Therapies To Help TBI Victims

Transcript:

So I’ve got a question that we get often is, what types of therapy can help people with the traumatic brain injury? And there’s a number of different types of therapies. All brain injuries are not created equal. They kind of range from sight, sound, physical movement, cognitive, memory, mood changes. Sometimes there can be short fuse or their personality will change. Depending on the type of difficulties that someone has after a traumatic brain injury, really is how we tailor the treatment to that specific individual. So what type of therapies do we find the most helpful for our clients?

Number one is post-acute brain injury rehabilitation. It’s a long word, but basically means an inpatient clinic that goes through every different functional aspect of someone with a brain injury. They document it all, and they do basically load the treatment. Rather than do a bunch of treatment over years and years, or you do it slowly piecemeal an hour a week here an hour a week there.

When someone’s got a brain injury, they need a lot of treatment all at once to help them really focus on getting a new pattern of life that they’re comfortable with and doesn’t cause them too much stress. And so in doing that, they really need a way to front load the treatment. Post-acute brain injury rehabilitation is the best way to do that.

The next way to do it is a what’s called a cognitive rehabilitationist or a speech and language pathologist. They generally are the same thing, but they kind of go together in terms of the treatment that they can provide to someone that’s got a brain injury. Those are the two that we recommend the most. In addition to that, depending on the difficulties you have, you have a number of different other experts. If there’s ongoing pain and chronic headaches, you get a pain management and rehabilitation doctor.

If there’s difficulty with certain types of limbs or functionality after the brain injury, you get a physical medicine rehabilitation doctor. If you’ve got issues with the eyes, you get a neural ophthalmologist. If you’ve got issues with the ear, you get an audiologist or one that specializes in brain injuries. Depending on the area, that’s affected that to where you need to track down the specialist who’s got enough familiarity with that area to be able to directly treat the symptoms that are resulting from the traumatic brain injury. It’s why it’s difficult to treat some of these. Sometimes there’s so many problems after a traumatic brain injury that you’ve got issues with eyes, sound, speech, and physical limitations. You need doctors to address all of them. That’s why sometimes the post-acute rehabilitation all at once can really help address those issues and then it can get sent out to different specialists.