Video Transcript
You know a little bit about my story, I’m a former army bomb technician, so I was the guy in the big green suit that went and cut wires on IEDs, got two combat tours under my belt, and everything was great until after that second tour, and I came back stateside and was just beaten to death almost by crippling panic attacks, and we’re talking about the kind of thing that can stop you in the middle of buying a TV at Walmart and have you shut in your house for three hours.
With all the blinds closed, just trying to get your heart rate down to a level where you’re not almost screaming. And it got so bad that, you know, after about six months, I was done. I was like, you know what? My 45 is looking awfully tasty right now. So I took my gun out of, out of my nightstand. I stuck it in my mouth and I was about to pull the trigger.
I was about to make that final decision. And the only thing that stopped me was my phone went off in my pocket. And one of my friends invited me over and saved my life that night. Um, it was actually Christmas Eve and he helped introduce me to the therapies that I’m going to talk about today. And they absolutely changed my brain and they changed my life.
And set me on this path of trying to do this for other people. My story is not unique. This happens all the time. You know, the second leading cause of death for individuals age 14, or sorry, 10 to 14, 25 to 34. We go one age bracket up from that, and suicide is the fourth leading cause of death in our country.
And for those of us that served, like, hey, there’s your veteran population right there. A lot of us, there’s our first responder population as well. We’re seeing U.S. suicide death rates just in the past 20 years are up 36%. We have to do something different. Because it, you know, if, uh, if what we were doing was working 22 vets a day, wouldn’t be committing suicide.
And to be honest, it’s more like 40 because that’s only the veterans inside of the VA system. I want to look at this a little bit differently. So, you know, we have anxiety, depression. PTSD, Brain Injury, it uh, almost sounds like a Pepto Bismol commercial, you know? Heartburn, Indigestion, Upset Stomach, Diarrhea.
What do all of these things have in common? Two things. One, they are highly inflammatory to the human brain. And two, they affect neural connectivity. So like in the case of post traumatic stress disorder, underactive prefrontal cortex, overactive amygdala. I feel like we’ve, you know, we’ve touched on the problem bit.
What, what the hell do we do about it? I suppose that the first thing we’d want to do is start with a map. Did you know that mental health is the only area of medicine that does not get an accurate picture of the organ they treat prior to treating? I think we can do better than that. So in our programs, we start with neuropsychological testing.
So we’re looking at 15 different measures in the brain. Just hitting the high notes here, you know, verbal memory, visual memory, psychomotor speed, reaction time, processing speed, executive function. That’s a big one. You know, what is one of the main issues that people with traumatic brain injuries and PTSD complain about?
Memory and brain fog. And getting an accurate picture of how devastating those consequences are for those individuals is incredibly important. Especially when we’re talking about outcomes, QEG, picture of the brain, how much electrical output is the brain producing? And at what frequency? From that we can see things like insomnia, we can see depression.
This is not an accurate representation, but you could see a TBI on one of these scans. If, if you were looking at someone who had a TBI, this one’s mine. Um, that, uh, was from a while ago. So just to give you an example. So start with the map. Let’s get an accurate picture of the problem before we do anything.
What’s the next step? Well, something that we use in our clinical practice and in our inpatient programs is ketamine. Ketamine gets a bad rap. People talk about street drugs. They talk about special k. The World Health Organization actually named ketamine as one of the most important drugs that’s ever been created.
It’s also one of the safest. It’s used in pediatric and bariatric surgeries. Every day. The reason why is because unlike opiate based drugs, it does not suppress the respiratory system. Why do we use it though? Because ketamine can provide near immediate relief from things like PTSD symptoms, depression, and the symptoms of a traumatic brain injury.
How? Ketamine does a couple of really important things. One, it down regulates inflammation in the brain. So we can take someone who is having, let’s say, post concussive migraines from a TBI and immediately interdict and give them relief from those symptoms for the first time in a long time. We had one guy, um, in one of our programs, he had literally woken up every single day for 19 years with a migraine.
