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Thomas Carroll Blauvelt

Why doesn’t the brain heal completely?

If you suffered a traumatic brain injury, the doctors might have told you that you will not see complete healing. It doesn’t mean no healing will happen, but you may not get back to the way things were before that injury. The brain can’t completely recover.

You may find this surprising. After all, if you get a cut, your skin regenerates and heals. If you break a bone, that bone can heal. What is it that keeps your brain from doing the same thing?

Brain cells are different

The difference lies in the type of cells that make up these individual tissues. Things like skin cells are able to divide and regenerate themselves frequently. In fact, you don’t even have to be injured for this to happen. It’s just a natural process for your skin, and the cells always have the ability to grow more skin by replicating the cells themselves.

In the brain, however, the cells are usually unable to regenerate at all. They don’t split as skin cells do, so you can’t create new cells from the ones you have. This makes it impossible for the brain to regenerate to the same degree.

To make up for this, the brain will often try to find new neural pathways to accomplish similar goals. But this doesn’t always bring you back to 100% where you were before, as the brain may not be able to find all of the perfect pathways that it needs.

Seeking compensation

For this reason, brain injuries are especially prone to being life-altering conditions, and it’s very important to know how to seek compensation.

 

 

 

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