What happens to your brain
Interns assigned to this project: Elena Morales-Grahl and Caroline Saksena
Mentor & primary contact: Julian
We’ll be adding more resources as you work on the project, so make sure to check this page every day before you get started.
Introduction
We are super excited that you will be updating this page! This page gets a high percentage of page views, so we’ve wanted to fix this for a long time. Thank you for taking this on!
It is not as easy a process as it seems. Keep in mind that our website is aimed at a somewhat different audience than our newsletter. The website is specifically for people who have had a concussion and their advocates. This is opposed to the newsletter, for which about 30-40% of our audience are healthcare providers.
We want this webpage to be readable for an individual with a concussion and their advocate, but also be credible and have links to evidence. The idea is that if a patient told their doctor about this page, the doctor would think it was reliable.
Your audience will be people who have had a recent (acute) concussion, as well as those struggling with persistent post-concussion symptoms. It would be good if the page could speak to both. See the video section for more discussion about this.
We will try to find an expert to read your draft. Usually, we would ask Dr. Giza. However, he is unavailable, but we have some other experts we can ask.
Page Design
The other set of decisions you will be making is related to the structure of the page: how to present the material, what diagrams or multimedia presentations you want to include, and other readability, accessibility, and clarity considerations. We plan to give you access to our ConcussionAlliance.org website so that you can build the page yourself, with feedback from the CA team. You may want to read up on these Squarespace tutorials.
We’ve handled page design in different ways — you can choose how you would like to handle it. Our treatment pages, for example, tend to be straightforward, which allows for including a lot of information. See Physical Therapy or Medication, as examples.
As an alternative, December 2019 interns created our Women & Girls, Pediatrics, and Concussion in Sports pages and used different layouts. I think the pages need to be more developed in terms of content, but you can see some design innovations.
One way to handle a lot of information is to have jump links (or anchor links) at the top of the page. It’s like a tiny menu, with the title of each section having a link that jumps down the page to that section. I wish we had jump link on all our pages, but we haven’t got to it yet. See this squarespace tutorial.
Your work space
Google Drive folder for your working documents.
Trello. We will be working with you to set up your Trello workspace.
Intro to the page
Possibly start with 1-2 sentence of what a concussion is. Maybe use this Cattonline page which starts with a one-sentence explanation of what a concussion is. You can paraphrase, or quote Cattonline with a link.
Finding a replacement video, if we can
A video would be good, but we don’t like the one we currently have on the page. Our vision is that this page speaks to people (and their advocates) who have recently had a concussion, or are experiencing persistent concussion symptoms.
We are concerned that the video we have on the page discusses neurodegeneration due to repetitive hits, and CTE. We don’t want to needlessly add to peoples’ anxiety when they come to this page. The issue of whether to include (on this page) longer-term damage due to repetitive hits, or CTE, is worth a discussion, and we would like to know your opinion.
Dr. Giza’s explanation of the neurometabolic cascade would be helpful, but his description in the 2019 University of Michigan Concussion Summit video is probably too complex. Dr. Giza created a 3-minute slideshow of the neurometabolic cascade for a Concussion MOOC that Malayka attended. It is possible that Dr. Giza would allow us to use it. Unfortunately, Dr.Giza has some complications in his personal life right now we don’t want to bother him. (Dr. Giza is THE person who developed the theory of the neurometabolic cascade.)
Cameron Marshal, DC, as some good whiteboard explanations online. I have communicated with Dr. Marshal in the past, and he likely give us permission to use his videos. I’d want your team to double check his explanation of what happens with a concussion. Another problem - he is a chiropractor who runs a company training clinics to be “concussion clinics,” something which is contrary to some kind of regulation in Canada - I’d have to look it up. So it is kind of “sus” that we would be hosting his videos. But I think what he is doing with his videos are quite useful.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B6vko1Vnh46/ swipe to watch each section of the video. But you can see how he is presenting this information in a way that makes sense to someone who has a concussion and is trying to understand how to help themselves.
This TedX talk starting at minute 7:30 has some cool graphics. It’s from 2016, so it’s kind of old. Previous to the cool graphics in the video, the speaker debunks the brain bruising model and throws shade on the CDC animated graphic that is on their HEADS UP website. Speaking of throwing shade, the speaker, David Camarillo of Stanford, was dissed recently in a The New York Times opinion piece.
“This Helmet Will Save Football. Actually, Probably Not.
At Stanford, David Camarillo chases the dream of a helmet that can prevent brain disease related to playing football. It’s filled with water. Really. Brain experts say he’s wasting his time.”
In summary, we have not been able to find a video we are satisfied with.
Resources:
Cattonline General Information about Concussions.
CDC HEADS UP What is a concussion? NOTE: I’m not sure if I like the animation of what happens inside the brain, as it makes it looks like the outdated concept of the brain “bruising” on the exterior of the brain.
We will be adding more.