Odette Harris on Concussion, Brain Injury, and Why Every Sport Carries Risk

Odette Harris, MD, MPH, Professor of Neurosurgery and the Paralyzed Veterans of America Professor of Spinal Cord Medicine at Stanford, joins The Future of Medicine for a conversation about concussion, traumatic brain injury, and what it takes to change how medicine thinks about the brain. The conversation was recorded in front of a live Medicine Grand Rounds audience.

Dr. Harris has spent her career arguing that concussions should be understood as brain injuries, not minor bumps. She explains her work with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to rethink how these injuries are labeled and treated. She also describes how research with the NFL is helping inform safety protocols in other sports. Her message for parents is practical: the children who come to her clinic are more often soccer players, divers, volleyball players, and cheerleaders than football players. She adds that every sport carries some risk, and families deserve better data to make decisions.

She also discusses her research on women with traumatic brain injury in the military. Because so few women were in the studies, their experiences were often lost in the data. When her team examined them directly, they found high rates of depression and balance-related problems that were not being addressed. Women veterans were also having a harder time returning to work and daily life, even though they were better educated than their male counterparts.

Dr. Harris reflects on her own path, from immigrating to the U.S. from Jamaica, to Dartmouth, to Stanford Medical School and neurosurgery training at a time when very few women entered the field. She describes the mentor who told her to "go where you can write the script." That advice led her to spend her Van Wagenen Fellowship studying brain injury in Jamaica. There she found that death rates from brain injury were the same as in wealthier countries. The differences were in how quickly patients died and how well survivors recovered. She also shares stories from her recent Dartmouth commencement address and what it means to have the Congress of Neurological Surgeons name a lectureship in her honor.

Together, Dr. Harris and Euan Ashley discuss concussion science, fairness in medical research, and why the future of brain injury care depends on asking better questions.

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