Unprotected rugby players play a full-contact sport with tackling similar to that in football. Yet they don't experience frequent injuries. And the reason is important, not just for football players, but everyone else concerned about safety.
Rugby, from which football evolved, is really big in much of the English-speaking world, although many Americans learned about it from Clint Eastwood's 2009movie "Invictus," which re-enacted events surrounding South Africa's triumph in front of their home fans in the 1995 Rugby World Cup.
The most noticeable difference between the rugby portrayed in the movie and football is that the rugby players wore nothing more than required to distinguish between the teams. Yet they're not injured more than heavily padded, highly protected footballers.
How could this be?
It is an illustration of a universal effect that too often goes unrecognized by safety advocates: People change their behavior in response to what they fear might happen to them.
Using a bare head as an attacking weapon is less attractive than using one encased in a helmet meeting all the latest standards.
As football players become faster and heavier, they become more and more lethal weapons. The damage they inflict on players they hit increases. Helmets can do little to reduce this. That is, unless the helmets become so large as to materially affect the game.
The same principles apply elsewhere.
Over the past several decades, for example, carmakers have, at the
prodding of the federal government, stuffed cars full of
crash-protection technology. The problem is that, if it becomes
safer to crash, the risk of crashing increases, and that can
easily overwhelm the benefits of the crash-protection technology.
Frontal airbags, to take one obvious example, reduce the risk that
a car's driver will be killed in a crash by 8 percent. Although
difficult to measure, we can be near certain that the perception
that airbags provide far more protection than they really do
affects the risk that a driver will crash.
What's more, there is a body of opinion that, while airbags do reduce the risk that drivers are killed in crashes, they increase the risk to pedestrians and other drivers on the road.
Overselling the benefits of better football helmets is fraught with the same perils as overselling the benefits of airbags. By 2003, more than 40,000 Americans had died in seats protected by airbags.
We should take care that in the future we are not counting how
many football players suffered permanent injury while wearing
helmets of improved design.
The only way to seriously address injuries on the road and on the
football field is to prevent the most devastating
collisions. This can be achieved by enacting and enforcing
sensible rules. It is a delusion to believe that new equipment can
make it safe to crash. A little safer yes. But safe, no.
If audiences want the blood and thunder of unconstrained gladiator
fights, and adult athletes knowingly take the risks to satisfy
them in exchange for huge rewards, it seems to me that a free
society should not prohibit that. Perhaps deplore, but not
prohibit.
However, it is a cruel hoax to bury the risks under the falsehood
that a better helmet can prevent them.
Leonard Evans is an internationally recognized traffic safety
expert and author of "Traffic
Safety."
Other op-eds by Leonard Evans on AOL News
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