Stamford CT Personal Injury Law Blog

The extent of injury involved with a head hit in sports is sometimes not obvious, especially for players wearing helmets. In fact, it often seems the case that team coaches, doctors and trainers are not aware that something might be amiss or that the player who was concussed or sustained another type of brain trauma even needs medical attention. Injured players themselves often remark following an injury that they were unaware of its extent or that they needed to stop participating immediately.

That is less often the case with sports injuries involving baseball pitchers, who do not wear helmets. It is often startlingly clear, in fact, when a pitcher has sustained a head injury while playing, given his close proximity to home plate and the near-lethal power of some professional hitters.

Some safety groups are OK with the longstanding drunk driving threshold of 0.08 for blood alcohol content (BAC) that applies in Connecticut and all other states.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is not one of them.

In 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president, about 21,000 persons reportedly died in car accidents involving a drunk driver. That number began to steadily slip following a change from a threshold BAC of 0.10 for drunk driving to a national standard of 0.08 signed into law by President Clinton in 2000. The number of fatal DUI-related accidents in recent years has, as a result of the change, dropped to about 10,000 annually.

From being essentially a subject that was out of public view and talked about only in doctors' offices a few short years ago to now being widely reported on in national media stories, head injuries are currently a topic of high prominence across the United States.

There are a number of reasons for that which apply equally in Connecticut and other states.

One is focused centrally on sports injuries, especially in contact sports such as football and hockey that involve hard hits to the head and where personal injury risk is heightened for concussions and other traumatic brain injuries.

Another reason is armed conflict, with scores of thousands of injured combat veterans returning to the United States following service in the Middle East. The head and brain injuries that many of them have suffered are so commonplace that they are referred to as the "signature wound" of the military's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That many Connecticut teens and their peers across the country chafe under restrictions is hardly surprising. Youthfulness equates to energy, passion and, often, impulsiveness, a combination that sometimes rebels against limits.

One such area of potential clash is -- and always has been -- parental counseling (sometimes read as hectoring by juveniles) relating to driving. Parents instinctively worry about the young drivers in their families; after all, they were once teens themselves and well remember the experience.

The proactive involvement of many parents when it comes to teen driving is motivated by an obvious concern regarding the inordinately high car accident rate among the teen driving population.