What is Head Trauma or Injury? Head trauma is caused when shearing and twisting forces impact the skull and brain. These impacts can disrupt the normal structure of the brain and neural pathways. It is possible to sustain brain injury even at moderate speed collisions. When the soft brain bounces off the bones of the skull, blood vessels may be torn or bruised. Damage to the nerve cells may also occur. Even if the nerve cells are not disrupted, there may be damage to the myelin sheaths, which in turn can disrupt brain function. (The myelin sheaths enable the nerve cells to conduct electrical impulses). About two thirds of patients with mild traumatic brain injury will recover 80% of their pre-injury functioning within 6 months. Most of these patients will go on to complete healing within the next year to year-and-a-half. However, about 1/3 of the patient do not heal and our treatment is aimed primarily at those patients whose symptoms do not go away after 6 months. Perceptual Stages of Recovery (Emotional=Subjective) Probably 80% recover completely from head injury, without lasting problems. The recovery may take up to a year, but eventually things seem to level out. Some people never recover from their injury, even though it may have seemed fairly minor at the time. Initially many people experience confusion and agitation. Later, they may find themselves doing very peculiar things, being forgetful, not taking care of their physical bodies, but they may deny that there is any problem. This can be difficult for families. This denial may become either emotional (they just don't want to deal with the problem) but more often is a result of physical injury to the brain itself. Later, they may become depressed or angry, when they begin to realize that they are not functioning normally, and which often can lead to the fear that they may never function normally. What do we do at the CrossRoads Institute? We treat patients with unresolved head injury symptoms on many different levels using many different tools. We have found there is never just one issue or area of the brain that is affected. We use a wide variety of tools within our healing practice. The tools do not dictate how we work with our patients. However, they do enhance our ability to provide the most effective treatment plan and protocols for each individual. In short, one size does not fit all. But our treatment goal is the same for each patient and that is to help each and every one regain their full potential. Our initial evaluation includes: Complete neuro-functional/developmental examination. Medical history, including review of old records. qEEG (quantitative EEG) to assess the function of the brain and sensory systems. Listening tests to assess listening ability and auditory processing. If indicated, a recommendation for testing of metobolic, allergies, and other body systems. If the individual is considered a candidate (based on the evaluation) we may recommend our “brain lab” where we do treatments to correct the overall brain processing abnormalities and auditory processing issues caused by the head injury. We use a form of EEG neurofeedback, which helps "retrain" the brain to recover a more normal pattern of brain waves thus relieving depression, anxiety and agitation, and promoting normal brain functioning. We have found that in cases of head injury the sensory nerves, including the auditory nerve at the base of the skull, are often damaged. Damage to the sensory systems resulting in damage to the supporting functional processes interferes with our emotional interpretation of signals received. This is often a cause of our inability to maintain proper emotional balance. This injury-based interference is directly addressed in the brain lab. The Brain WorkOut includes: Neurotherapy techniques Auditory processing techniques Visual processing techniques Memory and cognition rehab And more Our retraining and rehabilitation program may take anywhere from two to four months, with treatments of 90 minutes three times a week. Typically, our patients will do auditory processing rehabilitation, cognitive skills development, sensory integration, neurotherapy, home neuro-development exercises, and mentoring all concurrently. Each of the modules builds on and supports the others, leading to quicker and more lasting results.

Function of the Brain: Different areas in the brain serve different functions, but the interaction of each area contributes to our sense of cognition (a set of ideas or whole thought ). Vision: images coming from our eyes go directly to the visual cortex in the back of the brain, the occipital lobes. The interpretation of what we just saw involves other areas of the brain that include language, sensation and emotional interpretation and finally the ability to abstractly put in perspective what is being seen. Movement is controlled by a very narrow area of the brain, a band running across the head from ear to ear, called the central motor strip. If this area is injured, movement will be impaired, along with attention, concentration, access to memory and many other important functions. Hearing and language are controlled by the temporal lobes. In the 95% of people who are right handed, (left brain dominant), this function resides in the left temporal lobe. Identification of musical sounds and noises is handled by the right temporal lobe, along with our ability to discriminate emotions, social behavior, anger and unspoken subjective understanding. Vision and hearing interact at the boundary between the occipital (seeing) lobes and the temporal (hearing) lobes. In this area, we convert a visual stimulus (for instance, printed words) into an abstract concept or idea which may be based upon any of our sensory systems such as sound or sight. . If there is abnormality of this area, we may experience one of the many forms of dyslexia, the inability to convert the written word into language. Sensation is experienced in the area of the brain immediately adjacent to and just behind the motor strip. These sensations come in from our sensory systems and are experienced as raw feelings independent of emotional interpretations. Within this same area of the brain is the association cortex, where we learn to associate feelings with different combinations of sensory input. (such as: when you hear music that may remind you of a good time or smell an odor that had a unpleasant memory associated with it) The Executive functions, planning and organization occur in the frontal lobes. Conscious subjective experience of emotion also occurs in this area. Unconscious experience of emotion (things which are locked in to the physical body, or the autonomic nervous system) is experienced by the amygdala, completely bypassing the cortex and the conscious mind and are stored away in a part of the implicit memory system. (Fight or Flight)