Other Disorders That Come From TBI’s

Transcript:

So if you suffered a traumatic brain injury or had a loved one suffer from a traumatic brain injury, there’s often a number of other disorders that go with it that doctors will miss and it’s really important to their ongoing recovery from the traumatic brain injury, that they get addressed. The reason that doctors miss them is truthfully, there’s a lot of traumatic brain injuries in the United States every year;there’s 1.6 million traumatic brain injuries a year. Most people recover from them, but if there’s some additional things that go with them, they need to be addressed, they need to be looked at by the doctors and they can get them ironed out.

So just going through a couple of them. One is the traumatic brain injury sometimes will cause injury to your hormone system. In men, it’ll be testosterone. Sometimes it’ll interrupt the ability of the body to produce the same type of testosterone or hormones that it was before. You can do blood tests to find out about this. It’s pretty simple to do, but there’s a high percentage of people who have a traumatic brain injury and suffer some form of hormonal disorder as a result and it can cause weight gain. It can cause weight loss. It can cause feelings of irritability, feeling slow, feeling foggy, a number of these categories affect and people think it’s a result of the traumatic brain injury, when sometimes it’s a hormonal imbalance resulting from the traumatic brain injury that causes it.

The reason is the part of where your hormones is and your brain is the pituitary gland. It’s kind of like a ball like this. The brain sits over it and it actually, they both weigh different things and so if there’s a violent back and forth, sometimes there’ll be damage to the system that basically messes up the balancing of chemicals and so that needs to be really looked at. It’s something that if you get looked at, you can get injections of testosterone, or other type of hormones to help balance you out, and it will relieve a vast majority of those symptoms, which really can improve the life of someone who’s going through it that doctors just miss all the time.

It’s frustrating when I’m working on these cases and I see a doctor never tests for this stuff, and I go, “Well, did you test for their hormones? Or, how do you know?” And the doctor goes, “I didn’t test for that.” And I go, “Can we get them a test? This is important. If they have a ability to recover from this traumatic brain injury and they don’t do it, doctor respectfully, I know you’re trying to take care of them, but why haven’t you given them this option yet?”

We see it again and again and it’s something that needs to be considered as an additional injury, in addition to the traumatic brain injury that needs to be addressed is hormone and balancing hormones and injuries related to that, that are absolutely treatable. So, that’s something that really needs to be considered.

I would highly recommend that if you’ve had a traumatic brain injury or have a loved one that had it, you get their hormone regulation system tested in some manner and figure out if that’s a way to help treat some of those symptoms, because sometimes the symptoms seem to overlap and you treat one and all of a sudden their very serious brain injury isn’t so serious anymore. So, just be aware that. That’s something that needs to be looked into.