Traumatic Brain Injury

A traumatic brain injury results from sudden impact with an external force and even a small impact to the head can cause a brain injury.

MR. MICHAEL A. GALPERN: Traumatic brain injury is a definition of a loosely-organized definition that relates to a injury to the brain or a specific portion of the brain that’s not caused by disease or a drug process. The overwhelming causes of traumatic brain injury are two-fold. There’s closed head injuries and open skull injuries and open skull is a penetration of the skull. The most frequent cause is a bullet or a knife or a falling object. In terms of a closed head injury, where the skull remains in tact, but the brain is nevertheless injured, the overwhelming leading cause in the United States this year and every year since automobiles have been in use is motor vehicle accidents. A traumatic brain injury is a devastating injury. The majority of traumatic brain injuries are permanent. There is some improvement, but there are lifelong effects. It’s a fallacy to believe that you need a significant impact to cause a brain injury. You don’t. A mild injury to the head can produce a traumatic brain injury. Now, doctors classify brain injuries according to mild, moderate or severe, but a mild brain injury can cause lifelong impairment, can prevent a person from working in a useful capacity. It can prevent them from remembering. It can prevent them from organizing their thoughts and it can be a lifelong problem for the victim and the victim’s family. At the Locks Law Firm, our Brain Injury Department has been handling brain injury cases for decades. We have the literature. We have the experts. We have the attorneys. We have the resources to properly obtain a patient’s medical records, accident history and have the same analyzed by a psychotherapist or a neuropsychologist or a psychiatrist to determine if the person has a brain injury. MR. THOMAS L. GOWEN: In fact, Mike, we have developed the Philadelphia Head Injury Questionnaire with neuropsychologists here to help to screen these cases because one of the most tragic things about the mild to moderate brain injury case is that they go undiagnosed by medical professionals and many people deal with a great deal of frustration in coping with memory loss, concentration difficulty, severe fatigue and emotional instability for which they can’t explain until they come here and find after they’ve done the Philadelphia Head Injury Questionnaire that they probably do have a brain injury and then it’s important to have a full neuropsychological evaluation to determine whether there are areas of the brain that have been injured in this accident and as you were saying that it does not require a severe impact. In fact, it doesn’t even require an impact at all. The whipping or rotational forces in a car accident or in a fall, a fall is another area of--where a great many brain injuries occur and in athletic competition as well. It’s becoming particularly important today, in terms of brain injury, to recognize the concussions in athletic competition because of the tendency to put players back in games and second and third concussions are occurring and with much more devastating results than the first one had occurred when the players go back in before they have fully recovered. We go to all lengths to try to represent our clients in these cases and to demonstrate the extent of their injury and achieve compensation for them, for those injuries. MR. GALPERN: Tom, that’s an excellent point. Compensation is an important and a critical factor for people with brain injuries. Estimates of a person with a traumatic brain injury vary widely, but quite often, we see cases where a person is going to need literally millions of dollars in lifetime care to treat, clothe, feed, educate, retrain this person with a brain injury. Most often people don’t have that type of resource and if there is a legally responsible person that caused or contributed to the brain injury, it’s very important for the victim or the victim’s loved ones or the victim’s family to seek out an attorney who handles brain injuries, understands what you’re going through and will do their utmost to try to help.