Two doctors have started the London Hockey Concussion Summit 2009 and are trying to change the course of hockey.
On the day Buffalo's Drew Stafford took out Chicago's Duncan Keith with a cheap-shot elbow to Keith's head and in the wake of Montreal's Andrei Kostitsyn needless hit from behind on Boston's Aaron Ward and Tim Thomas' subsequent hit on Kostitsyn, Dr. Charles Tator and Dr. Paul Echlin drew their collective breaths. They hoped against hope that their upcoming London Hockey Concussion Summit 2009 will help change the course of hockey.
They also hope they can save lives.
That's no idle thought what with the recent death of Don Sanderson. The Whitby Dunlops player's recent demise was the direct result of a major head trauma.
But Drs. Tator and Echlin don't just want to save someone from the ultimate injury, they also care about the quality of life hockey players live both while playing the game and for the time when the game will have passed them by.
To that end they are hosting a seminar at the London, Ontario Hilton. It's just $20 to get in ($30 at the door). The money won't begin to cover the costs associated with the venture but the sponsors and the doctors are picking up the bulk of the costs simply because they think it's that important. Part of the day will be devoted to a parade of high profile ex-NHLers suffering from the long-term debilitating effects of too many blows to the head.
Eric Lindros is scheduled to tell his story. Alyn McCauley and Mark Moore will chime in to the best of their ability. Jeff Beukeboom has indicated he will attend. Pat LaFontaine will participate via a video testimonial.
They will speak to how their lives have been dramatically altered --both professionally and personally-- by head injuries they suffered playing hockey. They will be joined by world-renowned medical and sports experts who hope to inform an audience about the perils of concussion and educate them to the latest advances in the identification, management and prevention of perhaps the most troublesome injury in sport.
It should prove to be a sobering experience.
"In truth we don't know very much about concussions," said Dr. Tator, a renowned neurosurgeon, currently the Chairman of the Division of Neurosurgery at the University of Toronto.
"We really don't know anywhere near enough about how they can be identified or even how they should be treated. We know a little bit about how they are caused but even that isn't always clearly identifiable given the technology and equipment we have now."
In that regard they aren't even sure the reporting is anywhere near accurate. Though there are some 500,000 registered hockey players in Canada and more than 50,000 of them are thought to have sustained some kind of head injury while playing, that second number is a virtual guess.
"We think the numbers could be far higher," Dr. Echlin, a longtime team doctor at all levels of junior hockey and the author of numerous publications regarding sport concussions and sports-related injuries, said. "We think it could be as high as 50 percent."
Both men suspect that despite the recent interest because of the many high-profile concussion-related injuries at the NHL level, there are still a great many medical professionals who really aren't trained in the proper techniques for identifying and monitoring the injury and that the number grows when you know that a lot of times the first responder is a trainer or administrator who might not be up on the current science.
That's no criticism of the support staffs of so many teams, especially in light of the fact that the science of concussion is still more an art than a science, but Drs. Echlin and Tator don't like what they see.
Regarding the much-touted baseline testing in place in the NHL, Dr. Tator said the system is mostly "ineffective because data alone doesn't indicate when a player is fully recovered and that both the symptoms and the consequence of those symptoms can be different for each individual."
The doctor also noted that the NHL doesn't generally share its information both in regard to the science of its testing or the results.
"Essentially the information is unavailable so there's no telling as to whether or not it's accurate or flawed," he said.
And while the summit is more about consequences from fighting, blows to the head and hits from behind, and the damage they can do to a player's brain, both doctors are adamant that the game, at every level, has to change.
They have simply seen to much to think otherwise.
"Hits to the head have to be off limits," declared both men. Be it from fighting or hits, there has to be a realization that it's just unacceptable.
"We don't know everything about concussions, but we know that they are real, prevalent and that the damage can be devastating."
In the wake of the death of Sanderson, Dave Branch and the Ontario Hockey League have gotten the message an instituted an immediate ban on removal of the helmet before or during a hockey fight.
It's a first step, but if you are a parent, a player, a trainer, an administrator or perhaps even the Commissioner of the National Hockey League or the Executive Director of the NHL Players Association you can learn to do so much more Saturday in London.
A life may depend upon it. If you're a player, at any level, it could be your own.