Electronic medical records, that's what.[1]
Huh?
As this article in Wired explains, science can't figure out how risky football is for your brain until it's able to get rid of the selection bias issue. As it stands, we are only looking at the brains of people who die with dementia. To figure out the relationship between football--pro, college, high school and Pop Warner--and long term brain disease, we need to study an accurate cross-section of football player brains that includes the healthy and the sick.
How do we get football players who die without any mental symptoms to donate their brains for research?
In the future, electronic medical records will alert doctors when their patients can advance science, raising an alert when the records indicate a history of playing football. Your GP then can ask, hey you're a organ donor, do you mind if we take a look at your brain when you're done?
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1. Just to be perfectly accurate, the incentives and requirements that are pushing adoption of electronic medical records by physicians in the United States were not actually part of the Affordable Care Act. The stimulus act of 2009 included incentives and changes to Medicare contain the requirements.
