Articles Posted in Brain Injury

In the past week I’ve run across an unexpected convergence between my roles as a trial lawyer handling brain injury cases and as president-elect of the State Bar of Georgia. Last Friday, I attended a program on criminal justice reform at the American Bar Association office in Washington, along with state government representatives. Among the dizzying…

Over the years in my Atlanta personal injury practice, I have worked on cases involving catastrophic tire failure. It has certainly made me more alert to issues when tire issues arise with vehicles in our family.  And it helped to increase my patience with the replacement process when I recently ran over some sort of…

For an attorney handling Georgia brain injury cases, the difficulty of sorting out causes and effects is both frustrating and fascinating. Now there is a study reporting that head trauma may produce a motor neuron disease syndrome that looks like ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In fact, the researchers hypothesize…

As an Atlanta injury attorney practicing throughout Georgia with a special interest in spinal cord and traumatic brain injury cases, I was glad to see that Shepherd Center, within walking distance from my office, will host the North American Neurorehabilitation Symposium on August 27 and 28, 2010. The program is designed primarily for medical professionals…

Mild traumatic brain injury sometimes seems like an oxymoron. It’s only mild if it happens to someone you don’t know. The Centers for Disease Control here in Atlanta, together with the American College of Emergency Physicians, recently released updated guidelines for physicians in assessing patients with suspected mild traumatic brain injury.  The release includes: This…

As a Georgia attorney representing people with spinal cord and brain injuries, I am always alert to new treatments that offer hope for a better life for them. New animal studies at Children’s Hospital of Boston showed the suppression of the SOCS3 gene, an inhibitor of a growth pathway called mTOR — resulted in vigorous…

While I make my living as a trial attorney handling personal injury liability cases for people who have been seriously injured, I am also deeply interested in scientific advances that improve their prospects for productive lives of high quality. Traumatic spinal cord injuries leading to quadriplegia and paraplegia are among the most devastating of all…

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Department of Neurobiology and Developmental Sciences  web site offers an online brain atlas with multiple atlas images, including sectional and MRI images, of the brain and spinal cord Ken Shigley is a trial attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, who has represented numerous survivors of brain and spinal cord…

As a trial lawyer handling traumatic brain injury cases, one of my frustrations is that serious diffuse axonal injuries cannot be visualized with normal CT and MRI scans.  High resolution PET scans combined with functional MRI (fMRI) can show more, but access is extremely limited in this part of the country. MIT Technology Review has reported on three…

After traumatic brain injury, it is critically important to immediately begin nutritioal supplementation, by a gastric tube or PIC line if necessary.  According to a recent study from New York Presbyterian Hospital, without gastric feeding within the first 5-7 days of suffering their injury, TBI patients had a two- and four-fold higher likelihood of death.…