“All Blacks Haka” by Sonya & Jason Hills from London, UK

Rugby is wildly popular in New Zealand, and that’s no news for anyone who follows sports.

It may be less appreciated how much medical research on rugby and other sports comes from the Land of the Long White Cloud.  The University of Otago in Dunedin, for instance,  conducts a good amount of research on sports medicine in general, and on concussions in particular.  Recently, the University hosted a conference entitled ‘Understanding sports concussion:  facts and fallacies.’

Our intrepid reporter from New Zealand, Dr. Hamish Osborne, is on the editorial board of CJSM and has previously done some guest blog posts when he was attending the annual ACSP conference in Australia.  He was one of the faculty at the Otago lecture and I asked him to share with us any of the important topics addressed .  What follows…

Sam Boyd Stadium, Las Vegas Nevada, site of the annual Rugby 7s tournament.

It’s amazing how time flies.  How is it already March?

It’s almost 7 p.m. and I’m writing by the light of a sun that is still above the horizon, thanks to one of my favorite inventions of the modern world: daylight savings time, which arrived last night.

This realization is a personal reminder, however, that I have been delinquent: meaning to write a blog post about an event that took place three weeks ago…..but, my oh my, business has just swamped me, I guess.

As the swallows return annually to San Juan Capistrano, so do the Rugby 7 squads of Kenya, South Africa, New Zealand and other countries come each February to the desert:  Las Vegas hosted the USA leg of the HSBC Sevens Series Feb 13 – 15.  It is the largest annual…