Today’s health and safety news features much more than football — there’s baseball, basketball and wrestling, too:

* As part of its occasional series on concussions, the Philadelphia Inquirer featured former Eagles fullback Norm Bulaich, who was one of the first players to seek help for head injuries during the 1970s at the Duke Medical Center.

Acquired in a trade with the Baltimore Colts before the 1973 season, the Texas Christian graduate had suffered a concussion in the 1974 season-opening loss to the St. Louis Cardinals. When the same thing happened the next two Sundays – on hits McCormack conceded “weren’t that hard” – the Eagles began to worry. They sent Bulaich to Duke University Hospital in North Carolina. ”I kept on getting pain going into my neck,” Bulaich said in a telephone interview from his home in Hurst, Texas. “But, basically, I felt fine. The doctor at Duke said a concussion was like a bruise. If you don’t rest it, you’ll keep hurting the bruise.”

 

Shoulders and elbows encompass a lot of injuries, in general, not just sports injuries. I do a lot of things, soup to nuts, 8-year-olds to 84-year olds. I was just fascinated by how our body works. The shoulder is a very complex joint in the body and there wasn’t a lot out there in terms of information and training in that area when I was in school and my early career. The throwing athlete and the overhead athlete appealed to me because there wasn’t a lot out there. I’m a shoulder and elbow guy. At the time there weren’t that many shoulder and elbow guys. There was more of an opportunity to contribute in that area.

* The Sports XChange reported that the Jacksonville Jaguars have placed second-year wide receiver Cecil Shorts on injured reserve because of a concussion.

* The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported on Corey Fulbright, a Texas high school player who 10 ten years ago was paralyzed during a high school football playoff game.

* The Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune wrote about a University of Great Falls wrestler whose career ended as a freshman because of a concussion, but also opened the door for him to start a career as a wrestling coach.

* The Calaveras (Calif.) Enterprise wrote about how an area high school football player had to end his playing career because of a concussion while playing at junior college.

* Sports Business News said concussions and the issues surrounding them were one of the biggest stories of 2012.

* The Portland Press-Herald wrote a deeper story about baseline testing and how it meshes with the state’s concussions laws.

* And in the NBA, Dwight Howard admitted to USA Today Sports that he isn’t 100 percent healthy from surgery to repair a herniated disk last April despite playing in games the past two months.

“I’m still in that process,” Howard said in an extensive interview with USA TODAY Sports at the team’s practice facility. “People don’t understand that. They just come out and see me make a couple dunks and blocks and say, ‘Oh, he’s back.’ But it does take a while for all this stuff to heal. This is not something easy, so I understand that. It will come.”

– Bill Bradley, contributing editor