Closed Head Injuries/Traumatic Brain Injuries and Auto Accidents

If you watch any amount of football you can’t help but hear about the concern of traumatic brain injuries (TBI is the acronym you hear a lot, but they are also referred to as closed head injuries, and a few other terms that aren’t important for the purposes of this article) in that sport.  What a lot of folks don’t appreciate though is that you don’t have to be involved in a contact sport to get a brain injury.  All you have to do is drive a car and be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And brain injuries can have a lasting impact on your life, so you don’t want to ignore them, especially in the context of your personal injury claim.

You can sustain a head injury very easily in an automobile accident.  Even with airbags, people hit their heads on steering wheels all the time in accidents.  But you can sustain a serious head injury from impacting the head rest; you can even sustain a TBI from whiplash!  All it takes is an impact that essentially rattles your brain in your head.

This is obviously concerning because of the short- and long-term impact these injuries can have on your life, such as head ache, nausea, dizziness, blurry vision, short-term memory loss, change in mood, etc.  But it’s even more concerning for me because I talk to people in accidents all the time whose health care providers have missed their head injuries! When that happens, people suffer needlessly, don’t get the care they need and deserve, and their claims are not accurately valued.

This is not to say it’s always the health care providers’ fault, of course.  Many times it’s because the patient isn’t sure of how to answer.  Patients may be having these symptoms, but because they didn’t hit their head, or because they think they didn’t hit their head hard enough, they don’t speak about their head injury.  And sometimes they don’t think what they are suffering (nausea or blurry vision for instance) is related to the accident.  Here’s an important thing to remember when you discuss your injuries with your health care provider: Do not minimize any of your symptoms!  If you feel in any way different you should speak up!  If you don’t you might not get the treatment you need.

So remember, if you have an auto accident claim, don’t remember to talk with your health care provider about every single way in which you feel different after the accident.  You may be far more hurt than you realize.