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Barely 36 hours after learning of her adult daughter’s sudden death, Kintla Striker fainted in the middle of the night on the bathroom floor. Her husband, Sam, found her unconscious. He

nudged Striker awake and she vomited. Unable to stand, walk or speak, she shook her head “no” when he asked if she had hit her head, and he carried her to bed. When she awoke several hours

later, Striker, then 56, vomited again and could barely walk. A massive headache and pain at the back of her head suggested that she had hit hard when she fell. A CT scan at the local

emergency room showed no bleeding in her brain. So she went home with instructions to rest in a dark room, stay off screens and follow up with her doctor in a few days. But there was no time

to rest. During the next week — it was late June 2022 — the Strikers flew to Michigan, where her daughter had died, then back to their home in Charlottesville, Virginia. Kintla Striker

struggled with a constellation of symptoms, including severe migraines, brain fog, dizziness, blurred vision, balance issues, trouble focusing and problem solving, short- and long-term

memory issues, sensitivity to sounds and light and trouble taking deep breaths. At a follow-up visit about four weeks after the injury, her doctor, an experienced general practitioner,

seemed like “a deer in headlights,” Striker says. As they reviewed her list of symptoms, the doctor asked if she could discern, “how much of this is grief and how much is head injury?”

Striker replied that she didn’t know, but she guessed it was primarily grief. “I couldn’t assess myself well at all,” says Striker, a yoga and mindfulness teacher and researcher who

specializes in treating traumatic stress. The doctor suggested she see a therapist. Striker left the office without a care plan for most of what she was experiencing. The next several months

held repeated lessons about how challenging it is to find well-informed, consistent care for traumatic brain injury, or TBI. Striker’s experience is not unusual. There is no clear treatment

protocol for TBI, primarily because the symptoms are so wide-ranging. That makes both diagnosis and treatment of a brain injury unusually difficult. As a result, doctors often struggle with

TBI treatment, as few general practitioners are well-versed in brain anatomy and function, let alone have extensive experience dealing with TBI cases. What has emerged is that the optimal

solution for TBI treatment is a coordinated, multispecialist approach to “triangulate” the challenges and treatments. That, however, can be hard to get in many health care settings. DEALING

WITH A MIXED BAG OF SYMPTOMS “Follow-up of patients with milder forms of [TBI] is particularly deficient,” wrote Geoff Manley, M.D., professor of neurosurgery at the University of

California, San Francisco, and colleagues in a 2023 editorial in the journal _Injury_. And for older adults, “the standard of care is really too low,” says Matthew Peters, M.D., associate

professor of psychiatry and behavioral services at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.