Doctors urge schools to ban tackling in rugby

Poorfour wrote:The driving force behind this is Prof Allyson Pollock, a public health academic whose son was injured playing rugby and who tried to work with the SRU to analyse injury statistics for young players - and appears to have been stonewalled around it.

She's highlighted an important issue that rugby genuinely does need to address: we do not have sound, publicly available data on injury rates among children.

She's gone on to analyse what data is available and published a book about it Tackling Rugby: What every parent should know. It's a thorough analysis of the limited fact base that exists in the public domain, and the use of statistics is sound, but I have serious methodological concerns about it.

It was originally going to be called Should we ban rugby? which gives you an idea of how neutral Prof Pollock is on the subject. I have some sympathy for her - her son was injured and the SRU seems to have been less than helpful in her initial attempt to understand if this was an isolated case or a regular occurrence.

However, her approach isn't the neutral evaluation of the facts that an academic should produce; it verges on being an anti-rugby polemic. Three examples (of many):

1) She says that the chance of a child receiving a "serious injury" over the course of a season is around 20%. The statistical analysis is impeccable. The definition of "serious injury" is not, as it includes anything that causes a child to miss training for (from memory) more than a week. From my own personal and family experience, that would class ALL of the following as "serious injuries" to rank alongside ruptured ACLs, dislocations, broken bones and spinal injuries. All of these have caused me or my children to miss more than a week of rugby:
- Badly bruised fingers
- Sprained knuckle
- Black eye (which we decided to treat as concussion)
- An infected cut
- A torn thumb adductor
- A medial meniscus tear.
None of these needed more than ice and rest to clear up, but they all took more than a week so they are all "serious".

2) She cites a number of scrum injury statistics, but barely acknowledges the two rounds of changes that the IRB have made to scrum engagement and does not caveat her analysis with a note that scrums are now very different and injury rates have reduced. She also doesn't acknowledge any of the changes made over the last few years under the New Rules of Play for children.

3) Her only proposed remedy is to ban rugby for schoolchildren. There's no consideration of whether other changes might work and should be trialled. Given the paucity of actual injury data, it's hard to see how banning the sport is a proportionate response, because we can't see what the actual injury rates are.

The open letter itself is 4 pages long, one of which is addressees and 2 of which are signatories. The signatories include 2 GPs and one NHS Trust representative; the rest appear to be medical academics from institutions ranging from the Royal Collage of Medicine to community colleges. Many of them are from the University of Winchester, which is where Eric Anderson, her co-signatory, is a Professor.

Rugby needs to take this seriously. I don't think we can dismiss it and risk being on the receiving end of pressure from ill-informed but worried public opinion without the facts to fight back. The only effective long-term response is likely to be to compile comprehensive injury statistics and make them public, in which the respective unions need to take a lead.