How many more hits can contact sport take before it is banned?

But that's what happens when we let them play contact sports.

If you think I'm exaggerating, I bring you 25 year old rugby league player Eli Katoa, Melbourne Storm's star second rower. He suffered three head knocks in the space of 90 minutes while playing for Tonga against New Zealand in the Pacific Cup in Auckland. Three head knocks. Three head knocks in 90 minutes. He played on after the first one. He played on after the second one. Then he had a seizure and ended up with surgery for a brain bleed.

Sure. I hear you say. He's a professional. But I'm not sure we should even be sending out professionals to acquire brain injuries, from which they may never recover.

If I was the prime minister, I'd probably ban contact sports. I've watched kids' rugby on the sidelines and no one really seems to have any idea about what constitutes a serious injury. We get used to the idea of calling it concussion, which sounds harmless. It's anything but harmless.

I'm only a little bit of a party pooper - and my goodness, I've loved rugby league since I was a girl but I didn't recognise that it does terrible things to people's brains. Boomph. Thwack. Thud. Crack.

Nearly three years ago, a Queensland rehabilitation physician gave evidence at one of those parliamentary committees where useful ideas get aired all the time (but sometimes never get more than an airing)

Benjamin Chen, a Queensland rehabilitation physician, made the points everyone makes: safety's important, sport is part of Australia's social fabric, we enjoy the benefits of sport. But he said: "The challenge is to recognise the unintended, darker consequences of contact sports and the hidden toll that they may exact on the player and their loved ones."

Which hardly anyone does. Concussion knocks around more than your head: reduced academic and/or professional personal fulfilment; underemployment or reduced earning capacity; relationship difficulties; mental illness; and substance use. And then Chen said:

"Our personhood in its various dimensions is effectively the product of the functions of the brain, and injuries to the brain change a person."

Yep. And when we call it concussion, we move it away from what it really is: brain injury, possibly permanent brain damage. And no one really obsesses about CTE. That's chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which occurs after repeated knocks to the head - or as the experts describe it, trauma to the brain.

So what can we do to keep people safe? Not sure how banning contact sport would go down. Alan Pearce, neuroscientist and an adjunct professor at Swinburne University, is one of Australia's top experts on concussion and he says it's a question which gets asked a lot - should we ban them?

"The short answer is no," he says. But there needs to be strict management processes in place for those who are concussed. He says that while schools have policies around concussion, they don't really know the how of applying those policies. He says educating teachers, physical education staff, school nurses, to have a plan in place if concussion occurs.

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But here's his other key recommendation - for players under 14, sport should be non-contact. He means modifying the sports to non-contact versions, in the same way we have rugby and touch rugby.

Playing sport is so good for kids. Teaches them teamwork. Keeps them active. And even if your kids pick a sport you think will be safe, accidents happen. I was so pleased when my kids took up field hockey, only to watch a child's eye socket get smashed by an uncontrolled stick. They break limbs in gymnastics. They even get concussed in football because of the craziness of allowing people to use their heads to catch balls and score goals.

But non-contact versions of contact sports would still allow kids to have all the fundamental motor skills of learning a sport, the running, the catching, the sprinting, the changing directions. Plus all the non-physical skills, the psychological resilience of winning and losing, dealing with other people.

Pearce says that in the run-up to full contact, say from 14 up, there is also a process of teaching kids how to deal with full contact, how to bump into each other, the skills of tackling, all in a controlled environment.

All too late for Eli. I ask Pearce again whether we should ban contact sports. He says what happened to Eli Katoa is a strong advertisement for how we must improve our concussion spotting, our concussion management protocols.

"It clearly went against the worldwide international consensus statements around removing a player from play showing signs of concussion," he says. Those rules have been around for 25 years, 25 years and they stil haven;t penetrated the consciousness of some officials.

Helmets don't work, he says. Sure they protect the skull - but then we've got our poor little brains rattling around in our heads. Helmets don't work but proactivity does.

We've seen young men, little older than children, with CTE, diagnosed after death: Keith Titmuss and Ian Tucker. We've had AFL great Garry Lyon calling full-time on the word concussion.

My guess is this. We will continue to allow people to play contact sports for a while, in the same way we've continued to permit smoking. But the damage will become clearer over time (particularly as our athletes get stronger, fitter and heavier).

Then people will choose safety - and that can't come a moment too soon.