Representative Giffords recovery from a near-fatal shooting has riveted the nation's attention on the quality and intensity of the care she is receiving to recover from traumatic brain injury.  Unfortunately for most victims of traumatic brain injury the quality and intensity of the rehabilitative care is something far less than that being received by Giffords.

At least 1.7 million people in the USA suffer brain trauma each year, USA Today reports. Most of the injuries occur in motor vehicle crashes, strokes, assaults, falls, gunshot wounds and sports-related incidents. Each year, about 50,000 brain-trauma patients die, 230,000 are hospitalized and up to 90,000 survive with long-term disabilities.

The issue of how insurers cover brain-injury rehab made national headlines in December, when news reports disclosed that the Department of Defense 's insurance carrier, Tricare, refused to pay for cognitive therapy — a collection of intensive exercises that improve cognitive function — calling it experimental. The reports of injured troops being denied access to such therapy provoked a national outcry, a study by the Institute of Medicine and a series of angry letters from Congress.

"The fact is, a lot of people are not getting into rehab," says Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., co-chairman of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force. Like Tricare, many insurance firms have based their refusals to provide coverage on an absence of evidence that the programs work. Even true believers concede that the case for cognitive rehabilitation rests on a shaky scientific foundation, in part because of the difficulty of studying the brain and a lack of funding for research.

The consensus of those that work with and see the effects of rehabilitation therapy believe that it works.  Even if it does not definitively work on a physical level maybe we should consider paying for it simply because it gives hope.

What else we know about traumatic brain injuries:

• the effects of concussions are cumulative meaning that once your brain is injured subsequent injuries wreak more havoc,
• injury to one area of the brain is usually mirrored on the opposite area of the brain,
• CT scans are great for showing blood and bone but MRI is better at showing brain injury,
• contact injuries are usually local where acceleration / deceleration injuries are widespread with multifocal effect,
• the brain is a fully integrated state of the art system where damage to one area leads to deficits in other areas,
• smell regulates taste and a subtle sign of a brain injury is increased need for spicy food,
• damage to the frontal lobe that regulates the temporal lobe leads to erratic behavior,
• you do not have to loose consciousness to have a concussion injury,
• there are 10 soldiers returning with brain injury from Iraq for every soldier that is killed,
• after a brain injury your IQ may return to normal but you may have decreased executive function,
• the effects of brain injury in the elderly is especially dramatic,
• diffuse tensor imaging (DTI) shows injury to axons in the brain,
• a normal MRI may not (probably will not) show TBI.

I have been a motorcycle rider for over 30 years and have also been a registered nurse.  My law practice focuses on representing injured and killed motorcycle riders and their families.  We can help you with medical bills, getting your bike fixed and getting you the money you deserve from the person that caused the crash. Utah Bike Law and its attorneys are licensed to practice law only in the State of Utah and maintain offices in Salt Lake City, Utah. No attorney client relationship is established by simply visiting this website.

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