Information to give your doctor after a traumatic brain injury
A traumatic brain injury is not always easy to diagnose. Patients frequently don’t exhibit outward signs of an injury, and if they don’t provide the right kind of information to their physicians, the medical provider might not issue the appropriate diagnosis. This could lead to the patient not receiving the right kind of treatment for his or her injuries.
Since a traumatic brain injury could be present following any kind of serious accident, accident victims should tell their doctors the following:
- What circumstances surrounded the accident and/or how the injury happened?
- Did you lose consciousness after the accident?
- How long were you unconscious?
- After the accident, were you less alert, speaking in a strange way or have other signs of being injured?
- Did you strike your head or another part of your body?
- Can you offer further information about the forces involved in your injury? Where did your head strike? What kind of object hit your head? How far did you fall? Did you fall from a vehicle?
- Did your body get whipped around when you fell?
The answers to the above questions will give your doctor a basis for forming his or her diagnosis. It’s important to have a doctor’s diagnosis because defendants in traumatic brain injury cases will, at times, attempt to claim that the plaintiff did not, in fact, suffer a brain injury. You might also want to jot this information down on paper, so it can be used as evidence at a later time — should you need to prove your brain injury in court.
Source: Mayo Clinic, “Traumatic Brain Injury,” accessed Dec. 15, 2017