ABSTRACT
Minor or mild head injury is a frequent consequence of motor vehicle accidents. These head injuries, many of which are seemingly trivial in nature, often result in a persisting constellation of subjective disabilities and complaints that have been termed the post-concussion syndrome (PCS). Sweeney has extended the interpretation of the consistency of self-reported symptoms in PCS to argue that many personal injury litigants, who have never even hit their heads, suffer from brain damage. Putnam and Millis have proposed that persisting PCS after minor or mild head injury can best be conceptualized as a type of somatoform disorder. One criticism that might be argued regarding the investigation is that in order to better understand the influence of compensation and litigation factors on PCS, it would be necessary to include a control group of patients suffering from PCS who were not litigating or compensated.
