Traumatic brain injury: An effect and cause of domestic violence and child abuse

In sum, physicians and other healthcare professionals should play a more effective role in reducing the impact of CA and DV by instituting in their practices, and encouraging in their local hospitals, a routine screening for and assessment of physical abuse that is thorough enough to detect TBI. Longitudinal studies of victims with and without TBI would greatly buttress findings based on retrospective self-reports. Knowledge and awareness of domestic abuse by physicians would be heightened by courses in medical school and beyond and facilitated by a recent book [37] and a video [38] on violence against women from the American College of Physicians. Surely the modest costs in time and money of these efforts are worth the long-term benefits of reducing the enormous individual and societal costs of domestic abuse. Copyright © 2004 by Current Science Inc.