According to a March 12 report from MMA Mania, fight physician Dr. Johnny Benjamin thinks UFC heavyweight contender Stefan Struve should call it a career.
"Many people think, and Stefan will probably think, 'The doctor said I'm good to go, so I'll get right back in the gym and go at it,' but, even though we're great at healing bones, it's not so easy to heal the brain," Benjamin said of Struve. "How many times has he been knocked out? I know he's a young man, but he's been knocked out more than a few times. At some point, someone really needs to ask the question, should he still be fighting? That many concussions, so quickly, and at this young age ... a person has two types of age, chronological and physiologic age."
Benjamin makes a perfectly valid point, but the problem is that Struve is just 25 years old and still developing as a mixed martial artist.
'Stefan's license may say he's 25, but in physiologic years, he's much, much older than that, with all the concussive force that he's sustained," Benjamin added. "I'm sure nobody will like to hear this, but Stefan Struve really needs to think about retiring. If it's not him that will make that decision, then Dana White needs to start talking to him about retiring. The question out there is how many sustained concussions is too many, and according to the latest literature that's coming out, the answer is starting to look like it's somewhere between two and three. That's where you start having permanent changes. Knowing that data, Stefan is definitely beyond that number, and someone really needs to initiate serious discussion with either him or his promoter that he probably needs to do something else for a living."
Is it time for Struve to retire? It's hard to say for sure, as new studies about brain injuries continue to come out.
Struve has already been knocked out five times, which is a career's worth of punishment.
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