Recovering from brain or brainstem concussion is a formidable task. Concussions are easy to get, but not as easy to recover from. Brain concussions occur during injury to the head, neck and jaw from accidents in contact sports, car-crashes, slips and falls, and often leave many seeking concussion treatment in Utah and other areas of the world.
Protection of the Brain
The brain is encased in an aqueous environment of cerebrospinal fluid, floating inside the protective covering of cranial plates known as the skull. Skull bones come together around the eye, nasal air passages, sinuses, and nerve openings to protect the brain. The cranial bones are joined together along boundaries called sutures. Sutures allow a slight bit of movement of the cranial vault during inspiration and expiration. It was once thought that these sutures fused together and became rigid by adulthood. However, this is not the case as we now know that the cranial plates and the sutures that stitch them together remain moveable until the very late stages of life and therefore contribute to force impact absorption and allow for the recoverability of the skull.
While the skull is thought to be a solid, rigid structure, it does in fact have the awesome ability to absorb and dissipate injurious forces around the brain without transmitting them to the brain. Like the way expansion joints in your driveway allow settling and shifting of the concrete so that the concrete does not crack over the course of the concrete pad.
Skull bones encasing the brain
However, when the head is concussed, and the concussive force exceeds the inherent protective aspects of the cranial plate system and the cerebrospinal fluid encasement, the brain itself receives the force and suffers a concussion of varying severity.
Minor concussions may cause brief confusion, disorientation, and temporary dysfunction to many of the brain’s regions and functions. Major concussions may increase the severity of minor concussion conditions and be accompanied by other more serious symptoms and conditions, ranging from prolonged unconsciousness, intracranial bleeding, permanent memory loss and personality changes.
Receiving a severe blow through a whiplash injury, blunt trauma, or through impact waves traveling through the jaw, can indirectly jolt the delicate neural tissue inside the skull, and can wreak havoc on the intricate connections of billions of nerve junctions that make up the neural network.
Brain cells (called neurons) form complex connections with one another. A severe concussive injury can disrupt the connections between neurons, and by doing so disrupt the normal impulses of the electrical signals that travel over the neural network. This is why we see a variety of brain functional disorders following a concussion of our brain.
All that we see, think, touch, taste, remember, and even feel moves over these delicate connection pathways in the brain, jumping from one neuron to the other neuron over a very small functional space called a synapse. A synapse in the human brain is only 20-40 nanometers wide! This gap is held together by special cells that abound in the brain called astrocytes. When the impact wave from the concussion passes into the brain tissue, the fastening ability of the astrocytes fail, and the neurons may shear at the synapse gap, creating dysfunction in that pathway.
The shearing, compressing and tractioning forces generated during concussion may disturb the microanatomy of synapses thereby disconnecting the axon and dendrite bulbs from one another interfering with the electrochemical messages of life.
Craniocervical Junction–The Missing Link in Concussion Treatment/Recovery
When the brain is concussed through blunt trauma to the skull, whiplash, or a blow to the jaw, the base of the head at the craniocervical junction is almost always knocked out of joint and misaligned away from its ideal position on the top of the axis and atlas neck bones. While this misalignment causes a host of problems, it also interferes with the normal flow of cerebrospinal fluid that the brain relies upon to heal from blunt, concussive trauma. The TAP (Transdermal Atlas Positioning) procedure safely restores this crucial alignment, and gets recovery from concussion on its way.
We cannot say enough concerning the TAP procedure to restore the alignment, flow, and stability of the neural canal as it passes through the craniocervical junction, and the healing effect this has on injured, inflamed and damaged brain tissue.
The TAP procedure non-surgically opens the portal which conducts blood flow into the damaged and concussed brain tissues following a concussion injury and allows for the metabolic debris accumulating in the brain tissue to be flushed from the head via unrestricted venous drainage routes.
There is no risk to the TAP procedure for concussion treatment in Utah when performed at The Lift Clinic. We have pioneered methods of noninvasive correction through procedure guidance of this delicate important region and developed technologies that enable this region to retain its alignment and become stable. Contact our team to learn more about our healing process for concussion treatment in Utah.
