Traumatic Brain Injury Law Introduction-Crashing Minds

Hello my name is Gordon Johnson.

You are now on tbilaw.com which is a webpage that I had on the Internet since 1996.  This video is now being shot  at time that I’ve changed the title of tbilaw.com from the brain injury information page to Crashing Minds.  Why the title Crashing Minds?  Well Crashing Minds is a book that I’ve been writing for the last couple years and it seemed like it was time to incorporate some of the themes of that book into tbilaw which has had hundreds and hundreds of pages of information on it since I put it up in mid‑1990s.  I use the term crashing minds because the brain in a brain injury does crash in similar ways to what your computer might do if you in fact overloaded it or did something to make it crash.  Now there’s no comparison to the devastation of brain injury to a computer crash but as we begin to understand the way in which computers work the average person now knows what RAM is and hard drive is.  It becomes easier for me to explain similar processes that happen inside the brain when there’s a brain injury.  I’m not a doctor.  I’m a lawyer.  I’ve been writing about brain injury mostly my entire career as a personal injury lawyer.  These pages have information I’ve learned on them both when I undertook the massive undertaking to really understand brain injury when I became a brain injury specialist but also what I’ve learned from listening to you the people with brain injury my clients, loved ones, family members of my clients and the things I’ve learned in the years of doing battle with doctors who were hired by defense in insurance companies to basically deny that anything we know to be true could be true.  Tbilaw.com is really not like anything you are going to read in a medical book.  It does have medical science as its primary basis but it’s not written like a doctor would write for another doctor and it’s not written like a brain injury survivor would write for another brain injury survivor.  The goal is to combine a technical understanding of brain injury with the communication skills both written and verbal that I’ve developed in my career as both a journalist and a writer and also as a lawyer.  But to combine those things in a way where I can teach, I can inform and I can advocate.  We hope that these pages are self-accrediting to you.  That you will see yourselves.  You will see your loved ones in these pages and through them you will in fact get a better sense of what is ahead and what is that you need to learn and you need to do to ensure the best recovery for you or your loved one.  Throughout our web advocacy we have seen three basic themes that come up.  The questions come up over and over again.  The first is someone’s in a coma, their loved one is in a coma and the doctors are always saying the only information the doctors are giving is that you will just have to wait and see.  While predicting the outcome of a coma while someone is still in a coma is a very, very difficult thing to do.  There is legitimate information and it’s a very important time for the family member to learn as much as possible about brain injury.  The second theme is that you suffered a concussion or your family member has suffered a concussion and the doctors are saying everything’s going to be better and then you’re a week after the concussion or a month after your concussion that’s what you want to hear and it may in fact be the case but for a significant minority of people 10 to 15 percent of the people that may not be the case and the doctor’s advice that everything will go, don’t worry, you’ll be fine in six months isn’t always true.  And for the significant subset, this significant minority of people there needs to be more information.  There needs to be more assistance and the more focus has to be being out of long-term recovery and we’ve tried to address that issue.  The third major issue is what is almost a complete devoid of information about the long-term potential disability that can come either after a severe brain injury or after a concussion.  In the concussion cases it’s obvious why that information isn’t given because in concussion cases the doctors don’t think there could be any disability.  But remarkably there’s still very little information given about the long-term consequences, long-term behavioral changes after a severe brain injury.  In the severe brain injury case there’s this huge focus of care and attention in the first 90 days.  Hopefully it extends out for a year.  But once you’ve gotten away from the neurosurgeon’s care, once you’re outside of the requisite number of speech pathology visits or physical therapy visits then there’s very, very little done given information provided and focused on long-term recovery.  We started a project called TBI Voices a little over two years ago and we’ve offered almost daily installments of the voices of people who survive injury permanently severe injury and what their life was like as they went through and what it’s like now.  We are creating new pages as we go that incorporates what we’ve learned from listening to the TBI stories on TBI Voices to help people understand the future impact of brain injury to help them understand this long-term symptoms that they may suffer.  We hope that you click on it.  We hope that you find what you need here.  We hope that you will come back.  We will hope that what you use tbilaw.com Crashing Minds as your troubleshooting guide for the challenges that are ahead for those with brain injury.

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