How to Know If Your Concussion Needs Special Treatment
Most doctors will advise you to recover from a concussion by resting and waiting for the symptoms to clear up. But the latest research shows that vacationing isn’t always the best option. Concussion clinics in several states are using new strategies. Here’s how to find out if you need to seek specialized treatment.
The reason for standard treatment is that brain cells need rest to recover and exercise can worsen symptoms, which is why many doctors forbid exercise and hard mental work (which may include classroom and homework for students) while you wait for symptoms disappear. … This works in many cases. But new research shows that people with long-standing symptoms recover faster when they start performing certain tasks, training their brains to regain lost function. Outside magazine explains what the regimen looked like for one snowboarder who was being treated for a concussion at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center:
One of the attendees to this year’s program was Laura Fraser, who had three types of concussion (vestibular, ocular, and anxious / mood). Her recipes included staring at a point on the wall while shaking her head, looking for crowded places where people are bustling around her, and focusing on objects at different distances. Her doctors also insisted that she start exercising again. Running or biking, initially 20 minutes a day, became part of her recovery program. “It was the opposite of what I heard for a whole year,” she says. But it worked. By December, her symptoms had disappeared and she was allowed to snowboard more.
At these concussion clinics, doctors test various aspects of brain function, categorizing your symptoms into one or more of six types and assigning tasks to help treat that type. But this is cutting edge research, and your family doctor is probably not trained in how to treat concussions this way.
According to an Outside article, standard resting treatment is likely to work for many concussions, but here’s how you can tell if you need specialized treatment:
According to experts, head injury symptoms that resolve overnight or over several days shouldn’t be a cause for concern. Even a repeated concussion does not require the help of a specialist, if these effects also quickly disappear. But when symptoms last several weeks or longer, or if they are the result of multiple head injuries, people should see a specialist, which at this point may mean traveling out of state to concussion centers in Colorado, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, or North Carolina. Visit ConcussionClinics.org to find the closest one to you.
Read the full article to learn more about the new treatments for concussion.
The New Science of Concussion Recovery | outside
Photo by Ian Carroll .