Until It Hurts: Athletic Injuries in Youth

I play softball, and like many sports, I have to weight lift and condition to be in shape for season. Lifting sessions just started up again, and as my body aches, I wonder about the toll my sport takes on my body. Adolecents, like myself, have always played sports, but the increase in sport-related youth injuries is getting to alarming rates.

I found a two-year old article from Sports Illustrated that explained the sports injuries epidemic among today's youth. According to the article, more than "3.5 million children under age 15 suffered a sports injury that required medical treatment" in 2003 alone. These injuries are much more than a twisted ankle; youth althetes have been treated for serious injuries such as stress fractors, torn ACLs, and pinched nerves/ nerve damage. So what's causing these injuries? The answer is overuse.

Lyle Micheli, the youth sports medicine pioneer, estimates that of the 70 young patients who file into his clinic each Thursday at Children's Hospital Boston, 75% are victims of overuse injuries! Back in the early 1990s the figure was at about 20%.

These figures are astrounding, but are these numbers casued from kids pushing themselves too hard? Not according to Dr. John DiFiori, chief of sports medicine at UCLA's Comprehensive Sports Medicine Center. He claims that adults are the great enablers of overuse injuries, and that serious sports injuries didn't start emerging until parents started pushing their kids to limit.

So why do parents push their kids so hard? Perhaps their kid needs an athletic scholorship to go to college, or perhaps it's just for parent bragging rights, but either way, kids are pushed by their coaches and parents to win big and beat records. Every year sports records are set, and every year someone trys to break them. And everyone knows breaking a record means working harder than the guy who set it. I know Americans have a habit of wanting to be "the best", but I didn't know that being the best was worth the health of a child.

Blogging about blogging. META POST!

I find it hard to analyze my own writing because I always focus on all the little things I could improve upon, rather than what my piece is lacking as whole. In reviewing my works, there were many things I noticed about my writing, and more importantly, the evolution of my writing.

One of the first things I noticed after re-reading my posts was my lack of specific evidence, and how that detracted from the overall quality of my post. For example, in my very first blog post, "The Success Meter", I contemplate the different measures of success and compare an unknown rap artist/slam poet, George Watsky, to big time rap artists like Lil' Wayne or Big Sean. As I compare them, I mention that George Watsky's "songs are carefully crafted, and are real pieces of poetry", but offered no evidence to prove they were "carefully crafted" whatsoever. I easily could have included an excerpt from one of his poems, and analyzed it to prove the depth of his writing, but instead left it up to the reader to take my word for it. 


As my posts progressed, I started to include evidence, but I still lacked the necessary analysis of the evidence. It's just not enough to include it, but to explain it to the reader, and I clearly forgot that in my blog post titled: "Where did Lazy Sundays Go?" In this post, I talk about the  song "Mayberry" by Rascal Flatts, and discuss how American society has become so fast paced, and jam packed. In the post I pull out a line from the song that says: "Sunday was a day of rest, but now it's just one more day for progress". Although this is an improvement from my early blog posts, I still didn't analyze the actual words. I left the reader to assume the lines meaning, and although the line is fairly straight forward, everyone knows to show- not tell. I think this is a prime example of where a student thought she was analyzing a phrase by isolating it, but didn't actually discuss the meaning. 


Thankfully, this post is not all bad news. One aspect of my writing I've noticed is that I supported my argument, and wrote with better clarity when the post concerned a topic I wanted to write about. For example, one my strongest posts, "Above the Belt", was written right after I got home from a slam poetry reading, and I was so inspired by the poet, that I came home and blogged about it. In this post, I discuss a poem by Andrea Gibson entitled "Swing Set", and discuss gender labels in todays society. I took out one of Gibson's lines, and proceeded to analyze the word "self" as mentioned in the poem by saying: "Andrea suggests she is the truest definition of "self" when she claims to be the best example" and that "she doesn't feel she is either [a boy or a girl], and that's why she feels so rawly herSELF" I felt this post was not only strong because I liked writing it, but also because I took words out of her poem, analyzed them, and expanding on my point through my analysis.


After this analyzation of my writing, I feel the best way to improve it in the future is to just write about things that interest me. Although I try to avoid being a "hoop-jumper" type of student (i.e one that does all the work, but just for the sake of the grade), I don't plan on writing any more blog posts just to fill the weekly requirement. Clearly, I put more effort into supporting my claim when I care about the topic so why not pick something that actually sparks my interest? Although I know I will not have the luxury of writing about interesting topics all the time, I have the luxury here. So I shall blog away. 

Casey Anthony: Radioactive

Tonight, I started searching ABC news clips because although I should have been studying for my finals, and I found not only a way to avoid them, but also the latest video on Casey Anthony.

For those of you who are not familiar, Casey Anthony is a 22 year old woman who was accused of murdering her three year old daughter, Caylee in 2008, but despite the evidence proving her guilty, the Florida jury found her not guilty, and the case caused public outrage. 

However, she has been on probation for a few misdemeanors for several months, and has been serving those months in an undisclosed location. Casey has also been making "video diaries" on her computer, and the alleged "personal diaries were recently leaked. 

Although the leaked video of Casey Anthony was interesting in and of itself, what really struck me was the way ABC news framed the story. In the ABC news video, legal analyst Dan Abrams describes Casey Anthony as "radioactive". In saying this, Dan suggests Casey is unstable and dangerous. Although I do agree with what the analysts had to say about Casey, it seems as though every news story choose to frame her as a self absorbed, malicious human being. 

Maybe Casey is a crazy psychopath, but that's not the fact I'm interested in. The real question I have is if the media should be able to construct a news story with a bias. This is similar to how some history teachers feel history should be through cold hard facts whereas others believe analyzing history helps to better understand it. Does the presentation of media cause the same controversy? 

Why NOT Free the Green?

The legalization of recreational marijuana in the United States has yet to happen, but I find this controversy fascinating.

The reason I'm so interested in this topic is not because I want to use copious amounts of marijuana, but because there are so many reasons why legalization makes sense, but yet so many U.S citizens refuse to allow it. After seeing countless videos in middle school health class about 'saying NO to drugs', I was totally against legalizing this drug. "Why would I want a bunch of high teenagers around?"- I'd ask myself. It was not until my sister showed me an article published by TIME magazine in spring of '09 that explained the numerous and obvious benefits to legalizing marijuana.

For example, legalizing marijuana would save the U.S a ton of money. Not only could tax on marijuana like crazy, but according the TIME magazine article, the US spends "$68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes". And of all the drug related arrests, 47.5% of them are marijuana related! We put so much money into our correction facilities when we could save millions (if not billions) of dollars just by legalizing one of the most popular reasons for arrest in the United States. 


Like any drug or medicine, marijuana does have health risks.  As promoted by the Above the Influence organizationn, using marijuana at a young age can result in structural and functional deficits of the brain. Marijuana may not be perfectly safe, but there are countless health risks associated with other legal drugs, many of which are harsher than marijuana. Alcohol for example does damage to the brain, stomach, liver, kidneys, and muscles- especially in teenagers.  (Above the Influence) It is a choice to use either drug, (or any other for that matter) so why not make it legal, and help out our terrible economy in the mean time? 


This is the part I find fascinating. WHY do people ignore the fact that marijuana is just as, if not better for one's health as alcohol, but yet remains illegal? Is it because we've taught our kids to "make the right choices"? What image do you think many Americans want to avoid?