Mild Traumatic Brain Injuries

Welcome to the Legal View with Farah & Farah. I’m Chuck Farah, and with me today is Eddie Farah. And today, we’re going to talk about mild traumatic brain injuries.

 Thanks, Chuck. These are cases we handle a lot in our office, and people are involved in automobile accidents and it’s really, a lot of times, it’s not even a big crash. And a lot of times, and most of the times, the client never even loses consciousness. But after the accident, or several months or weeks after the accident, the client starts experiencing memory loss or cognitive deficits and maybe their personality changes. When those kind of symptoms arise, we always look at whether or not that person has sustained a traumatic brain injury. And the doctors are aware of that, and they usually run some tests to try to find out if that person does have such an injury. And typically they’ll run a CAT scan, or maybe an MRI. But a lot of times, those diagnostic tests—those MRIs and CAT scans—come out normal. So it’s always a challenge proving that traumatic brain injury to an adjuster or a jury if you’re in a trial. But there are other means by which you can prove a traumatic brain injury. In our office, we use neuropsychologists, and there are several of them that we’ve used over the years that are very experienced at diagnosing traumatic brain injuries even when all the diagnostic testing is normal. And the neuropsychologist is specialized in doing that, and a lot of times we find someone who, although has normal diagnostic testing and normal MRIs, they have an abnormal neuropsychological test and it’s proven that they do have a mild traumatic brain injury. So, even if you don’t have a loss of consciousness but you’re having these issues, it’s something that needs to really be followed up on.

Right. And another thing that we do is when we suspect a brain injury—a mild traumatic brain injury—we’ll bring the client in, and we’ll really sit down with the client and get into the details of how they’re functioning since the accident. We’ll ask them about their personality changes, if any, if they’ve had any memory loss, any difficulty keeping their concentration. And a lot of times we’ll suspect these injuries just from reviewing the medical records, or with the mechanics of how the accident occurred. And once we’re able to determine that, or we suspect that, then we can move them on to the right medical expert that Eddie mentioned earlier—the neuropsychologist. Another way that we’ll sometimes prove, or get more evidence of, the brain injury is by speaking with relatives or the spouse of the client. Sometimes these people are able to bring to light the difficulties that the client is having, such as personality changes or cognitive deficits or any type of other type of concentration issues. But we do that because the client sometimes doesn’t recognize that they’re having these problems, or really, that sometimes they don’t even like to admit that they’re having these problems—they think that it’ll just go away and they don’t really mention it to anybody. So you kind of rely on this third party to bring those symptoms to light.

Yeah. The thing is, these injuries—I mean, they may be classified as mild traumatic brain injuries, but the ones we’ve seen can be very debilitating. We’ve had clients that have not been able to go back to work due to their traumatic brain injury. I mean, they can’t concentrate, they’ve lost their memory—their memory’s not what it was—and so they’re kind of disabled for the rest of their lives. So this is something that really needs to be looked at in almost every automobile case. And as Chuck—as we mentioned earlier, it doesn’t have to be a big impact for it to occur. But you’ve got to be on the lookout for the symptoms and act accordingly and make sure that you’ve got the right doctors involved.