Dear Mark - Thank you for reaching out to the Brain Injury Association. I am familiar with the Neurotalk community and will refer people there for support when there is nothing available in their area. It's a great resource. You ask some excellent questions and ones that we ask often ourselves. I will try to answer these as fully as possible:

Why don't we have a list of docs on our website? That is an ongoing challenge for everyone involved in brain injury advocacy. As I mentioned in my message to you there is not a specialty for brain injury in neurology, so it makes being able to identify a professional who understands brain injury more challenging.

The one suggestion I have for people is to try to find a brain injury rehab program anywhere near you. You may not need all the services they have, but they may have someone on staff that you could see just for a single service. Also, use them as a resource. Ask them who they refer their patients to when they need more in depth evaluation. If the brain injury program refers people to a professional I would think it's a reasonable assumption to make that the professionals know something about brain injury.

As for the question about DTI's that's a good question. I am not sure if there is a list, but I will ask a few of my colleagues to see if they have some suggestions for finding them. I am sure there are not too many around, but you are right it would be nice to know where they are located.

The guy in FL that's giving shots for $10K I know about him and have read the study he put out. It's not good science how he did the study but there is something to the idea of if you can get a medication, a useful medication past the blood brain barrier, it could potentially be very effective in the brain, and you would not need a lot of it to be effective. I just think he needs to do a better study. The study he did was with a large number of people (600+) but there was no control group, the outcome measures used were terrible (they weren't even measurements it was like "the patient can move more"). But clearly if those tapes of people getting a treatment are accurate, there is the potential for usefulness.

Also stem cells, that's so new in brain injury. The only trials done in the US thus far have been small to test the safety and efficacy. There is a lot more that needs to be understood on how to make stem cells help brain function. There was an article in one our issues of our newsletter about stem cells, and the leading researcher in the US said something to the effect of stem cells don't really replace the actual neurons, but they seem to work to improve the "support cells". There is a lot there we do not understand yet.