Your Weekly Dose of #5ThoughtsFriday: A description of what we think is important at BIAMD
  #5ThoughtsFriday
The Doonesbury Begins Edition
10/26/2018
#5ThoughtsFriday is Powered By the :

Call for Presentations for the 31st
Brain Injury Association of Maryland
Annual Conference.

The BIAMD ANNUAL CONFERENCE is a multi-track neuro-conference focusing on issues related to: individuals with brain injury and family members, children and adolescents in the school system and transitioning, advocacy and community rehab services, and professional and clinical training.

Submit your Presentation today by CLICKING HERE .
Here are the 5 things we thought were
worth sharing with you this week:
Milton Packer wonders if we learned anything
from the Roman Empire
When I moved from New York to Texas more than 14 years ago, my life changed in many ways. I graduated from being a division chief to a department chair. I moved from a "blue state" to a "red state." These changes were fairly minor compared with one seismic shift.

In 2004, I moved from a state that loved baseball to one that loved football.

I still vividly remember Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. When Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner made his infamous fielding error (which allowed the New York Mets to prevail), I was at a medical conference and watched the game with four cardiologists from Harvard. They went to bed in tears, but I was ecstatic beyond words.

But no one in Dallas cared very much about baseball in 2004. The stadium in Arlington was filled to capacity only when the Yankees were in town. My 10-year-old son was a lefty pitcher. When the parent who coached the team decided to retire and no one volunteered to replace him, I stepped up as the head coach for four seasons. It was the most fun a parent could ever have. It did not matter that the stands (meager as they were) were rather empty.

In Texas, football is a religion. (One church even set up a widescreen TV so that congregants could watch the Cowboys during the prayer services!) But it isn't just professional football that commands this devotion. Every Friday night in the fall, parents ecstatically swarm into stadiums to watch their school-aged kids play. One suburb of Dallas paid nearly $20 million to build a stadium for their high school team. Within a few years, it was enlarged so that it can now seat more than 10,000 people.

CLICK HERE to read more of Milton Packer's reflections.
The most recent study shows lottery winners experience no significant change in happiness level but feel more satisfied about their life.
The record-breaking $1.6 billion Mega Millions jackpot raises an age-old question: Can money buy happiness?

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that big lottery wins don’t guarantee a better life. Instant multimillionaires William “Bud” Post, Jeffrey Dampier, and Jack Whittaker are just a few examples of how getting lucky can make you miserable—or kill you.

But what does science say?

As it turns out, there have been a number of studies over the years to determine the psychological effects of a big, life-changing windfall. The results vary and, of course, none of them have dealt with a payout as large as the one at stake on Tuesday night.

But if you like to have research in hand before making a big decision, here’s what the evidence shows:

A classic 1978 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Science tried to gauge happiness by asking two extremely different groups of people how happy they were: 22 winners of the Illinois State Lottery who’d scored between $50,000 and $1 million versus accident victims with paralysis. Researchers asked how much pleasure people got from otherwise mundane everyday activities: watching television, hanging out with a pal, hearing an especially good joke. Lottery winners rated their happiness at 3.33 out of 5; the quadriplegics and paraplegics rated theirs 3.48.

A preliminary paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in May studied 3,362 “large prize winners” in Sweden. The researchers found that people’s happiness was unchanged, especially after winning more than $100,000. It did, however, suggest that jackpot winners’ experience “sustained increases in overall life satisfaction” that lasted more than a decade (life satisfaction refers to overall quality of life versus happiness, which corresponds to how a person feels on a daily basis). The study, though, noted that winners might have bought a ticket because they were dissatisfied with their lives, which could have made them more likely to experience a change.

Sorry you didn't win, but CLICK HERE for the next big one .
PERPETUATING STIGMA, CAUSING HARM
A recent story covered by,  KTVU  ,  East Bay Times , and the  San Francisco Chronicle  details an incident where two Alameda County Sheriff’s department personnel experienced the effects of “fentanyl exposure.” The articles vary greatly in their accounts of what drugs were present at the scene and what symptoms the officers exhibited, but all accounts contain misinformation, inaccuracies about fentanyl and overdose, and perpetuate fear-based messaging that stigmatize people who use drugs.

The officers claim that they became sick when they entered a Hayward motel room during a drug raid where they reportedly “inhaled airborne fentanyl.” This story is similar to reports from across the country detailing accounts of first responders having near death experiences when encountering fentanyl. None of these reports have been verified by toxicologists. The symptoms referenced in the stories are not consistent with the symptoms of an overdose on fentanyl.

CLICK HERE to find out more on this important topic.
2) What We Are Reading We Think You Might Enjoy
Hey! You Can Win The Book Below!

Send an email to info@biamd.org with the
Subject Line: I Like To Read! and your name and mailing address in the email . We will enter your name into a drawing to receive a free copy of the book mailed to you for your reading pleasure!
“PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYERS DO NOT SUSTAIN FREQUENT REPETITIVE BLOWS TO THE BRAIN ON A REGULAR BASIS.”

So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: A chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players -- including some of the all-time greats -- to madness.
League of Denial reveals how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, sought to cover up and deny mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage.

In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research -- a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer.
  (If you decide to buy anything mentioned in #5ThoughtsFriday, don't forget to use  Amazon Smile  and select the Brain Injury Association of Maryland as your donation beneficiary.) 
1) Quote We Are Contemplating...

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. ”

HAVE A TERRIFIC WEEKEND. 

Did you enjoy #5ThoughtsFriday? If so, please forward this email to a friend! 

Got a story we need to follow or share? Send it to info@biamd.org .  

Want to find a story from a past #5ThoughtsFriday blog posts, visit the archive by clicking HERE .

  Please let us know your requests and suggestions by emailing us at info@biamd.org or contacting us on Twitter. 

  Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Let us know! Just send a tweet to  @biamd1 and put #5ThoughtsFriday in there so we can find it.

  Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful weekend.