07/14/2026
Three out of four domestic violence survivors who experience physical abuse sustain a brain injury. That injury is almost never screened for, almost never diagnosed, and almost never treated as the physical wound it is — it is absorbed instead into psychiatric labels that describe and palliate its symptoms, all without addressing its cause.
PRESS RELEASE
Arlington, VA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
THE HIDDEN WOUND: Domestic Violence/Intimate Partner Violence (DV/IPV) Is an Untreated Brain Wound Crisis
75–80% of intimate partner violence survivors sustain a brain wound. Up to 1.6 million a year — a number that may rival combat and contact-sports TBI combined.
The mechanism: blunt trauma and strangulation-induced oxygen deprivation. Strangulation alone shows up in 58–80% of survivor populations, often with zero external marks.
The problem isn't a mystery: it's invisibility.
There is no screening protocol. Symptoms are absorbed into PTSD/depression/Mental Health labels. No institutional infrastructure exists like the military or pro sports built over decades of advocacy.
New York took the first step — shelter-based TBI screening pilots, a new City Council training mandate. But even there: the law names the injury and funds no treatment.
HBOT — already backed by 29 peer-reviewed studies — is the treatment nobody's funding for this population.
It's the same brain wound TreatNOW has documented in veterans for 20 years. Different population. Zero infrastructure. Proven, science-based success. Medicine dragging its feet.
It's not a red-state or blue-state issue. It's physiology, and brain wound healing.
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