Pittsburgh’s ‘Concussion Town Huddle’ Postponed – But Not Concussion Inc.’s!

A program entitled “Town Huddle: Concussions in Sports” was scheduled to be held next Tuesday at the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum in Pittsburgh. The event (co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, ImPACT Applications,Inc., the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic League, and television station KDKA) has been postponed until further notice – “due to some scheduling conflicts,” a museum spokesman told me.

See http://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/events.aspx?EventID=160. I’m especially amused, or something, by the note, “High school athletes are encouraged to wear their jerseys or team colors.”

Panelists were to have been Andy Russell, a linebacker on the Pittsburgh Steelers 1970s Super Bowl teams, plus the Big Three of ImPACT: Dr. Joseph Maroon and his UPMC / National Football League / World Wrestling Entertainment business partners Mark Lovell and Micky Collins.

The cancellation has crushed your humble blogger: I was all ready with a skullful of questions for this free and open public forum.

Instead, I’ll post all my questions, one by one, in a series beginning next week. Here’s the first sample:

Dr. Maroon, in 2009, WWE, for which you are medical director, told ESPN, “WWE has been asking to see the research and test results in the case of [Chris] Benoit for years and has not been supplied with them.” (https://concussioninc.net/?p=1263) But Dr. Bennet Omalu told me that what WWE denied had actually happened at a meeting a year earlier at the West Virginia Brain Injury Institute, which you attended. And Peter Davies of Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine later told me that you had “brokered” that meeting. (https://concussioninc.net/?p=2904) Why did you allow WWE to publicly lie about this, and what does it say about your independence and credibility on all matters related to the public health issue of traumatic brain injuries?

Irv Muchnick