Traumatic Brain Injuries

It is estimated that there are more than seven million head injuries in the United States each year. About 500,000 of these individuals are admitted to the hospital. About two million of those individuals who suffer a head injury end up suffering from traumatic brain injury.

When a traumatic brain injury occurs, the life of the person who was injured and sometimes their family members' lives will be changed forever.

No one is ever prepared for a traumatic brain injury. The way a family responds to a traumatic brain injury is dependent upon many factors: the role of the person with the injury in the family, the severity of the injury, the availability or lack of insurance, prior experience family members may have had with medical professionals, and access to information resources and support systems. Everyone responds differently to a brain injury and some individuals may feel angry, guilty, overwhelmed, depressed, helpless and hopeless.

The changes you can experience following a traumatic brain injury affect you physically, cognitive, and emotionally, these changes sometimes cause day to day functioning to be fairly difficult. Initially you and your family are totally reliant upon doctors and other medical providers to provide you with information about the condition itself, your prognosis, and treatment recommendations for the future. When you begin to see how a traumatic brain injury affects aspects of your life such as ability to work, or ability to function like you used to, most people then start taking steps to examine their legal rights with regard to their injury. Unfortunately, waiting may make it more difficult or impossible to gather information from the scene of the accident which will help you in proving your case.

If you have suffered a traumatic brain injury in an accident, whether that brain injury be medically described as mild, moderate or severe you should initially make sure that the doctor or doctors you are seeing have extensive experience and knowledge with regard to diagnosing and treating traumatic brain injuries. The practice of medicine is highly specialized. There are doctors who specialize in treating individuals suffering from traumatic brain injury. Ask your doctor how much of his or her time is spent caring for and treating individuals who suffer from traumatic brain injuries. Ask them if they have written articles or lectured in that area of medicine.

If you need legal assistance, make sure you consult a lawyer who has had experiencing handling these types of cases. The lawyer needs to have an understanding about the multiple medical facets of traumatic brain injury. Your lawyer needs to be able to communicate with you and your family. The lawyer must be willing to listen to your account of your life before and after the injury. Finally, they must be willing to spend whatever time and resources it takes to understand your case. There is no such thing as a minor brain injury.