HJAR Jul/Aug 2026

CTE know today — well, I hope you are well insured, because former players may experience the impact of this game long after they hang up their cleats. And to the physicians, athletic trainers, nurses, and healthcare practitioners caring for these young athletes: At what point does clearing a child to return to the very game causing the brain injury stop being sports medicine and start becoming participation in the harm? A concussion is not a bruise. A young athlete who has already sustained one concussion is at increased risk for another, and yet we continue to send children back into a collision sport built around repetitive head impacts. Is that doing no harm? Or have we mistaken managing the damage for protecting the child? Former football players who are feeling the effects of chronic brain damage should no longer be ashamed. You are living with a brain injury. You need support and help. This happened to you because people you trusted thought they had your best interests at heart, and perhaps some did not understand the impact at the time. But anyone who sanctions school sports and ended boxing in schools should have made the association long ago and stopped the damage. Ask a qualified lawyer what recourse you may have, especially against the NCAA and against any school or university that has continued football in the last 20 years despite what is now known about repetitive head impacts and long-term brain injury. And young people should know this: Anyone today who asks or applauds you getting your head hit to the ground or against another player does not give a shit about your brain’s health or your long-term well-being. If you are a great athlete, play soccer without the headers — it pays better, and you can live anywhere in the world. Or play tennis, or golf, or baseball, or basketball — anything but a game where collision is part of every play. The following JAMA article is part of our CTE series. Another important paper will be published this fall. It, I am told, will be a game-changer. P.S. As many of you know from reading this journal, I am the widow of a former college football player who was asked by his neuro-oncologist to donate his brain for research as he was dying at 54 of glioblastoma because it was “unusual,” and some of his symptoms started before they could be explained by brain cancer. With his CTE postmortem pathology, I wish to God that his high school coach would have given him a tennis racket. No one should live their entire life with long-term chronic brain inflammation and injury because of repetitive hits to the head from a game played as a boy and young man. 20 JUL / AUG 2026 I  U.S. HEALTHCARE JOURNALS Chief Editor Dianne Hartley holds the donated brain of a former football player at the VA Boston Healthcare System before post- mortem CTE analysis through Boston University. A year earlier, Hartley’s husband, Smith “Wally” Hartley, a former college football player who died from glioblastoma at age 54, was also confirmed to have CTE after his brain was donated to the University of Washington.