DaveO wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2024 6:50 pm
Mike wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2024 2:38 pm
Did they know about the risk of dementia and very serious mental heath issues before they started playing? The current generation certainly should do, but most of this has come out in the last 10 years or so. IMO mental health issues are very different to bad knees or broken bones. They are up there with cancer etc. If you worked in the nuclear power industry and found out that you and your colleagues had a much higher rate of cancer than the general population - would you be saying "oh well, we knew the risks when we took the job..."? Or would you be looking for support and to make sure that doesn't happen again?
May late Dad worked for Turner Brothers and a lot of people who worked there died of asbestosis. They didn’t know the risks either but the cause of the horrible disease they were afflicted with was proven. It was as a direct result of their employment and it could be argued their employer didn’t exercise a duty of care to them resulting in them becoming ill. So a similar example to yours about the nuclear industry..
However there are problems applying this analogy to RL and RU. First of all there was no denying the link between their employment and contracting the disease. That is not so clear cut in the case of the issues former players are suffering. Diseases like Parkinson’s and dementia can be caused by many factors including lifestyle and genetics. The MND Association do not claim head injuries are a cause, they still don’t know what causes it despite different studies into different potential causes so will not say head injuries are a cause.
So how 160 players can claim their issues are all caused due to playing RL I have no idea. There is no direct link like there was with working with asbestos and asbestosis. How do they know they wouldn’t be suffering from dementia if they had never played the game? They don’t.
Note I am not saying repeated bangs to the head won’t make such issues more likely just that they could contract these diseases regardless.
Secondly I think the RFL would be in much more trouble if they knew the sport caused brain injuries and covered it up or denied.it. The players will have to prove the RFL should have done something to protect them from a known issue. I doubt anyone in the game thought it could lead to such issues so it’s hard to argue precautions should have been taken against an unknown risk.
This is all true. Its a very complex issue, not a black and white, and IMO not a topic to easily to dismiss with a throw away twitter post blaming one side or the other. There are real issues here and we are now working through them.
Regarding the lack of concrete causal proof about whether an individual might have got this or that - that is true there is none, but for me it echos the tobacco companies old defence against the harm smoking does. We're probably never going to have total proof of all the mechnisms at play here because we don't even understand the diseases themselves fully yet, and even if we did, we've never be able to say for sure that Player X got dementia because of this or that tackle. However, you can do statistical studies about prevalence of these diseases in the population of RL players vs a comparible non-RL playing population, and if that provides strong correlations then its understandable that head injuries come into the spotlight.
Maybe head injuries are nothing to do with it, perhaps there's a hidden variable that causes both wanting to play RL and dementia, or something else the players do that causes dementia. All we can do is wait for those studies to be completed over the next few decades and the evidence will either firm up, or disappear.
However for now, I believe its sensible to suppose that repeated head contacts are detrimental and to do something about it. If the RFL don't do that, and the link becomes even clearer, the next 160 players to sue will have a much stronger case, that's for sure.
