GUEST COLUMN: A Public Service Announcement From Your Local Surgeon

Welcome back, boneheads. As a faculty member, I am impressed by your intellect, your enthusiasm and attitude. However, as co-director of the University's Head Injury Research Center, I am awed by your stupidity and your fathomless reliance on luck as your ride your bicycles throughout campus and West Philadelphia without a helmet. I am perpetually amazed at how many of you supposedly enlightened and semi-educated Ivy Leaguers continue to ride without any protection to your brain. Didn't anyone visit your third grade classroom, drop an egg on the floor and with and without styrofoam protection demonstrate what always happens when your skull chooses to have an argument with the concrete pavement? Weren't you paying attention? Your skull always loses and unfortunately, so does your brain. Forever. I grew up in the free-form sixties, went to Woodstock (yes, that generation) and still believe I know what's cool and what isn't. And I know that for most of you, riding a bicycle with a helmet is not cool. You're right. It isn't cool at all. But I'll tell you what's even less cool -- being entered into one of our clinical head injury protocols here at HUP after you've sustained trauma to your brain by riding your bicycle without head protection. Definitely not cool. So, even though you may not be moved by my message, think about someone else for a change. Think about your girlfriend or boyfriend whom you love, your parents, your brothers and sisters and friends and all the people whose love and caring you take for granted. Think about how their lives would change if you sustained even a minor head injury. And if you won't do it for yourself, do it for them, for your years at Penn, for your careers and livelihoods. I'll see you around campus. I won't be hard to miss. I'm the one yelling at you, riding your bicycle, to get a helmet and get a life. Tracy McIntosh is a professor of Neurosurgery, Bioengineering and Pharmacology at the University.

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