CWRU law professor and colleagues challenge the future of sports injury reporting
In September, Assistant Professor Yaron Covo and co-authors from the Yale University School of Medicine published an opinion piece in STAT News, a leading medical news platform. In the piece, Covo and his co-authors question the social desirability of sports leagues’ “injury reports,” which are periodic detailed disclosures regarding the health status of professional athletes.
Specifically, the authors argue that such reports may exacerbate mental health stigma, infringe upon athletes’ privacy interests and potentially aggravate compulsive gambling. Moreover, Covo and his co-authors argue that injury reports “fail even on their own terms,” given that, even with strict enforcement, these reports are often incomplete, thus allowing the very gambling manipulations they are aimed at preventing.
The authors of the piece—Covo and Yale University School of Medicine’s Mihir Gupta, MD, assistant professor of neurosurgery and fourth-year medical student Trevan Klug—are members of a medical/legal research team that examines, among other topics, the health implications of sports betting. The team’s newest law review article, “It’s Not ‘Personal’: Health Information Disclosure and the Physical-Mental Distinction,” will be published in the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts in February.
Covo’s prior work on the intersection between sports betting and health information has appeared in both law journals and popular media, and was discussed in Sportico: The Business of Sports.
