Treatment Providers

The brain injury victim and the family get to meet almost everyone in medicine. Initially, they are at the hospital and they get to need all of the Trauma Specialists, the Emergency Room Physicians, the Neurosurgeons, Orthopedic Surgeons and the Anesthesiologist and they are involved in that critical care period time and there is a transition to the Post Critical Care Physicians. The Neurologist are supposed to the Neurosurgeon, the Psychiatrist, the Physiatrist which is the Physical Rehab Doctor Specialist, the Neuro Psychologist which is the person that is doing the testing, the educational testing, the psychological testing, they try to measure to the extent possible, the extent of the brain damage, how it’s affected memory cognition, intelligence and such and then, you meet the really important people and they are the therapists. They are the people that really work with you day in and day out. So, let’s talk about that. I have special place in my heart for the speech therapist because my wife is a speech pathologist and my daughter is studying to be one and they are working with people who have suffered traumatic brain injury; to teach them to speak from the very beginning all over again and they are working with memory, they are working with cognition, they are working with different types of problems like aphasia and other speech problems that can develop from a traumatic brain injury. Then you get the physical therapists and everybody loves them, they are the people that are really working with you day-to-day to walk again, to move those muscles and get you back up moving again. You know with a traumatic brain injury, if its severe enough, the ability to walk, the ability to move can be lost and unfortunately we had to work on many cases like that over the years and it’s not spinal chord injury now, we are talking about a brain injury but the degree of the injury can affect the ability to walk and in fact sometimes it can be so severe that it can cause problems with spacicity in the muscles so that the muscles will become tensed and we’ve had to work with physicians in fact, I was just on a matter year at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia where a surgeon had to because of a brain injury do a surgery to release the tension in the muscle so that there will not be the kind of pain that is associated with spasticity caused by a traumatic brain injury. The occupational therapists who help people work again with their hands when there has been a problem with a brain injury and as a result they really need to be retrained to use their hands and to work again. So, those are the physical therapists that you work with. There is also Cognitive Therapist and that’s an important and developing area to in helping people with their thought process and getting organized with respect to their life and dealing with the issues caused by having the brain so severely damaged in one of those traumatic brain injuries. So you really get to meet everybody along the way, from the beginning through the hard working crew at the end and spend a lot of time with them. It is a traumatic brain injury, severe traumatic injury and even the so called mild traumatic it’s a life long process of rehab and you really get to meet all of the crew along the way and then that’s it.