March is Brain Injury Awareness Month, an opportunity to bring greater awareness to brain injuries which affect more than 3.5 million Americans each year, including our military service members. This year, the Brain Injury Association of America has designated the theme of Brain Injury Awareness Month as “Change Your Mind.” Their goals are to de-stigmatize brain injury, empower survivors of brain injury and their caregivers, and promote the types of support that are available to people living with brain injury.
Brain injuries are complex, just like the brain. Like fingerprints or snowflakes, no two brain injuries are alike. This can make the treatment of brain injuries more complicated than other injuries. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all treatment. Brain injuries can cause physical, sensory, and cognitive issues that can range from headaches to seizures, vision issues, and depression.
Our Intrepid Spirit Centers, satellite centers of our National Intrepid Center of Excellence (NICoE), are blazing the path for treating traumatic brain injuries in military personnel. We began this mission twelve years ago in 2007 raising $60 million to construct NICoE, which researches, diagnoses, and treats TBI and post-traumatic stress (PTS). After the completion and opening of NICoE, it was clear that there was a need for more facilities to treat military TBI, so we launched our current mission: building Intrepid Spirit Centers.
Each Intrepid Spirit Center acts as a satellite to the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, applying their interdisciplinary model of care to treat each unique TBI case. The programs implemented at Intrepid Spirit Centers encompass a wide range of therapies and treatments to treat the wide-ranging effects of TBI. The methods of treatment at Intrepid Spirit Centers include physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, vestibular therapy, vision therapy and more. In addition, other treatments that are part of the model of care include yoga, music therapy, and art therapy, all of which have been proven to help address the symptoms and effects of a traumatic brain injury.
With nine Intrepid Spirit Centers operational and one more planned, every service member treated gets us closer to changing the perception of traumatic brain injuries, and healing as many of our military heroes as we can. Over 90% of those treated at our Intrepid Spirit Centers return to either Active Duty or regular civilian life. This Brain Injury Awareness Month, help us expand treatments of TBI to more of our heroes with a donation to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund.
Posted on March 4 2019 in Blog