I don’t know, uh, show of hands, but, uh, I wouldn’t play that video game. And, uh, we were able to, you know, through the administration of some of these, uh, well, all of these, um, treatments completely relieve those symptoms and he hasn’t had a migraine since he stepped in treatment. Aside from downregulating inflammation, it also upregulates neurogenesis.
So that is how your brain cells branch out and create new synaptic connections. Think of it like allowing you to think in a different way. And we talk about efficacy. If you’re looking at double blind placebo controlled studies, anywhere from 60 to 70 percent at treating major depressive disorder, 67 percent for chronic PTSD and the clinical observations of ketamine’s effectiveness are even higher between 70 to 80%, depending on which study you read.
Every single one of these things I’ve done, you know, I’d like to take a minute to talk about what ketamine feels like, like what it feels like to live with these symptoms and then have them go away. So imagine if you will, that you have a pair of sunglasses that are surgically grafted to your skull. You cannot take them off and no matter what you do, you are always viewing the world through this lens through this trauma lens and over time they get scratched up marred up They get nasty.
All you can do is try to clean the surface off. But what the neurological reset from ketamine feels like is being able to take these glasses off and get a brand new pair of frames bolted to your head. And what I tell our patients is that something like ketamine, although it is a transient therapy, it is here to provide a foundational level of relief from your symptoms.
However, the next things we’re going to talk about are going to take that new state of being, you know, from down here where I really don’t want to be around anymore, to I can engage with my reality. I can engage with the people around me. And these next couple therapies are here to make that your new normal.
Intensive psychotherapy is a huge part of this. When we’re down regulating inflammation, we’re giving, you know, these patients a new lease on life. We need to create a roadmap. We need to provide structure and directionality so that, you know, we’re not just wandering in circles with our new mental health outcomes that we’re experiencing.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is the next piece. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is when you get in a pressurized tube, we increase the pressure in the tube. While you’re breathing in concentrated oxygen. And what that does is it forces extra oxygen into your bloodstream. And it can actually, we can increase the amount of oxygen saturation into the bloodstream to the point that you no longer have to rely on your red blood cells to deliver oxygen to cells to, uh, to complete the electron transport chain.
And make ATP. So we drastically increase the amount of energy that the body has while, while we’re downregulating inflammation. Think about that from a traumatic brain injury perspective, we’re letting the air out of that overinflated balloon a little bit. And the nice thing is like the studies out of Israel are showing that one, the efficacy for treating PTSD is pretty damn good.
And when we’re talking about traumatic brain injuries, there’s really no other way that we know about right now to heal that injury because of TBI. Okay. It’s not like a broken arm. You know, I fall off this stage, which Ashley and I were talking about earlier. I’m not going to do it. I fall off the stage and break my arm.
I can put it in a sling. I can rest it. If I hit my head on the way down, though, there’s no way to rest my brain. It is constantly using a large frequency of the oxygen and the glucose that I take into my body. And there’s no way to arrest that. So we have to provide the system with more resources so that it can heal.
And the last piece that I’m going to cover transcranial magnetic stimulation. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with TMS, you know, TMS has been around since the eighties and it’s really starting to gain traction. These are the Brainsway DTMS coils. It’s an MRI coil inside of a helmet placed upon the head.
And depending on how this coil is shaped, we can target different areas of the brain to affect different conditions. For the H1 coil, we can target the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is underactive in depression and sometimes PTSD, depending on the patient. With the H7 coil we can target obsessive compulsive disorders.
So for the first time there’s a non-drug intervention for treating that. When we look at the efficacy of TMS, real world clinical data, and this is from Brainsway, they publish this in peer reviewed journals, over three, 1, 300 patients, with 13 treatments of TMS for major depressive disorder, it’s on an 80 percent response rate.
Just to put that in perspective, I don’t know if any of you have ever heard of the STAR D study. It’s the largest study on antidepressants that’s ever been done. And that study showed that on your very best day, that antidepressant medication that you’re popping in your mouth from your psychiatrist has a 33 percent chance, and this is on the first med trial, a 33 percent chance of doing anything.
