Your brain does heal, but it’s not the same as the rest of your body. In many cases, a traumatic brain injury is only going to heal to a certain percentage. This can bring back some of the skills you may have lost or the cognitive functions, but you may not necessarily regain everything.
For instance, perhaps you suffered a TBI that left you unable to speak. Through physical therapy and speech therapy over the next six months, you may have regained the ability to speak, but you may still have a limited vocabulary or feel like you have to work extra hard to accomplish it. People with mobility issues may not be able to walk at all after the initial incident, but they may regain some ability to walk with assistance later on.
But why is this? When other parts of your body, such as your skin, suffer injuries, they are generally able to heal to 100% of the function they had before. Why is it that the brain is different?
Neural cells are just built differently
The difference is that the neural cells in your brain do not share all the characteristics of the cells in your skin or other organs. Most cells have some ability to replicate and regenerate if they are damaged or destroyed. This is why your skin can heal if you get a minor cut. It just regenerates the cells that it needs to fix that issue.
Your neural cells have far less ability to do this. Some cannot regenerate at all. As a result, your brain can’t simply replace cells that were damaged or destroyed. It may need to focus on finding new pathways for the signals that tell your body what to do. This is why you can see some level of healing as it rewrites some of those pathways, but it may not be able to find new pathways for all of the impulses necessary to bring you back to 100%.
What options do you have?
For these reasons, medical treatment after a traumatic brain injury can be very expensive and you may have to undergo some level of treatment for the rest of your life. You could also see other long-term changes to your career, your relationships and more. If this has happened to you, then you need to know about all of your legal options to seek financial compensation from the party who was responsible.
