
Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, is something that affects a great number of people across the United States every year. It is estimated that upwards of 1.7 million traumatic brain injuries are sustained every year. About 52,000 of those injuries result in death, while 275,000 people are hospitalized. That leaves roughly 1.37 million people with TBI who are treated in an emergency room and released.
Traumatic brain injuries are not limited to only one age group. Everyone who has a brain is subject to getting one, regardless of age, race, gender, creed, or color. Anyone who falls is subject to the possibility of a TBI. In fact, falls are the leading cause of hospital visits related to traumatic brain injury.
For adults who are aged 20 to 24, the leading cause of TBI-related deaths is a motor vehicle-traffic injury. Fatal car accidents are very often the result of a driver or a passenger who has collided with another vehicle or an immovable object and sustained a significant blow to the head. Often, in a fatal car accident, there is nothing that can be done.
Because the vast majority of the people who are treated for traumatic brain injury are released from the emergency room of the hospital and not checked in, there is a significant risk that their condition could worsen. The kinds of injuries that are sustained from everything from a football injury to a severe car accident to a simple fall while skiing can make a head injury difficult to diagnose.
Natasha Richardson, the late wife of Liam Neeson and daughter of Vanessa Redgrave, died from a brain injury she contracted while skiing with her family. She was treated and released, thinking she was going to be fine. Just a headache. But, she died later of complications from that injury. It might not always be clear when a brain injury is prevalent. It also might not be clear if the doctor treating you is doing so in the proper manner. Sometimes signs get missed and it is simply sad. Other times, the might be something missed that should have been caught by the attending doctor. In those times, you might need to seek after malpractice help.
Malpractice help can come from a number of different sources, but it is always best to find out what you need to know from an attorney who specializes in giving malpractice help as a significant part of their law practice. When you have a lawyer on your side, you can feel much more certain about all of your options should anything like this happen to you or a member of your family.
Many people see having a lawyer as either a defensive move or an aggressive move toward legal action. That is not always the case, however. Often, simply retaining a lawyer is a way of making sure you have all the information you might need in the event that you do have to take some kind of legal action.
We can never be fully prepared to prevent an accident from happening; that is why we call them accidents. What we can do, however, is prepare ourselves with the information we might need if we ever find ourselves in trouble.