PI Brief Update

Never Assume When It Comes to Injuries - Bill Braithwaite QC, Head of Exchange Chambers

09/07/13. Still on predicting the future, it is so important not to assume that people are the same as other people. You do sometimes hear, even now when we should all know better, phrases like “a standard paraplegic”. A version I came across not long ago was: “If X achieves a level of independence usually found in spinal cord-injured patients at T10”. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that phrase in itself, and the person who used it did so in a correct way. But it is very open to misinterpretation, because it is only a short step to saying either: “why hasn’t he achieved the standard”, or “he probably will achieve it”.

It is because all patients are individuals that the (old fashioned???) phrases disability and handicap were used by the WHO. The point those words make is that the same apparent injury can produce different effects on different people – the commonly used example is the concert pianist who suffers a small injury to a finger – trivial to most, but profoundly disabling to the pianist.

Ongoing pain in spinal cord injury, and memory problems in brain injury, are two common examples, but there are many others – as many as there are catastrophic injuries.

Bill Braithwaite QC, Head of Exchange Chambers
This article was first published at http://billbraithwaite.com/blog/

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