Can a person suffer a mild traumatic brain injury that has catastrophic consequences to his or her life?
Absolutely. There really is no such thing as a mild or minor brain injury. Our brain controls almost every aspect of our lives. By definition any injury to the brain is serious. Hippocrates recognized this fact in the 4th Century B.C. when he wrote: “No head injury is too severe to despair of, nor too trivial to ignore.” The term mild head injury originates from the classification scheme of the Glasgow Coma Scale. This is a test that evaluates a patient’s state of consciousness and may be used to predict whether the patient is likely to survive. The scale was never intended to predict functional outcome following traumatic brain injury. The brain is the body’s central processing unit and its system software. It regulates attention, cognition, language, memory, conduct, movement, and all the autonomic functions. Minor damage to a computer’s CPU or system software is likely to lead to the computer working a lot slower or crashing. Similarly, even minor damage to the brain can cause a per
