injuries, was the closest trauma center to her home. This novel therapeutic approach, experts say, can mean the difference between life and death, or resuming normal activities and a lifetime of dependency.
There's nothing miraculous about Heather Filley's remarkable recovery. "It's just good science, and the technology that saved her should be routine," insists Dr. Jamshid Ghajar, a neurosurgeon at Cornell Medical College president of' the Brain Trauma Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization in New York.
The treatment is in place at the Regional Medical Center at Memphis, the region's only level 1 trauma center.
Unfortunately, despite striking gains made by hospitals that have adopted these new brain-injury standards, most U.S. hospitals don't follow this course of treatment.
Little wonder the rates of death and severe disability among brain-trauma victims remain stubbornly high. Each year 230,000 Americans are hospitalized with brain injuries from car accidents, falls and assaults, leading to death or serious impairment in more than half the cases. In fact, more than 5.3 million Americans, about 2 percent of the U.S. population, live with a disability as a result of a traumatic brain injury, and it costs the federal government $45 billion each year for their care. And this doesn't include costs for private insurers or the inestimable emotional toll on families.
Yet people such as Heather Filley don't have to be doomed to life in a coma or having a permanent disability. Recent studies have shown that the traditionally high rates of death and irreversible brain damage can be drastically cut by implementing the simple procedures doctors used on Heather: monitoring the pressure inside the brains of victims and maintaining blood flow to make sure tissue is supplied with vital nutrients and oxygen.

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