You Don’t Need to Be Wearing a Brain-Pad™ in Order to Know the FTC Should Investigate the ‘ImPACT™ Concussion Management System’

The “concussion awareness” crowd went all gaga over the news that the Federal Trade Commission entered into a consent decree with Brain-Pad, Inc., in which the company agrees to stop claiming that its mouth guards are known to help prevent concussions.

Your tax dollars at work.

While they’re at it, let’s hope – audacious though that hope may be – that the FTC proceeds to take a helmet-to-helmet hit at the quacky ImPACT concussion management system developed by brain surgeons at the hypercapitalist University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

As this blog alone has reported, ImPACT Applications, Inc., marketers tell high schools and doctors to go ahead and buy and use their product even without administering baseline tests to the athletes who are tested. See “EXCLUSIVE: ImPACT and UPMC Tell Docs and Schools Baseline Testing Is ‘Not Necessary,’” November 1, 2011, https://concussioninc.net/?p=4911.

Senator Tom Udall and the Senate Commerce Committee have been prodding the FTC to investigate only the easiest, most obvious, and most grandstanding examples of companies which exploit traumatic brain injury fear-mongering for profits. At a hearing last October, Udall gingerly refrained from naming the prominent doctor who has endorsed another ducky-wucky product, a supplement called Sports Brain Guard. The doc? Joseph Maroon of UPMC, ImPACT, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the National Football League concussion policy committee, and – last but not least – World Wrestling Entertainment. See:

At Commerce Committee Hearing, Senator Udall Whiffs on Dr. Maroon’s Quackery and Distorts the Record on Dave Duerson

Irv Muchnick