EP 132: The Parent's Guide: What to Ask, Who to Push, and How to Get Your Kid the Right Care

And so this episode is really going to be the parent's guide to helping your child recover with concussion and making sure they're getting the care they need to get.

So this question or this comment came from ca- this, a woman named Cheryl, and Cheryl had said, "Do you have anything for parents so we know what questions to ask or how to make sure they're getting the right treatment? My daughter has had post-concussion symptoms for months and just wanna get her, and just wants to get her life back and do gymnastics again." So Cheryl, this episode is for you and for every parent who's sitting in your shoes who's trying to navigate this space to help their child.

Because here's the truth, being a parent navigating your child's concussion, the healthcare system wasn't designed for that, right? It wasn't designed to support in that thing.

It was designed for individual patients, and when the patient is the child, a teenager, or a young athlete, you're in the room, you become the advocate.

You're the one who notices the things they won't, and nobody gives you a map.

So today, I'm hoping to give you the map.

This would be one that you wanna, you wanna pull out a pen and paper, take some notes, bookmark this episode, share it with a parent friend that you know so that you have it should the time come that you need to navigate this path with your child.

So before you can advocate effectively [chuckles] for somebody, you, we talk about you need that basic map of the landscape so you know what you're actually navigating, right? So a concussion is a brain injury.

It's not a bump to the head.

It's not a bruise.

It's not something they're just gonna shake off.

It is a physiological disruption to brain function that requires a proper approach and treatment.

Okay, so I'm gonna be really blunt with that.

When the research states over and over and over again at this point that the best expedited trajectory for recovery is that you connect with a concussion-specific clinic within the first week, okay? Normal scans, like normal CTs, normal MRIs, do not mean that nothing is wrong.

Okay? This is the most important thing.

[chuckles] A normal CT or MRI is reassuring because what it does tell you is that there's no fracture, there's no bleed, there's nothing of that level of injury, but it does nothing to tell us about the function of the brain or if a concussion is or is not present.

Okay? Recovery can take longer in our youth than it does in adults.

So for those people that hear that, you know, "It's a couple of days and they're fine," or it's like, "It's a week and they're back to themselves," the average length of time for a youth to recover is at minimum four weeks.

It's not a day.

It's not two days.

It's four weeks.

Now, that being said, your child should be improving over the period of those weeks, but it's not abnormal for it to take that length of time.

Okay? Concussion is multi-system.

So what do I mean by that? I mean it affects different systems of how we function in our life.

So that could be symptoms like headaches, dizziness, mood or irritability issues, sleep disturbances.