Traumatic brain injuries are often hard to identify.
For a valid mTBI diagnosis, patients need at least one of the following symptoms.
- Disorientation
- Confusion
- Amnesia of events that happened near the time of the injury
- Neurological or neuropsychological problems
- Scoring a minimum of 13 on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS)
Brain damage from an injury takes place on a near-microscopic level. Consequently, image scans may not pick them up. Doctors might call this nearly invisible damage a microtrauma. A person with microtrauma can suffer very serious symptoms that don’t show up in diagnostic tests. As you can imagine, this can cause confusion about the legitimacy and seriousness of your injuries—and cause disputes with insurance companies.
