Can patting your head cause brain damage

This question has been asked time and time again.

Many Black women express issues with their scalp itching before, during and after getting their hair done. Many, use the “patting their head” treatment so as to get rid of the itching, while not messing up their hairstyle or scalp. Many women can be seen doing it frequently throughout the day, but the question remains: is it damaging your brain?

The short answer is that it is very unlikely. If you don’t have any loss of consciousness, seizures, arm/leg weakness, altered vision, persistent severe post traumatic headaches, you more than likely will have no ill effects.

It actually takes fairly hard trauma to the head to hurt someone who is an adult.

But (you knew that a “but” was coming), with that being said, there is medical evidence that over a number of years, repeated mini-concussions can in fact cause brain damage. Rapidly shaking your head around back and forth can cause axons to tear, which causes brain cell death. Just think of the “shaking baby syndrome.” But as an adult, more force is needed to tear those axons apart than just a little shaking here and there.

And what can be classified as brain damage?

The brain is vulnerable to traumatic damage in two ways. The cerebral cortex can become bruised – contused – when the head strikes a hard object (or a hard objects strikes the head). Or, the deep white matter can suffer diffuse axonal injury when the head is whiplashed without hitting a hard object (or being hit by one). In serious whiplash injuries, the axons are stretched so much that they are damaged.

The brain has it’s own system of dealing with foreign materials, viruses, or trauma. The rest of the body depends largely on white blood cells or T-cells attacking invaders and making repairs. However, in the brain, this function has taken over by structures in the brain called “glial cells or astrocyctes.” When these cells become activated by trauma,…

…they tend to remain activated for years, during which they attack healthy or repairing brain cells. In response to trauma, the brain cells produce too much calcium and that can become toxic to areas of the brain. The delicate balance of different organic molecules crucial to brain function becomes disruptive after trauma and recent studies have suggested that this imbalance continues for at least eighteen years in brain injured patients. Some of these imbalances can be noted on a type of MRI called spectroscopy.

Bottom line is that people can and do get worse in the short run with brain injury. This is largely due to people not allowing time for their injuries to heal.

So if you have sustained any injury to the brain AND patt your head, you could be of course making the injury worse, not allowing it time to heal.

So, the question needs to be asked, how hard are you patting your head and how frequent is it. If you are suffering from: