Question:
I found that dr.s don't always TELL you much! After my head injury healed up, no one told me that there could be any other problems...I had to read about it in the newspaper about a year later! Then I made the connection between the injury and the neck/back pains and other things. When I mentioned this to my dr. he said: "Oh, well...I see some grey hairs up there (on my head) and you always get these kind of problems when you get OLDER". Well...none of them were there before the injury. After x-rays they found degenerative disk damage, but concluded THAT was 'old age' too! I guess it's easier to do that than try and treat us 'old folks'! What they don't take into consideration is that my family live to be quite old, and if you are in yourearly 60's, you STILL have 20 or so productive years ahead. Why should we have to spend them in pain and fighting your own dr.s???

Answer: In my experience, specialists are too often myopic! Brain injury specialists too often only notice (and overinterpet) brain injury symptoms. Orthopods too often only notice orthopedic problems and neglect brain injury symptoms. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists often only notice (and overinterpret; and mix up cause and reaction; and look for and find) psychological symptoms.

This phenomenon is referred to as the "Law of the Instrument".

I can't tell you the number of times a few local, nationally renouned brain injury experts, and their underlings, fail to treat back and other pain that, when I see the same patients after years of no improvement, improve greatly from pain symptom treatment / improvement. I have sometimes offered: "If you have a kid hanging on your neck and punching you in the ear (which is what pain acts like) how can you expect to concentrate, remember efficiently, etc.? And from neuropsychological assessments of persons with chronic pain, I see very similar profiles to persons with mild TBI. And similar profiles are also seen in patients with significant sleep disturbance, fatigue problems,