time.” He also enjoys working with a team of doctors and therapists. In the fall and spring, which are the busiest seasons for athletics, Dr. Watanabe says he sees as many as four or five new patients a week with concussions. “I don’t think people are actually getting more concussions,” he says, but they are more aware of them than people were in the past. He says that when he first sees patients with a possible concussion, he tries to picture what happened to them. He checks for concussion symptoms, such as a headache, dizziness, problems sleeping and concentrating, tiredness, irritability and sensitivity to light and noise. “There isn’t just one test to diagnose concussion,” he says. Dr. Watanabe says that it isn’t always easy to know who will recover quickly and who will take longer. “Most people get better within a couple of weeks and most things are fine,” he says. “Some people do take many weeks and months.” Dr. Watanabe recalls two high school athletes he cared for. One was a wrestler who aimed to get a scholarship to wrestle in college. After the concus- sion, it took him almost six months to get better, but he was able to go on and wrestle at the college level. The other patient was a really good basketball player who got a concussion that caused vision issues and other problems. Thomas Watanabe Keeping the brain safe Dr. Thomas Watanabe treats a lot of patients with concussions— many of whom are kids who were hit in the head while playing sports. “A concussion is a brain injury,” says Dr. Watanabe, clinical director of the Drucker Brain Injury Center and Stroke Rehabilitation Program at MossRehab. When someone has a concussion, “the brain is not working as well as it should be.” Dr. Watanabe is a type of doctor known as a physiatrist. A physiatrist can treat many different medical conditions that affect the brain, spinal cord, nerves, and other body parts. He has worked in the field for about 20 years. Dr. Watanabe’s patients have brain injuries from different causes, including falls, car crashes, and sports injuries. He says he likes being a physiatrist “because I can spend a lot of time with my patients. It is a field of medicine where you are working with patients for months, even years, unlike in some other fields of medicine where you see them only for a short 24