The potential contribution of the person with the illness needs to be enhanced. That contribution obviously depends on background and experience and may be restricted in scale for health reasons. But activity and involvement in the lives of others can be part of the healing process. The range of possibilities is considerable . . . There is often a feeling of guilt when a carer leaves the side of a person with an illness.
Physicians are mainly concerned with the primary sequelae.
It is not always easy to distinguish the two. On many aspects of cognitive measurement, the groups could not be distinguished. In other words, problems that might have been attributed to the head injury per se were probably the result of having experienced a life-threatening event with all its consequences eg long absences from school, numerous hospital appointments and physiological stress. Thus the central role of individual and family in combatting those real-life consequences must be acknowledged.