George Lundberg, MD

Editor in ChiefCancer Commons

A 1995 “pioneer” of the medical Internet, Dr. Lundberg was born in Florida in 1933, grew up in lower Alabama, and holds earned and honorary degrees from North Park College; Baylor University; the University of Alabama (Birmingham and Tuscaloosa); the State University of New York, Syracuse; Thomas Jefferson University; and the Medical College of Ohio.

John Wight waxes poetic about the history of Soviet-style boxing (M Star September 14-15). In the Brain and Life publication of March/April 2006 Frank Clancy has an article, The Connection Between Boxing and Brain Injury in which he observes, “Brain damage is as much an occupational hazard for boxers as black lung is for coal miners”. In BBC News online of 26 November 2021 Tomos Morgan’s article, Boxers at greater risk of early onset dementia, study finds, says “Findings show they are at least twice as likely to have Alzheimer’s-like cognitive impairment, with the onset of dementia starting on average five years earlier than those who had never boxed” he writes.

Horse racing football, rugby, ice hockey and other violent contact sports have been identified as causing brain damage. Famous victims are Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazer but shamefully their daughters, Laila Ali and Jacqui Frazier-Lyde fought each other. Five members of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning team died from dementia.

For many years all serious medical organisations globally have called for the abolition of boxing. In 1983 the American Medical Association editor, George Lundberg, wrote that boxing was an “obscenity” that “should not be sanctioned by any civilized society.”

When Ali was just 42 years old, 3 years after retiring, he suffered tremors, slowness, slurred speech and fatigue. He wrote, “I’ve been in the boxing ring for 30 years, and I’ve taken a lot of punches, so there is a great possibility something could be wrong.”

If all these medical opinions were accepted, then courts would see huge compensations claims. The socialist society of the future will successfully ban all violent contact sports because human beings will no longer need to violently confront each other to escape poverty, ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’.