Good news on the tbi news front – the Washington Post is running news of a new report on soldiers with tbi.

The 400-page printed report is forthcoming and will cost about $70 to purchase. You can read the full report online for free (tho’ you have to page through, one page at a time) at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12436#toc

While I am really, really happy that national attention is being drawn to this, what worries me is the thought that many tbi surviving vets may get dropped by the wayside and/or be underserved, because people keep repeating that old mantra about “every brain injury is different” and use that as an excuse not to fully engage in helping these wounded warriors heal.

It’s true — every brain is different, and hence every brain injury is different. But that can all too easily stop folks (especially bureaucratically bound professionals) from drawing conclusions and taking steps and reaching out to suggest new solutions to problems we tbi survivors face… just because (they insist) we’re all apparently so different from each other.

From the article at the Washington Post:

“The real bottom line significant finding is that there’s not a good human literature on the kinds of neurotrauma seen in Iraq and Afghanistan caused by blasts,” said Dr. George W. Rutherford, vice chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. “The human literature is really about people who’ve had [brain injury] from car crashes or falling down stairs and, in the military, from shrapnel or gunshots. We’re all worried that blast neurotrauma hasn’t really made it into the human literature.”

This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate and hopefully mitigate the long-term consequences of such injuries, added Rutherford, who chaired the committee that wrote the report.

So, does this mean… because there’s not blast-related neurotrauma literature in abundance, there should be a bottleneck on looking for solutions and treatments and preventions for military personnel?

Because our Iraq/Afghanistan vets’ injuries are from a different source (and presumedly more severe or at least more severely unique) than your “standard issue” assaults, abuse, car crashes, falling down stairs, shrapnel, or gunshots, does this disqualify them from the benefits of the experiences of countless individuals who have experienced and survived tbi — albeit in a different form and from a different source?

Because there isn’t “good human literature” that’s germane to neuroblast specialization, must that prevent us from doing what we can to help these folks?

It’s a chilling thought, that people who are already disadvantaged by an injury that other people cannot see (and which may be in fact hidden from them because of cognitive issues), may continue to be under-served, because they are not your “run-of-the-mill” tbi survivors.

While blast trauma (and the ability to survive blasts) is a relatively recent phenomenon, in relation to the thousands of years people have gone to war, gotten hit on the head, fallen, been smashed and bashed around, and generally sustained brain traumas, the fact remains that head trauma and brain injury are NOT new to the overall human experience. Where human literature is missing, we DO have human experience. After all, the human race is still here.

Surely, there MUST be a way to employ what we DO know about tbi, surviving it, and recovering from it, to assist the folks who are coming back from one war, only to enter another, once they are back home and trying to find their feet again.