CC: Since that fateful meeting with Mike Webster in the autopsy table, you have now embarked on a new quest that you feel passion-ately about – preventing children from suffering brain injuries through high-contact, high-impact sports. BO: The truth is inconvenient. Many times in our lives, the easiest road to travel is not always the right road. To do the right thing is more difficult. I believe that autopsy has saved and continues to save many lives – especially the lives of our chil-dren. That is my mission now. It’s the very basic tenets of modern society that our children are the most vulnerable members of our society and it is the duty of society to protect them from any form of harm, intended or unintended. That is why at some point in our evolution as a society when we discovered that cigarette smoking was harmful, the first thing we did was ban it so that no child should be allowed to smoke. When we dis-covered that alcohol damaged the brain, what did we do? We banned children from consuming alcohol. It has always been my position that no child in America today should be intentionally exposed to the risk of permanent brain damage in contact sports. CC: What kind of impact do you think the movie Concussion have had on public perception? BO: Hollywood is a very powerful agent of change in America. KOSIM GROUP COMPANY INC. The (Concussion) movie made tremendous impact. Without our movie nobody would be talking about CTE today. So the movie elevated the discussion. But the downside of that is because of the Hollywood effect people have now become consumed by CTE. That is now creating some type of obses-sion and fascination that shouldn’t be. CTE is not the com-monest type of brain damage from brain trauma. It’s just one of many. For example, if your child plays football, or any of the high-impact, high-contact sport – American football, ice hockey, mixed martial arts, boxing, wrestling and rugby – your child has about three to four times increased risk to commit suicide. Your child has about three to four times increased risk of suffering a major psychiatric illness like major depression. Your child is more likely to die before the age of 42 from violent means. Your child is about three to four times more likely to abuse drugs; about three to four times more likely to abuse alcohol; about three times more likely to drop out of college. These are all psychiatric illnesses that are outside CTE that we have always known. So why is the debate about CTE? It’s distracting us. CC: Advocating for the prevention of kids going into these types of sports can be an uphill battle. How is change going to happen? BO: These are very difficult issues. They can make one very uncomfortable. But like I have said, the truth is always in-convenient. There have been times in the evolution of the American society where, in the fullness of time, change had to come. We change. We shouldn’t be afraid. We shouldn’t let fear drive our decision making process. We should give up the darkness of the past and embrace the new light of the pres-ent, knowing what we know today. It’s not going to negatively impact our society to change for the better. There are also socio-economic impacts. The country that plays football the most is America; ice hockey in Canada. The fertility rates in developed countries are going down. We are having less children. I came from a family of seven. I have two kids only. Our children have become more pre-cious commodities. CC: What is the role of health care professionals, in your view, in this shift in sports paradigm that you are advocating? BO: As health-care providers we are providers of education, information; then we are healers, too, and comforters. So in our duties in providing information we must tell the patient the truth. When you suffer brain damage of any kind, med-icine and science have not yet developed cures for most brain diseases … because the brain does not have any reasonable capacity to regenerate itself. We all know that. So what it is essentially is to prevent injury. First, do no harm. When harm is done, the next thing to do is control the harm so it doesn’t progress. This is not about the NFL or sports. These are corpora-tions, we should leave them alone. Let them make money. This is about our children. Many parents don’t know this. Many parents believe if they buy a $600 helmet that’s going to protect their child. That’s a lie. 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