In the US, head injury is the leading cause of traumatic pediatric death, resulting in roughly 7,400 fatalities, 60,000 hospitalizations, and more than 600,000 ER visits annually, so it follows that all this talk about concussion is a big deal, right? As an emergency physician and the parent of athletic kids who have been very active in soccer and gymnastics, I can’t begin to recall the number of times I have listened to a parent tell of rushing his/her child to the ER for a CT scan after some well-meaning health professional deemed the injury a “concussion.” The term conjures up a host of scary images. After all, everybody knows that Muhammad Ali’s Parkinson’s didn’t come from a bad-luck roll of the genetic dice; it came from getting his brain bashed in. Continue reading →