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Auto Accident Brain Injuries: Advice for Brain Injury Attorneys

A brain injury is a very serious and very real injury, yet it is very difficult for attorneys to prove in court. Juries cannot “see” a brain injury, and the diagnostic testing will often be normal, even when the impairments are disabling. This leads to brain injury accident victims being routinely under-compensated as insurance companies choose to defend these cases more aggressively in court.

Another common problem is that many injury lawyers often do not understand how multiple injuries can affect, and exacerbate the symptoms of a traumatic brain injury. This interplay from multiple injuries – which is quite common after a serious car accident – causes a “combination effect” on the accident victim, as each of these injuries affects and often makes worse other injuries. This creates the vicious downward spiral that causes so many seriously injured accident victims to deteriorate over time – think of it as the combination effect of multiple injuries causing a vicious interplay of symptoms from a brain injury, other physical injuries, fatigue, depression and pain – all affecting one another and making each one worse in turn.
pain
As many doctors who treat multiple injuries and chronic pain will say, when people have multiple injuries, problems go up by multiplication, not by addition. With multiple injuries, sadly, 1 + 1 does not always equal 2. Many accident victims begin to deteriorate under this vicious downward cycle of injuries exacerbating one another and the constant pain, fatigue, and lack of sleep, which makes everything worse.

People with Brain Injuries Often Also Have Depression

It is well accepted in medical and scientific literature that people who suffer traumatic brain injury often suffer from depression. Many defense doctors accuse accident victims of “malingering” by overlooking the effect that depression, or chronic pain (or both) will have on someone who also has this type of injury. Yet these are far more reasonable explanations for why an accident victim will perform worse over time on repeat neuropsychological testing, or in life, instead of improving as these defense doctors always expect.

Lang, Iverson, and Rose undertook a study to “examine the influence of depression on post-concussion symptom reporting and patients following mild traumatic brain injury.” These researchers confirmed that people with mild traumatic injuries, concussions AND depression experienced significantly more post-concussion symptoms; and that these concussion symptoms were more severe than people who only suffered with depression and those who only suffered traumatic brain injury.