There's Nothing Mild About Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

[Music] Welcome to Brutal Honesty with Author, Teacher in National Trial Lawyer, Nick Rowley. Welcome back to Brutal Honesty, I'm Nick Rowley. Let's spend some time talking about traumatic brain injuries and how often they are overlooked. Mild traumatic brain injuries are oftentimes not mild at all. When you hear the word mild, it's a misnomer. We're talking about an acute classification scale. Mild moderate or severe. Mild moderate or severe in the acute phase. We can have a severe traumatic brain injury that has mild consequences over the course of a person's life. You can have a severe traumatic brain injury that has zero consequences in the long term. There are other things that can qualify a brain injury as being severe. A mild traumatic brain injury might be one where someone didn't even lose consciousness. But they have severe lifelong consequences. Every brain injury is different. Every brain is different. Every human is different. So we can't treat all brain injuries the same. You're making a big mistake if you're valuing a brain injury case the same way that you've valued the last one. Every human being is different and every human experience is different. A person with a severe traumatic brain injury might have severe consequences. Or they might not. A person with a mild traumatic brain injury might have mild consequences. And they might be temporary or they might be long term. A person with a mild traumatic brain injury might have moderate or severe consequences that are long term. Personality change is something we see in traumatic brain injury cases. Mild, moderate and severe. It's often overlooked. A person can do just fine in neuropsychological testing. Their cognitive function might be okay. But their personality is completely different. They've gone from being a loving, caring, understanding patient person to someone who flies off the wall. To someone who has poor judgment. But their intellect is still the same. Their governor, the governor that would keep them under control. The governor might be damaged. That's going to be in the frontal lobe of the brain. There is neurosurcatory in the frontal lobe of our brains that impact our ability to make decisions. That help us exercise good judgment versus very bad judgment. We can have damage to the brain that we see on MRI scans. That's macroscopic. And then there can be damage in the brain that's way worse. That we do not see. That we're never going to be able to see on an MRI. That's microscopic. So we don't take a brain injury case and say there is or is not a brain injury based upon an MRI scan. Standing alone. We have to have clinical correlation. And we might have a clean MRI scan that doesn't show anything. But when we look at the patient clinically, we see that there's been a trauma. We see that something has happened to their head. There's been a head injury. And they've changed. Their personality has changed. Their memories have changed. Their cognition has changed. It could be one or all of those things. It could be something different. It could be that a person's hormones have changed because they've had damage to their pituitary gland. It could be that none of those things have changed. But they're dizzy. And they have visual changes. Or it could be something else. And the way we identify a traumatic brain injury is by listening. Listening to the human being. And learning from them what is different. If we're not willing to listen, we're never going to find out what truly happened to them. And if all we're doing is looking at a CT scan or an MRI scan, we're going to miss traumatic brain injuries most of the time. Traumatic brain injury is one of the most misdiagnosed problems in acute care settings and emergency rooms in this country. So it's our job as lawyers to listen to investigate and find out if there has been any sort of head trauma or acceleration, deceleration that could cause the brain to ricochet off of the skull. There are so many cases out there where a person has been hurt. And the focus is on that person's neck or their arm or their hand or their back or leg. And they've suffered a brain injury. Brain injuries are so often overlooked because a person whose brain has been injured might not realize it. And if they're not unconscious, then how would we know that their brain has been injured? By the time first responders get to the scene, the person's walking and talking. In sports, we know when a person's had a head injury because we get to see it right there in real time. In fact, we'll see it in the replay. In a motor vehicle collision or a slip and fall, we don't see that. We don't have that camera angle. And we have people in sports who hit their head and their brain ricochets off the inside of their skull. And they might be dazed and confused for a few seconds and then continue to play the game. Yet they've suffered a brain injury that could cause that person to have lifelong consequences. So we don't just look at loss of consciousness. One thing that we can do is we can find out if there has been a loss of time. Because I might be playing the entire game and not remember anything about it the next day. Not even remember that I played the game. Not even remember the touchdown. Not remember fumbling the ball. It might all be gone because I'm amnestic. I'm amnestic and have no memory of what happened because of what happened to my brain. But we would only know if a person lost time if we spoke to them and asked them the right questions. So that's why a lot of brain injuries are overlooked. What we can do when we're evaluating a case is we can look in the emergency room records or the first responder records. And we can see whether or not there has been any impact to the head. Has the person been confused or dazed at any point? Talk to the people at the scene of the collision. I've had multiple cases where the ambulance records, the fire department records, the emergency room records, say no loss of consciousness. Class cowcoma scale of 15. The person's alert orientated times three. There's nothing wrong with them neurologically. And you talk to the person who was at the scene who will tell you that the person you're representing was unconscious. Or was luring his or her speech or was confused. And then you talk to the person you're representing. It turns out they don't remember anything from the scene of the collision. They don't even remember being in the emergency room. They don't remember the ambulance ride. You have to investigate and ask the right questions because missing a traumatic brain injury can be a horrible thing, an awful thing for that person who's trusted you with his or her case. What's a brain injury case worth? Well, it depends on the human being and what's happened to them. Any injury to the brain in my opinion based on my experience and my success is worth at least a million dollars. Because an injury to the brain and damage to the neurons, that's not something that you ever fully recover from. Once neurons, once brain cells are dead, they're gone. They're dead. They do not grow back. Other cells might regenerate. The brain does not. A concussion or a mild traumatic brain injury will impact the way that human being ages. It will increase the likelihood of dementia, Alzheimer's, neurocognitive decline significantly. That's why these cases are serious. I've won hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of patients, people who suffered brain injuries. It's something that I have a great passion for, having people I love, who've suffered brain injuries, and having to live with a brain injury myself. It's tough. Your personality, who you are, it can change and it takes a whole lot of work to get past it. I know that my brain will probably age a lot differently than an otherwise would have because of what happened to me. That's scary. When I see someone with a traumatic brain injury and they need help, I care greatly. Hey everybody, this is Nick Rowley. I'm looking forward to seeing you at Trial Lawyers University in Las Vegas, starting October 16th. I'm going to be there. If you want to get healthy, we'll help you get healthy. If you want to work on your trial skills, we can do that too. We're going to have a wellness room. You're going to be able to do a cold plunge. For the first time or the fifth time or the tenth time, we'll have a sauna. We'll have gym equipment. You can get personal training in addition to working on your cross examination skills, in addition to working on how you can be better at picking a jury. We're going to work on every facet of a jury trial, every different trial skill that you want to learn. You're going to have an opportunity to learn that at Trial Lawyers University. You're going to be able to get a chance to start getting healthy again. So I hope to see you.