Treating Traumatic Brain Injuries in McKinney

Treating traumatic brain injuries in McKinney can be a complicated process. Trauma to the brain is serious, and failure to perform necessary treatment can cause further issues over time. An attorney experienced with TBIs could help determine if you received treatment and intervention that can result in better long-term function. The traumatic brain injury attorney could also prove the severity of your injuries to ensure you are properly compensated.

Identifying Types of Traumatic Brain Injuries

Brain injuries affect every person differently. Separate areas of the brain suffer various types of injuries that manifest themselves in different ways. For example, a trauma that causes issues with the electrical signaling in the brain could lead to mild to severe seizures, depending on the severity of the injury.

Other common types of severe brain injuries include anoxic, which is a lack of oxygen to the brain, or hypoxic, a limited amount of oxygen to the brain. These injuries show up differently in films than other injuries, such as a diffuse axonal injury (DAI), which may so up or may never show up on conventional MRI technology.

In motor vehicle accidents, a lot of DAIs occur because, during that type of trauma, the brain tissue is twisted and stretched. Brain cells are long and narrow, like telephone wires. If telephone wires are twisted or put under too much stress, they will pop or become unusable. Therefore, for those types of DAIs, there are injuries over different areas of the brain, some of which are not large enough to be seen by standard MRI technology.

However, more advanced technology, such as DTI series onT3 MRIs, has advanced to the point that we can now see structural damage to entire tracks of those special cells helping the doctors confirm brain injury diagnosis in some cases

For instance, in an anoxic injury, a doctor may believe a person went through cardiac arrest or some other trauma that caused their oxygen to be completely cut off.

More standard MRI and CT technology will show the process in a fairly predictable manner, with the brain deprived of oxygen on the margins at first, leading to the areas that typically get more blood involved. This changes how a lawyer proves the brain injury and how they would defend it.

For instance, with a diffuse axonal injury, one lawyer may have a doctor say there is no visible evidence of damage due to lack of oxygen to the brain, while the other says that it is not visible because that is not the mechanism of injury in the case.  If the injury is one from stretching and contorting the brain, you would not expect to see damage from lack of oxygen to the brain.  The two are just different injuries. If a lawyer does not have experience working with these types of injuries, the lawyer may not realize that the insurance doctor may be telling the truth, but still misleading the judge or jury because you might not expect to see damage on the particular test for a particular type of brain injury.

Common TBI Treatment Protocols in McKinney

The initial treatment protocols depend on how the injury presents itself. In cases where an injury causes swelling of the brain, the intervention includes things to reduce the swelling of the brain since it is in a confined space with increased intracranial pressures. If the brain swells in a confined space, the pressure increases, decreasing the amount of oxygen getting to the brain. This can cause further damage to the brain.

It is critical in those types of brain injury situations that doctors do what they can to relieve the pressure on the brain, mechanically and chemically. They will use drugs to reduce intracranial pressure by decreasing the heart rate, but if the pressure is too high, they will intervene mechanically by putting a hole in the skull to reduce and regulate the pressure. If the pressure is not regulated appropriately, there will be additional brain tissue death and possibly herniation of the brain.

Generally, diffuse injuries do not have a lot of swelling or tissue death, but critical tissue is harmed in other ways. Gray or white matter is stretched and deformed, causing it not to function the way it did before. That can lead to longer-term issues such as seizures, which may require a person to take medication for the rest of their life. Seizures themselves can injure the brain further, so doctors must intervene chemically in those situations. However, these medications could have serious side-effects.

It is very common to see depression and brain injury go hand-by-hand. When there is a traumatic injury to the brain, it undergoes chemical changes. This often requires doctors to moderate and change the chemical balance to prevent depression. In addition, many times after a traumatic brain injury there are functional or cognitive losses that sometimes cannot be fixed, but cognitive therapy can prove helpful.

Hire a Lawyer Who Knows TBI Treatment Options in McKinney

It is important to work with an attorney familiar with the types of injuries because treating traumatic brain injuries in McKinney can change from one type of injury to another. It is also important because the diagnostic features of one type of traumatic brain injury are different from others, and a lawyer must prove that. Therefore, they must know and understand the difference.

If you or a loved one suffered a severe brain injury, you should speak with a knowledgeable attorney now. Call now to schedule your first consultation.