Brain Injury Lawyer

Myth 1: Mild traumatic brain injury is not serious.

Traumatic brain injury is usually broken into three classifications: severe, moderate, and mild. Unfortunately, the latter classification –mild traumatic brain injury –does the disservice of making the injury seem trivial or insignificant. This was recognized by Dr. Nathan Zasler in his chapter in Medical Rehabilitation of Traumatic Brain Injury. There, Dr. Zasler wrote:
   
“Modifiers such as subtle, minimal and minor are to be discouraged. Practitioners
    must understand that the term “mild” describes only the initial insult relative to
    the degree of neurological severity. There may be no correlation with the degree
     of short or long-term impairment or functional disability.”

The National Institute of Health recently released a NIH consensus statement on rehabilitation of persons with traumatic brain injury. The NIH reported, “Since TBI may result in life-long impairment of an individual’s physical, cognitive and psycho social functioning and prevalence is estimated to be 2.5 million to 6.5 million individuals, traumatic brain injury is a disorder of major public health significance. Furthermore, mild TBI is significantly under-diagnosed and the likely societal burden therefore even greater.”
   
What is mild traumatic brain injury? This question was posed to a select committee assembled by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. They developed a definition of mild traumatically induced physiological disruption of brain function as manifested by at least one of the following: Any alteration in mental state at the time of the accident, such as feeling dazed, disoriented or confused. This definition includes the head being struck, the head striking an object, or the brain undergoing an acceleration/ deceleration movement without direct external trauma to the head. Mild traumatic brain injury may cause physical symptoms, cognitive deficits and behavioral changes. Physical symptoms of mild traumatic brain injury may include nausea, vomiting, dizziness, headache, blurred vision and fatigue. The cognitive deficits of mild traumatic brain injury include problems with attention, concentration, perception, memory, speech, and language and executive functions. Finally, behavioral changes may include irritability, quickness to anger, emotional ability, and dysinhibition.

You can read my other posts on the 10 myths of traumatic brain injuries here.