Anyone care to talk about boxing and head trauma this year, high board diving and back braces, plebes coerced by detailers to ignore medical chits?
Overblown, overblown, and happens-but-shouldn't-and-not-as-often-as-people-think. Boxing isn't that bad. If you're not an idiot and pay attention to the instructors, you can escape the 10 meter without injury. With both of those events, I'm sure that worse injuries HAVE happened, but generally the most you have to worry about is a bloody nose, headache and sore hindquarters.
There's a difference between "hurt/injured" and "hurting," and over plebe summer a lot of the plebes don't get that. By the middle of second set, everyone's sore, tired, and definitely hurting. The detailers get kind of fed up with "My shins hurt!" and "I'm sore!" Yeah, we get it.
Everyone's sore. You're not special, and when the plebes asked us to go to PEP tent for some random thing ("Ma'am, I need a band aid for this tiny cut on my knee!" "I can just give you one. I have an entire box in my room." "Oh...uh, ma'am, my shins hurt too.") we often ended up looking at it a little warily.
I can speak for my company and say that we never
denied a kid from going to PEP tent or seeking medical help, but we did stress the difference between hurt and hurting and told plebes their options. In some cases, NOT going to PEP tent or BMU ended up being more beneficial because it gave us and them more discretion over what they were able to participate in. Other companies may have flat out told kids not to go to medical, which shouldn't happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
And, honestly, the plebes coerce themselves to ignore medical chits, especially after the first couple weeks. Once they realize that going on chit and being unable to participate is one of the fastest ways to be...disliked by your classmates. It sucks, and it's unfair since a lot of kids have legit medical issues, but it happens.
I ended up forcing one of mine to go to medical after he tried toughing out an injury, something as stupid as an ingrown toenail...he ended up in the hospital for four or five days and losing a chunk of his toe due to a nasty infection he'd tried to hide for the last chunk of first set.
For detailers, there is no benefit to having kids avoid medical problems. Sure, it's a pain to coordinate someone to take all of them to PEP tent, Ortho, etc (or Bethesda!) and dealing with injury reports, but it's better than doing the carpet dance in front of your company officer trying to explain why you didn't know what was up with your people and having a kid in the hospital, which is no fun for anybody.