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I have been representing brain injury people for probably 15 years now. It started as a
one case and then two cases. I had one particularly challenging case in probably 1993. Um, where
it was clear in talking to my client and even clearer in talking to his wife that he was
significantly impaired by the injury. Yet the doctors weren't treating him, were basically
saying that he would have full recovery. It was a good size case there was a deep pocket,
it was a good chance that of collecting a substantial sum if we were successful. I just
wasn't satisfied with the explanation I was getting. And there was a seminar offered in
Houston on brain injury. And I just felt I needed to know more about brain injury to
properly represent this individual. Um, so I got on an airplane and went down to Houston
and spent three days just absorbing more information about brain injury than I ever imagined. And
for some reason it clicked for me. Since then I have basically tried to limit my practice
to brain injury. And it took me several years to transition from what frankly was a small
town general practice lawyer into being a brain injury advocate and um, full time personal
injury lawyer representing only brain injuries. When I first started working with brain injury
um, we were taught um, by the best doctors in the country that there were certain myths.
that people had about brain injury. That the first thing you had to do was overcome these
myths. And the first most common one I suppose is that you have to have a loss of consciousness
to have a brain injury. The second one um, probably almost as common was that if an MRI
or a CT Scan is normal you don't have a brain injury.And probably the third one that was,
um probably as significant is that if you didn't hit your head you couldn't have a brain
injury. These issues are talked about at length throughout subltebraininjuryhelp.com through
at length through TBIlaw.com. There are clear explanations of why it is that this this witness
test of having a loss of consciousness has nothing to do with the diagnosis of the severity
of the injury. There is substantial information in about how it is that the brain can be injured
even if there is no direct blow to the head. That the forward and back violent motion that
occurs in a whiplash injury is sufficient to jam the inside of the is sufficient to
jam the brain into the very hard surface of the skull or the very sharp surfaces on the
underside of the skull. Whats the biggest change that has occurred in that twelve of
fifteen years since I started doing this a substantial amount is that the MRI technology
has substantially improved. Um, a brain injury involves injury microscopic portions of our
bodies The nerve cells the neurons that are injured in the brain are a hundred thousand
of them have to be injured in the same place to actually have enough to start to show up
on an MRI scan. In the last couple of years the MRI has gone from the capacity of seeing
virtually no permanent brain injury that involved the type of concussions cellebral symptoms
that so many of my clients have to now we are getting as much as 50 percent of those
people we are starting to show starting to show some markers of the brain injury. We
are not actually seeing all the brain damage but are starting to see the markers. Um, that
is probably the most exciting thing that has happened in my career in the last five years.
Um I remember that the actualization of the event where I had a client who had been diagnosed
with a brain injury, she had a vestibular disorder, it was clear that it all happened
but the early MRIs what they call a 1.5 decible MRI had been normal. The new generation of
technology became available in 2004 ah was sent this client to be scanned and the MRI
came back not just showing evidence of brain damage by evidence in the exact places that
the treating doctors had said was there before they had the MRI. I remember it was like , it
was just wonderful. Our current MRI technology is still only showing us the tip of the iceberg.
The 3 testal magnet can now see things, concentration of damage as small as one millimeter. Where
the previous generation was probably more like 2 millimeters. One millimeter is a huge
amount of brain tissue when we are talking about damage. Yet that ability to use the
imaging tool to show us even that much brain injury that is truly wonderful breakthrough
that makes us all very eager for the next generations of scanners will show us even
more.