There’s an old saying about raising children, “If you can just get your child to age 25, you have a good chance of getting them to 50.” So profound and so true.
Now here’s a rule to get to age 25 and beyond, protecting what I expect will be an awesome future. This rule was taught to me by the famous brain expert, Daniel Amen, M.D. He said, “Don’t bounce anything off your head.” This means soccer balls, windshields, dashboards, fists, karate chops, walls and countless other hard objects.
Understanding the mind-body connection was a tough sell to the medical profession. The belief that our way of thinking could possibly influence our health apparently minimized the doctor’s skill as well as the value of the pills and surgery. Now that the mind-body connection is an accepted way of thinking, we had to progress toward understanding the physical keeper of our thoughts; the brain.
Your brain is the consistency of cottage cheese, floating around as if suspended in air. Its bony protector, the skull, can become a source of brain injury when something hits the outside of the skull.
If you hit your head hard enough to injure your brain, you would expect to instantly know it beyond the discomfort on the outside. The injury can be so subtle it doesn’t show up for years. When discussing head trauma with patients a common response to it is, “Oh that happened years ago.” It’s so easy to see residual effects of head trauma in football players who haven’t played in 20-30 years and understand the brain trauma connection to health.