Army clinic treats brain injuries

Laura Arenschield, the Fayetteville Observer

Nov. 16–The Army’s first clinic to treat mild-to-moderate brain injuries opened Thursday with a ceremony at Womack Army Medical Center on Fort Bragg.

The Traumatic Brain Injury and Neuro-Rehabilitation Center has been operating without being fully staffed since the end of March.

Womack officials created it to help soldiers with less-than-severe traumatic brain injuries improve their mental abilities.

Until the clinic opened, soldiers with mild or moderate brain injuries were treated only for their symptoms, said Ben Solomon, the center’s chief neurologist. Doctors gave them medicine to help them sleep, to relieve their headaches and to control their mood swings.

Doctors at Womack’s new center will continue to do those things, Solomon said. But the clinic also employs speech pathologists and neuropsychologists who help them rebuild their minds. Until the clinic opened, only soldiers with severe brain injuries received that kind of therapy.

Last month, the center treated 500 soldiers.

“What we’re able to do is what the Army has not been able to do before, what the civilian sector has been unable to do,” Solomon said. “We are treating those soldiers, those folks who have been really left to not be treated for their traumatic brain injuries.”

Fort Bragg treated soldiers with mild-to-moderate brain injuries before the clinic opened at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, but only had one physician’s assistant to prescribe medicines.

That physician’s assistant — Mary Susan Tolbert — is now director of the new center.

Soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan often do not realize they have sustained a brain injury until they return, she said, when their personalities and sleep habits start to change.

“Good soldiers don’t turn bad,” she said. “If these soldiers are willing to put their lives on the line, the least we can do is help them when they come home.”

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