Time only healer for head injuries

LIVERPOOL’S medical staff will be perfectly aware of how important Mohamed Salah is to the team. But your primary responsibility as a doctor is to treat your patient. If he has not fully recovered then he will not be included in the team, no matter how good a player he is. If Salah was still having problems yesterday, the day after suffering his head injury against Newcastle, then he has not got much chance of playing against Barcelona in the Champions League tomorrow. Concussion is a range of symptoms: headaches, dizziness, fatigue or an inability to concentrate. Sometimes, those symptoms can develop later on. That has to be respected in football. We like to see the player free of symptoms and, ideally, we’d then like them to have a full week of recovery. In this situation, with the Barcelona game coming so soon, you would assess it day by day. Once free of symptoms, you’d expose him to gentle exercise initially. If he does not cope, then you have to back off, give him a few more days and worry about the next game.