Continuing the “Pointing out Stupidities and Blatant Errors” theme, I’m going to focus on a Newsweek article about cheerleading (“Drills and Spills”, from the October 31 issue). Because, of course, I love cheerleading so much.
That is a lie.
Actually, I’m doing this because the article is yet another scaremongering “news” piece. The main point of the story, that cheerleaders suffer injuries, that there’s very little coordination between any of the official organizations that might want to regulate the sport/activity, that people can’t even agree on whether it’s a sport or an activity…all of those points are reasonable, and valid.
It’s just when they start writing about the numbers of injuries in that breathless, Won’t Anybody Think About the Children sort of way that things get wonky. Time to make with the quotes:
The numbers tell the tale: emergency-room visits for cheerleading injuries…jumped from 15,700 in 1994 to 28,400 in 2004…
So the number of injuries almost doubled in ten years. Sure, that fact might be a cause for concern. But the next sentence admits that “much of that increase” is due to the fact that there are more cheerleaders now than there were ten years ago. How many more? The article doesn’t say. It does say that the current estimate of the number of cheerleaders in the US is 1.5 million. Who came up with this? The article doesn’t say that, either.
But if we accept that there are 1,500,000 cheerleaders in the US (and, hey, why not?), then 28,400 represents 1.9% of the total number. So, at most, 2% of cheerleaders have suffered what the article describes as “often fractures, dislocations, and sprains.” Now, I have no idea whether 2% is disproportionately large. The article doesn’t provide the context, so I don’t know if high school football players, volleyball players, or members of the swim team have a similar percentage. I don’t think that you can call 2% an overwhelming percentage, though.
Heck, what if 500 of those injuries were sustained by one cheerleader? We just have to assume that those are 28,400 unique cases, but I would guess that there were at least a few people injured multiple times. Probably not a huge number, though, so maybe it’s safe to ignore that question.
And “even more troubling”, the number of “catastrophic” injuries (“those involving severe skull or spinal damage”) is “on the rise.” Now, very few people are pro-skull damage, so an increasing number of such injuries is certainly bad. The article includes the story of one girl who died during cheerleading practice. How many other deaths have occurred? The article, again, doesn’t say. But it’s safe to assume that if the number was large, it would be in there.
So, how massively on the rise are the numbers of catastrophic injuries?
Of the 101 such injuries among female high-school and college athletes between 1983 and 2004…55 percent resulted from cheerleading.
First of all, that’s a twenty year span. 56 really bad injuries in 20 years? Yeah, it’s not a great thing, but I don’t think it’s time to mandate full-body foam uniforms. And how, exactly, has this number increased? Nope, the article doesn’t explain that, either. There’s not even a graph showing an exponential increase in the number of injuries (thanks to the magic of axis compression).
You can’t even fairly analyze those numbers. How many people have been cheerleaders over the past 20 years? If there are 1.5 million today, then…well, what? Where there 100,000 ten years ago? I’ll bet the person who wrote the article doesn’t know. If they can’t do the research, than I
But even given 1.5 million cheerleaders, 56 represents 0.0037%. And all we know is that the total number of cheerleaders over the past 20 years is some number greater than 1.5 million. So we’re actually talking about less than 0.0037% of all cheerleaders. And that’s a very, very small percentage. Yes, spinal damage is something that people should avoid. I’d certainly be concerned if my daughter wanted to be a cheerleader (for more reasons than just the potential for spinal or skull damage, to be honest), but I hardly think that’s it’s time to panic and impose draconian legislation designed to Protect the Children.
And, again: I don’t even give a rat’s ass about cheerleading. But I’m certainly annoyed by journalists who claim that catastrophic injuries are on the rise, and then completely fail to back up that claims in any way. And then provide numbers that, with a small amount of consideration, show that odds of such injuries come out to 37 ten-thousandths of one percent. No, wait: At most 37 ten-thousandths of one percent. And while this is probably still better than your odds of winning the lottery, it’s less a cause for panic than it is an example of a journalist trying desperately to cobble together a story out of fairly weak material.