Whether your concussion occurred a week ago or a year ago, your brain yearns to heal. With the right kind of help, it can.

After specializing in cranial osteopathic medicine for over two decades, over the last ten years I have found myself treating more and more patients who suffered from the lingering effects of concussions. Many of these patients had seen multiple practitioners in an endless quest to get well.

They suffer from crippling headaches, debilitating fatigue, insomnia, vertigo, depression, anxiety, memory problems, chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, and a host of other maladies that seem to have no relationship to each other.

Most of the time, none of their practitioners there was any connection between the patient’s spiral of suffering and the concussion that started it. Eventually, these patients are dismissed as “head cases” whose suffering is imagined or emotionally based.

To me, these gallant souls are not head cases. The effect of injury on the human body and spirit, including head injury, can be insidious, causing problems far way from and seemingly unrelated to the brain and throwing its victims into a spiral of loneliness, isolation, and despair.

None of it is necessary.

It takes listening carefully to the patient, as the patient almost always holds the clues that lead to the best treatments. Over the years, I have learned that my patients are my greatest teachers — they, plus a comprehensive knowledge of anatomy and an awareness of how the body and brain work to heal themselves.