Girls' Most Dangerous Sport: Cheerleading

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR9NeHrn8x8

Accounting for 2/3rds of catastrophic injuries for women and girls in high school and college cheering cheerleading is getting more and more attention from safety experts and the legal community. Combining gymnastics and acrobatic moves cheerleaders do risk catastrophic injury when they engage in off the ground and also on the ground

In this vide Dr. Jake Deutsch of Hackensack University Medical Center discusses his opinions as an emergency room medical service provider. FOX News covers the fact that NCAA Insurance statistic that 25% of claims involve cheerleading injuries.

Cheerleading can cause traumatic brain damage, blunt force injuries to the trauma, quadriplegia, paraplegia, fractured or broken bones, ruptured discs, torn knee cartilage and death.

This sport is not regulated and the coaching is not one of set standards. We aren’t here to pick on the sport or to suggest you don’t cheer. We are here to point out how you should be evaluating whether your child is being exposed to unreasonable risk of injury. Remember the Noveske case out of Wisconsin where the Wisconsin Supreme Court required the injured cheerleader and her parents to shoulder the costs of injury and permanent disability. The Wisconsin legislature is free to pass such laws and you the public can demand that negligence laws be changed to make the injured pay for their own damages. But as a parent whose children play high school and college sports you can demand your child not be allowed to engage in activities that expose them to unreasonable risk of catastrophic injury or even death. As a parent you need to insure against those risks the public schools and universities have protection against. These institutions expose your child to unreasonable risk of catastrophic injury and death and then get to walk away from responsibility, while your family and child live in a life of poverty. That’s the nature of layperson legislators with no education or formal training in the law, passing laws that affect you. They seem like a smart political decision and yet the affects on any one individual are life destroying. Taxpayers think they are saving a few bucks on high school liability insurance programs but in the end they get to pick up the tab through governmental medical and subsidy programs along with increased crime and those costs of running the criminal court program. Who wins and who loses? You be the judge.