I have seen many patients make a complete recovery from traumatic brain injuries, including concussions. Some of these patients have suffered for years from the consequences of concussion. But the brain and body are incredibly wise, and the brain will heal with the right kind of help.

Chances are you’re dizzy, tired, have trouble sleeping and have problems with memory, balance, thinking and concentration. You are endlessly losing your keys and your phone and are easily overwhelmed . And if you’ve just had a brain injury or a concussion, chances are you find it hard to ask for help. That’s partly because your symptoms often feel bizarre, confusing and unconnected. Your battered brain doesn’t work well enough to help you make sense of your distress. And, unlike a broken arm positioned at a weird angle, you usually look fine, making your suffering invisible to friends, family and bosses.

You are not invisible to me. After thirty-five years of treating people who have sustained brain injuries, I recognize the subtle signs of your distress.

I see it in your confused face, as you struggle with light and noise sensitivities. I see how your body doesn’t look totally connected. I hear it in the flatness and tentativeness of your speech. Some of your reserve may come from embarrassment that you are making a fuss about what seems like nothing or that something that once seemed so easy for you is now so difficult. Like most people, you probably discount your symptoms.

Your symptoms are a crucial part of the puzzle. But practitioners always have to dig deeper and ask, “what could be causing this patient’s particular constellation of symptoms?”

Why? Well for one thing, the brain is so enormously complex and its interconnections so vast that the same symptoms can have many possible causes. A headache could be related to injuries to the vagus nerve as it exits the skull, to muscles spasm in the neck, to problems with the visual pathways, or to spasming blood vessels within the skull. Fatigue can be caused by injuries to the pituitary gland in the center of the skull, to overactivity of the fight or flight sympathetic nervous system, or, if you injured your chest when you sustained your concussion, to shortness of breath. You may simply be dehydrated. Any practitioner worth their salt has to look at the entire spectrum of their patient’s history in order to understand their symptoms and even look around corners for the answers.

And, it’s not just the brain and its neurons that are injured in a concussion. Concussions also damage SYSTEMS in the body and brain.The autonomic nervous system, the brain’s powerful fluid flows, and the brain’s suspension system that anchors and positions the brain inside the skull. Left untreated, disruption of any of these systems can cause cascades of injury and destruction that can go on for months, even years.

Finally, concussion involves the whole body. A force that’s powerful enough to injure the brain almost certainly injures the neck, and probably other parts of the body as well. The gut, the liver, the chest, the sacrum, can all be injured in the same instant that the brain sustains an injury. These additional injuries can contribute to and exacerbate the injury to the brain.

If you start to look around the corners for what just happened when you injured your brain, you will come up with some very surprising answers about how to fix it.

If you start to look around the corners for what just happened when you injured your brain, you will come up with some very surprising answers about how to fix it. Practitioners are still catching up to what the science is revealing about what happens to the brain in a concussion. Everyone agrees that the connections between the brain’s neurons are strained; that’s why practitioners typically prescribe cognitive and physical rest. But injured neurons, given the right circumstances, will heal, or other neurons will step up to take their place. Then why is it that months or years after a concussion, tens of thousands of victims have still not recovered?

Concussions do far more than damage neurons; they damage SYSTEMS in the body and brain. Systems like the fight-or-flight autonomic nervous system , the brain’s robust fluid flows, and the brain’s membranous suspension system that anchors and positions the brain inside the skull.

Concussions also can damage the master regulator of our hormones, the pituitary gland, causing menstrual and sexual problems, fatigue, and headaches. They can damage the pathways to the pineal gland, which can impact sleep and inflammation. And if the mishap involves the chest and neck, as it often does, our breathing, digestion, heart and lungs can be affected.

This is an immensely complicated subject, but I believe the basic outlines of how to recover from a concussion are not. Osteopathic physicians have been attending to

WHAT HAPPENS IN A CONCUSSION

TO BE ABLE TO HELP A CONCUSSION HEAL, it helps to know what happened to the brain in the first place. Every day, there are astonishing new discoveries about how the brain and the body responds to this injury. Every concussion is different. Your brain and the connections it makes are as unique as your fingerprints. The variables are almost infinite. Here are some of the main factors that can affect how a concussion affects you.

• The amount of force your brain is subjected to, the direction of the force, whether you have a pre existing vulnerability that makes you more vulnerable to injury
• female gender
• age
• prior concussions
• stress
• Early life stressors
• depression
• Lack of consistent exercise (reserve)
• Poor diet
• whether the head was directly impacted

•Many things happen in a concussion If you get dizzy when you try to exercise, feel faint when you stand up or your digestion or sleep is impaired, your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) may have been affected.

The ANS is the part of your nervous system that keeps you breathing, your heart beating, your blood pressure stable, your digestion providing your nutrients. These critical functions keep you alive without you having to think about them.
Concussions are some of the most frightening and frustrating injuries for my patients. Because it is often an invisible injury - no bruises, bleeding, or broken bones - patients often do not get the support or care they need. They often suffer in silence, feeling as though they are making a fuss about nothing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As I turned my focus to the treatment of concussions about ten years ago, the medical literature was just beginning to focus on concussions. With the insights of some brilliant researchers and clinicians, a picture is now emerging of what happens to the brain in a concussion. That picture is astonishingly consistent with what Osteopathic physicians have known for decades: to heal the brain, three things have to happen:

1. The autonomic nervous system and its “fight or flight” reaction must be calmed.
2. The brain’s fluid flows must be restored in order to help resolve inflammation.
3. The brain’s inherent motion must be restored and the strains in the brain’s tissues must be resolved.

To truly heal, There are other things that have to happen as well: we have to feed the brain nutritious food, In the last ten years, our knowledge of concussions has exploded. Yet the basic principles of healing from a concussion are the same as those for healing from injuries elsewhere in the body: Calm the autonomic nervous system, help resolve inflammation - by restoring fluid flow and other approaches, and restore movement and alignment to injured tissues.

Concussions cause people to lose their sense of themselves. They are often invisible, both to the person suffering from it and