite a young thing. "Oh, I stopped making candied orange-peel because they're sprayed with DDT and it can't be washed off." "Don't handle the rest-pad for the steam iron, dear. It's made of asbestos, which gets into your body and never comes out."
Her older brothers played high school football in the late 1920s/early 1930s, wearing leather helmets. They grew up to be successful men. But something about a known percentage of football players becoming permanently addled (i.e. brain damaged in some way) meant that she absolutely refused to sign off on my youngest brother joining his high school football team, no matter what kind of helmet he wore.
My point is: We knew this. It's now made some spectacular news because pro-football stars commit suicide or otherwise self-destruct. But the information has been around for a very, very long time. And people just effing don't pay attention until the lawsuits pile up. Not the broken bodies, the lawsuits. So I hope this kid wins.
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