The study comes from Dr. Shelby Karpman, a sports physician and one of the more experienced doctors at attending to MMA injuries in North America, who has presided over dozens of fights. For over a decade he and colleagues have been reviewing and tabulating data from over 1, 700 fighters in Edmonton to come to their conclusions.
Their first conclusion is that MMA leads to injuries and can be considered a dangerous sport; we all likely knew that to be the case already. The other conclusion is that mixed martial arts is actually not as dangerous as boxing is.
“Mixed martial arts, for the most part we see a lot of bruises, scrapes, cuts, things that need to be stitched up,” Dr. Karpman said. “But we don’t see a whole lot of major injuries that need to be treated.”
Injuries in fights
The numbers appear to back up that assertion but while there are seemingly fewer major injuries in MMA, they still occur. They found that 59 percent of MMA fighters suffer injury compared to 50 percent of boxers. Those are the numbers for injuries overall.
But when it comes to losing consciousness during a fight, by any standard a major injury, 7 percent of boxers will experience losing consciousness in their career while 4 percent of MMA fighters will. So out of 500 boxers, 35 will lose consciousness during a fight while only 20 MMA fighters out of 500 will.
Dr. Karpman, who works at the U of A’s Glen Sather clinic, has stood against bans on the sport of MMA whenever governments threaten to ban it in their jurisdiction. He believes a ban would drive the sport underground and make pursuing it more dangerous.
“You can ban this all you want, but you’re not going to stop the sport from progressing,” he is on record as saying. “You’ll generate more injuries and more deaths.”
