Living in America’s Never-Never Land — the Optimistic Nonsense that Americans Are Asked to Swallow about Traumatic Brain Injury

16 June 2011

Traumatic brain injury prognoses are almost always depressing

When Representative Gabrielle Giffords (Arizona) was shot in the head, her physicians took a deliberately misleading optimistic line in public.

The media willingly went along, as if no one in the world already knew the disturbingly pessimistic facts about traumatic brain injury (TBI) — despite years of military experience with brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fools are willingly led.

Deception as a primary way of social interaction?

There is something unappealing about a culture that so complacently accepts deception as an appropriate foundation for social interactions and government policy.

Why should we care? — TBI patients are generally left to sink, unaided

Ruth Bettelheim and Geralynn Knorr, both experts on the subject, explained yesterday why untruths about the dismaying prognosis in traumatic brain injury are damaging us as an American people:

Pretend for a moment that you are Gabrielle Giffords, about whom we are at last being told the truth.

After 6 months of inpatient treatment, the best that money can buy, you can't speak fluently and must rely upon facial expressions and hand gestures to make up for words that vanish as you search for them.

But continuing rehabilitation will not be available to you because your insurance won't pay for it.

Imagine yourself the victim of a serious brain injury: losing the ability to bathe yourself, feed and dress yourself, walk, and even think clearly.

Every 19 seconds someone in the US sustains a traumatic brain injury, and 90,000 Americans are left with long term disabilities each year.

These alarming numbers do not include military personnel, tens of thousands of whom also suffer a TBI annually.

Unlike Gabrielle Giffords, their inpatient rehabilitation ends after 6-12 weeks, not 6 months.

They will be discharged the moment they can transfer from bed to commode and use a walker, even if they are incoherent and cannot take care of themselves in the simplest ways.

When we don’t recognize truth, we can’t deal with it effectively

When we can’t deal with truth, we box shadows instead. Meanwhile, Reality blind-sides us.

That sums the American condition today.

The moral? — Lies are bad

Liars benefit no one, other than (occasionally) their selfishly shallow selves.

The media has an ethical responsibility to get things right, to fact check, and to educate.

Instead, we seem to generally settle for the Media as purveyor of the irrelevant and deliberately twisted.

That’s bad for an allegedly free and democratic people.

PeteFree.com

Living in America’s Never-Never Land — the Optimistic Nonsense that Americans Are Asked to Swallow about Traumatic Brain Injury