On your second med trial, that number goes from 33 to 20, it’s either 24 or 26 percent that it’ll work. By the time we’re on three, we’re down to 16%. Who’s excited about 16 percent? And by the time we get to four, six percent. Keep in mind that every single duration, every single treatment cycle of these antidepressants is at least eight to ten weeks long with an adequate dose that the insurance company gets to dictate.
If that doesn’t scare you it should. Compare that to 80 percent response over seven weeks. You could not feel like shit anymore in seven weeks. I get excited about that one. This is all well and good. Here’s a, you know, a couple examples of some treatments. But can we combine them to create a winning formula for treating mental health? I believe we can.
And it all starts with the first phase, reveal, understand what is going on in the system, create a map, create a plan. The second phase, repair. We downregulate inflammation in the system and we give the brain all the resources that it needs to start healing and rewire. We reinforce the prefrontal cortex and give back executive function to the individuals who have not had it.
What that feels like in real life is, uh, it creates a dimmer switch for your symptoms. Instead of me going to Walmart, getting this stink eye, and immediately, like, starting to have a panic attack, it’s, alright, that guy just looked at me weird. Okay, my heart rate’s elevated. I don’t need to step in that. Like, let’s just shake it off and go. And that’s, that’s what we’re going for here. We’re not trying to eliminate the triggers.
We’re trying to down regulate the intensity of the autonomic nervous system’s response to that. Let me tell you, you know, a quick story about my friend Tom. We got any, we got any clinicians in the room? Therapists? I’m sure you guys have seen, uh, what we, what we would call, uh, a patient who has fallen off the trauma tree and hit every branch with their face on the way down.
That was Tom. When Tom was small, his mother was a prostitute, his father was a, a former amateur boxer, significant traumatic brain injury, who was super abusive. He dealt with literally abuse every day. The only thing keeping him tethered to this world was his twin brother. And, at the age of 18, his twin brother went off the rails, got into drugs, and ended up in prison.
Now without an anchor, my buddy Tom joins the United States Marine Corps. That’s, you know, not exactly the pension for mental health, but a lot of us lost boys end up in the army, er, in the military. So he finally finds his purpose, right? He’s like, alright cool, join force reconnaissance, I’m in special forces, this is awesome.
Deploys to Iraq, and has his best friend. As they enter a door in Fallujah, 17 guys with AK 47s, PKMs, and grenade launchers are pointed at that door. He watches his best friend get gunned down right in front of him. He survived long enough to enter that door, take the rounds that were meant for Tom, turn around and push him out of that door.
And so, as you can imagine, my buddy Tom had some problems. The PTSD was constant. He got hit by a couple RPGs during that engagement. So, a mild to moderate traumatic brain injury, memory issues, brain fog, substance abuse. He would drink. He would drink, you know, half a bottle of tequila a night just to go to bed, no sleep at all.
And so we, we put Tom through our Patriot Power Up program, and this is what happened. First, within, you know, he was with us for 30 days. These are our PHQ scores, so analogs for depression and anxiety. Within, was that 12 days? Within 12 days, he was in what we would call symptom remission. Within 24 days, full symptom remission.
His, his PTSD scores dropped precipitously and he no longer qualified for the diagnosis after week four. And the coolest part, my favorite part, is on his neurocognitive exam, we watched his scores skyrocket. He got back 40 percent of his executive function in 25 days. This is not the only case. I use Tom’s story just because I’m so familiar with it.
And it’s so close to my heart, but you know, we’ve been doing this with vets for what, going on eight months now, and we’re seeing fantastic results and we’re gathering all this data so that we can affect change in this industry. I really believe that together we can transform mental healthcare and move us towards a model.
That focuses on better outcomes. We don’t even need to wait for psychedelic medicine. We have the technology right now to heal the brain, to rewire the brain, and to make sure that the people who are suffering today do not have to suffer tomorrow.