If you’re involved in a car accident or a fall at work, and you suffer a traumatic brain injury, there are a few things you need to know about your path to healing. There are treatment options that can be used, and some TBIs will heal entirely. But some of them do have a lot of trouble healing and may never return to the state that they were prior to the accident.
This is why it’s important to meet with a medical team quickly once you suffer the TBI. You want to get started on treatment and rehabilitation. Much of the time, healing happens in the first few days, weeks or months. But there may be a point where the doctors decide that no more healing is expected.
Why doesn’t the brain heal like other organs?
When looking at these timeframes, people sometimes start wondering why the brain can’t just heal like their other organs. If you cut your arm or break your ankle, it’s eventually going to heal. That doesn’t mean you won’t have complications or symptoms ever again, but many injuries do heal to roughly 100%.
The brain can’t always do this because some level of healing may require the regeneration of cells. Your body can do this by allowing the cells to split, creating more that can replace those that were lost. If you were injured and your body has to regenerate skin cells, you may also have scar tissue, but your skin will eventually heal to cover the cut.
The brain cannot regenerate cells in the same manner. Instead, it sometimes tries to seek out different neural pathways to recreate skills. The cells that were lost in a serious brain injury, for the most part, are not going to be regenerated or recreated. They’re simply lost and the brain has to see if it can get around this limitation. If it cannot, that is when you sometimes see symptoms that are going to last forever.
Regardless, you can see just how a TBI can change your life. Make sure you know what rights you may have to financial compensation.
