Is a Neuropsychological Evaluation Needed?

Transcript:

So a question we get is, do I need a neuropsychological examination if I’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury, or my loved one suffered a traumatic brain injury? What a neuropsychological examination is, is it’s testing. Sometimes it’ll be over two days, it’s six to eight hours, sometimes even more testing, where they sit down and they basically are tested on all different areas of their brain function. They’ll test short term, they’ll test long-term memory. They will test visual memory. They will test hearing memory. They will test auditory response. They will test the ability to see one picture and make that picture again. They will test multiple different areas of the brain. And when they do that, they put together a report. Sometimes there’ll be 20 or 30 pages long, it’s long and very detailed. It goes through everything. It is a great document to understand where the limitations of someone who suffered a traumatic brain injury is.

And sometimes we use that document to specifically go out and try and design a treatment plan for our clients to give them the most value. Where some clients will have a brain injury where it affects their hearing and their sight and their short-term memory, we’ll have other clients that’ll have what’s called mild paralysis in one of their limbs, or they’ll have a nerve disorder related to the traumatic brain injury, or they’ll have numbness and tingling in an area, or they will have certain symptoms with their balance, that somebody else that has visual and hearing problems don’t have. And what it means is you need to go get the experts as a result of that report, to be able to treat the areas that are a problem. For example, if you have balance issues, is it related to the eyes or is it related to the ear?

That is actually a pretty important question. It could be from the eyes not having the right type of tracking or it could be from the inner ear where basically if there’s a damage to it or there’s damage of how that goes to the brain, they feel unsteady all the time. And so that’s something that really needs to be taken into consideration. That’s why neuropsychological testing is something we recommend most of the time. It can be expensive. It can be 15 or $20,000 if insurance isn’t paying for it.

And you go, “How in the world is so expensive?” Well, it’s a board certified PhD doctor who spends hours and hours writing a report about one person. So it’s expensive. And you go, “Well, how do you pay for that?” Generally the law firm that’s representing you, if you’ve been harmed, will pay for that report. And all neuro-psychological experts are not created equal. You want one that’s board certified. If he’s not board certified, well, you don’t want that guy. There’s no other way to say it other than that. There are some people out there that will hire non board certified neuropsychologists, and it’s just a mistake. So, that’s what we think about neuropsychological reports. I’m happy to answer additional questions on that or do videos on that, but that’s all I have to say on this subject right now.