Let's start by establishing some framework for approaching the question: could alcohol consumption have contributed to Gronk's injuries?
...
In short, it looks like alcohol's effect on injury risk is mixed and depends on parameters like gender (known), age (known) and quantity of consumption (unknown). It is more probable than not that alcohol did not help Gronk, but I wouldn't use that in court or anything.
I just want to contrast this with my post above. I consider my post an opposite in both tenor, approach, and content when compared to yours, my opinion could be wrong or worthless however.
Thank you for putting in the word to salvage useful conversation out of this. After reading the abstracts, I share your opinion: it's clear that beyond a certain point of consumption frequency and intensity, propensity to injury increases, but the location of that point is vague and the magnitude of increased risk could be miniscule. We certainly have no ability to make an argument that Gronk's behavior has been problematic, other than "hey, it can't have helped!", which is also true of, say, him driving out to the store to get stuff rather than ordering it online. Some sense of magnitude is necessary before we make any prescriptive judgments.
I'm interested in whether any of the "give me evidence" people would disagree that at some level of alcohol consumption, athletes experience increased risk of injury. You can quibble over what exactly that point of consumption is, but I'm reminded of the adage "now that we know you're a whore, we're just arguing about price."
In another vein, has Gronk at times been exposed to increased injury risk attributable to his alcohol consumption and not been injured? Do we care about those times?
My conclusion from reading this thread is this: Gronk would minimize his increased injury risk attributable to alcohol consumption (whatever that may be) by not drinking. For me, I'd take it a step farther and posit that as he ages, the effects of alcohol consumption on his body could be more pronounced. This may lead to an elevated increase in risk of injury when compared to what he has experienced as a younger player. I would, personally, make these statements more conclusively and say that as he ages, the effects of alcohol consumption on his body will be more pronounced and that will lead to elevated increase in risk of injury attributable to alcohol consumption. But again, my position is largely drawn from personal experience.
To the bolded: sure,
but that's not useful. You've created a bit of a strawman. If Gronk is routinely ending up face-down in a gutter somewhere, scraped off the pavement by EMTs, yeah, obviously that's not good. But, by all accounts,
he's not. If he is a minimal drinker, the potential impact, based on what we've seen posted, ranges from negligible to minor.
We ought to distinguish between things that have some theoretical amount of risk attached, but small and reasonable parts of everyday life - like driving to the store - and things that have clearly material amounts of risk attached, like doing meth. A criticism of Gronk is probably only fair if it's closer to the skydiving end of the spectrum. I'm persuaded that frequent binge drinking passes that threshold, but once we agree on how much Gronk drinks, we ought to be looking for signal that that amount is harmful, or that we can draw no conclusion.
Fwiw, I think that the single best piece of evidence posted in this thread is that TB12 doesn't really touch the stuff anymore. Fucking guy is superhuman as an old man, by football standards. If he eats sheep nuts 5x a week, Gronk et al. should consider them.
In the same vein, just because Tom Brady avoids it doesn't mean it creates material risk. Gronk's adopting Brady's approach this year, which is great, but it also requires more self-discipline than it's reasonable to expect out of anybody. Brady's approach is "
only do things that we're sure help or don't hurt", whereas we're talking about an approach of "
avoid doing things that we're pretty sure hurt". There are some studies that show that, say, one glass of red wine a few nights a week
helps with stuff like cholesterol, but that's not what we're examining here.
Wow, really happy to see how this conversation's evolved overnight and through the morning. I honestly was not expecting that. Every time I bring this topic up I get hammered for 2-3 days by mostly the same people, then a year or two goes by, it comes up again and I get hammered again for 2-3 days by mostly the same people...rinse and repeat.
In a thread where Eric Feczko just went out of his way to try and reorient the conversation, to bring it back to the topic and introduce some meat to digest, you
persist in trying to pursue the interpersonal psychodrama, and your own personal persecution complex.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE STOP. WE'RE TALKING ABOUT SHIT NOW. HELP US OUT.