4 Tips For A TBI Plaintiff

Brain injuries are rough to say the least. They’re hard to diagnose, they can take their time showing up, they can even be impossible to identify when they’re staring you in the face, and insurance companies are often all too eager to use the ambiguity of a traumatic brain injury (TBI) to get away with a small settlement. If you want to avoid being written off as a faker, you should keep the following tips in mind:

1. Get A Second Opinion And Seek Out Advanced Brain Scans

All too often a brain injury won’t show up on an MRI or CT scan, and a doctor who’s used to relying on just these now-basic technologies may pronounce you fit as a fiddle even though you, your family, and your friends all know there is something significantly wrong. Fortunately, there are a variety of more powerful and specialized tests which can spot unusual details, so if at first you don’t succeed, try until something shows up.

2. Document And Keep Everything

No matter what kind of case you’re looking at, you’ll be sure to get a better settlement or a more favorable verdict if you can build up an overwhelming body of evidence. The way you can do that is by taking pictures of yourself and the car, including both long shots and details of the damage. You should also remember to keep all the records and test results of your clinic and hospital visits, even if they don’t turn up anything: if you happen to skip one or two, the insurance company might accuse you of concealing something.

3. Try To Cope

Life with TBI isn’t easy, nor is it easy to say how you can recover from such an injury. Your brain controls virtually all the functions of your body, particularly your ability to make decisions, sense the world around you, and communicate your thoughts to the world, and any one of these functions (or more) could cause you a variety of problems by not working right.

If your speech center is damaged, you might have trouble understanding what people say even as you read, write, and speak perfectly. Alternately, you may be able to understand others perfectly but need to relearn how to speak. If your frontal lobe is damaged, you’ll often give in to your whims and urges without even realizing it, and if your visual cortex is hurt you may have trouble seeing even though your eyes are perfectly fine.

Still, it’s important to keep moving ahead as well as you can when you have a brain injury or any other sort of disability. An insurance company may try to use the fact that you can still partially function in society against you, but at the same time a judge or jury won’t look kindly on someone who uses his or her disability as an excuse to avoid working or being active in society.

4. Get Help

When you’re severely injured by a TBI, you need more than just a diagnosis: you need help. If you’ve lost your ability to do something, you may be able to get help from a developmental psychologist or a physical therapist. If your TBI has caused a personality disorder, you may be able to bring it back under control with medication and therapy.

And if your TBI has created a large medical bill, you may want to work with a personal injury lawyer to negotiate with the insurance companies involved. A good lawyer, like the ones who work for , Goldman, Babboni, and Walsh, can often get a better settlement out of an insurance company since it’s a cheaper alternative than going to court and potentially losing anyway. So if you live or were injured in southwest Florida, be sure to look us up for a free case review.