Week 1, Day 2

Welcome to the first week of your internship with Concussion Alliance! We are excited to work with you and to get to know you better. Thank you for joining us.

We look forward to helping you get up to speed on the world of concussions in medicine and research while getting to know your fellow interns. You’ll have multimedia curricula every day, and we’ll spend time on remote teamwork and learning more about each other through social activities and group discussions. 

Our first expert guest speaker is Dr. Stephen Casper Today at 10:00 am PT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET; Dr. Casper is the leading medical historian on the topic of traumatic brain injury and related neurodegenerative disease–and a CA community member. You can check out his short profile on our website here.

Our second expert guest speaker this week is Dan Fogarty on Wednesday at 1:00 pm PT | 3:00 pm CT | 4:00 pm ET; Dan is a concussion patient and advocate–and a CA community member. He’s also the author of Kill the Prince, a novel about an MMA fighter struggling with persistent symptoms from multiple concussions and hiding them from his coach and girlfriend.

We’ll have our first Discussion, Revisiting our Concussion Understanding mini-discussion from the Welcome Meeting, on Wednesday at 10:00 am PT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET. 

Toward the end of the week, you’ll get a chance to practice your science writing before writing your real newsletter synopsis next week. You’ll write a practice synopsis and learn about our best practices in our Newsletter Workshop on Friday at 1:00 pm PT | 3:00 pm CT | 4:00 pm ET, run by our Science & Technical Writing Mentor, Kira Kunzman.

We’ll also have group social activities this week! We’ll start with Two Truths and a Lie on Thursday at 1:00 pm PT | 3:00 pm CT | 4:00 pm ET and have our first weekly Social Hour on Friday at 10:00 am PT | 12:00 pm CT | 1:00 pm ET.

Start-of-day Procedure

I’ll outline the procedure that we’d like for you to use for starting your days with us this summer. I’ll talk more about this at the welcome meeting and include this text for each “day” page this week.

  1. Check Slack for new messages

  2. Check the schedule in #weekly-schedules on Slack, on the week page in this portal, or on the shared Google Calender (more on that below)

  3. Check the ‘day page’ (like this one) for tasks & content

  4. Check your project resource Google doc in your project folder for new resources (this will come into play starting later next week).

  5. Check in with your PM on Slack

  6. Check in with your project partner(s) on Slack (again, this will be relevant once you start your projects).

There are three Tasks to do today:

Reach out to someone!

  • Reach out to a fellow intern on Slack and set up a time to talk synchronously (zoom, phone, google meet, etc.). Try to pick someone from a different school–this is a great opportunity to make connections with folks from around the country with shared interests!

Concussion Alliance emails

  • [Time sensitive] Create your Concussion Alliance Google account! 

    1. You should receive an email notifying you of a new Google Workspace account from CascadiaNow! – this is your Concussion Alliance email. This account is solely for your CA email; you won't be using the Google Workspace account for your work. The link expires in 24 hours, so please sign in to the email as soon as you get it. If you don't see it, check your spam folders.

    2. Email Conor from your Concussion Alliance email as soon as you get signed in.

    3. Slack Conor if your sign-in has expired, they can send you a password reset email.

  • Once you have a Concussion Alliance email, we’ll be able to give you a Grammarly Premium account!

  • Conor can also add you to the shared Google Calendar once you send them a confirmation email that you’ve signed in.

[Before Thursday] Newsletter Workshop sign-up

Curriculum for Today

We’ve provided a group of educational resources below. We’ve listed them in an order that we hope will build on your understanding of concussions as you go through them.

Speaker readings

  • Read this New Yorker article on Dr. Casper’s work and our related newsletter synopsis.

  • From Stephen Casper

    • Hello interns,

      We will be talking about traumatic brain injury (TBI), chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and stigma. Before CTE was called CTE, normal people and some doctors called it "punch drunk" or "slugnutty". Attached to this email are several primary sources from the history of TBI as well as an article I have written on the subject. At the completion of our activities you should be able to:

      1) Define stigma

      2) Describe objective historical evidence about the dangers or traumatic brain injuries

      3) Analyze language that downplays patient experiences of traumatic brain injury or neurodegenerative disease

      4) Evaluate ways that stigma promotes injury, risk-taking, and subsequent disease

      I want you to first watch the YouTube link from about 1954: (67) Cauliflower McPugg's Last Fight - YouTube. In this video, you will see a famous Cold War Era television comedian named Red Skelton. Red Skelton played a punch drunk boxer as part of a normal comedy routine. 

      After you have watched this two-minute video, I want you to next read: Evaluation of Boxing as a College Sport. This is a secret report that was created at the University of Illinois in the 1940s. The report examines the question of whether or not boxing should be a sport at the University of Illinois. I want you to look at the survey data that the authors gather together. Notice that the university concludes that boxing can lead to neurodegenerative disease.

      After you have read the secret report, read the 1955 article in the Saturday Evening Post. In this article, a former boxer talks about his TBI and punch drunk experience. I want you to focus on what he has to say about Red Skelton's comedy routine. What else does he say about his life as a punch drunk?

      Take a look after that at the data in 1955 from the American Football Coaches Association. How many injuries and fatalities in American football do these authorities find across several years? And what recommendations do they make to keep football players safe? 

      Now that you have read these primary sources, I want you to turn to the article I wrote on the topic of malingering and brain injury. Malingering is the idea that people exaggerate their symptoms in order to receive compensation or for sympathy. 

      In this study, I show that malingering influences in two directions. On one hand, fear of malingering prevents people in need of help from receiving the help they need. But, there is an additional problem. The fact that we worry that malingering may happen in cases of traumatic brain injury, individuals with exposure to brain injuries are also sometimes forced into downplaying the harms they have experienced so that they appear to be exaggerating their injuries. Thus what I show in this paper is that stigma works to at once downplay symptoms and simultaneously harm individuals. 

      Enjoy!

Unit 1: What is a concussion? (~1h 10 min)

  • Concussion Awareness Training Tool (CATT) 

  • Overview: What is a concussion, Concussion Pathway (online information) (~20 min)

  • Athlete module (E-learning training modules) – complete this module (~45 min)

    • Also, Read the Medical Professional Overview. How does this resource differ from the general overview in language? What about areas of focus? (~5 min)

      • This document may be a bit older and doesn’t mention that some people develop persistent symptoms. Otherwise, decent overview

Unit 2: Lived experience, stigma, support (~55 min)

  • Spend some time (~30 minutes) perusing the CrashCourse Concussion Story Wall to hear personal stories from people whose lives have been touched by concussions. 

    • Click “Story Wall” to get a searchable database where you can find stories categorized by Cause of Injury, Symptoms, and more. 

  • Read The Invisible Injury (~10 min)

  • Read “Volleyball star Hayley Hodson had it all, until blows to her head changed everything,” about a Stanford volleyball player with a career-ending concussion and how she is using her experience. Note: this is not necessarily a typical example of the impact of persistent symptoms and, in some ways, is a worst-case-scenario situation, especially concerning recognition and reporting in sport. We include it to help illustrate the range of impact on people’s lives and the kinds of obstacles to diagnosis and care that some face. (~15 min)

Unit 3: Shaken Brain (~45 min)

Read Chapter 1 of “Shaken Brain” (~45 min)