Here's the Bottom Line, Up Front. We must accelerate the conversation and change the way we think about and treat brain injuries. The data and evidence from science and clinical medicine tell us that brain wounds are treatable. Lives can be made much better when we shift from "watchful waiting" as the standard of care to active intervention with treatments that work to heal brains.
Football, Soccer, Rugby, Lacrosse, Blasts, IEDs, falls, stroke, assaults, car accidents all can cause TBI, PTSD, Concussion, and CTE. Politics, Big Pharma, DoD, the VA, your Emergency Room, and most doctors are grossly inadequately trained to know and recognize these injuries let alone what to do about them. The "Concussion Protocol" by the NFL, NCAA, NHL, MLB, FIFA and many others are examples of this ignorance. All these human endeavors and the results of "combat", sports, or daily living get tangled up in trying to define what we're talking about when we say "Brain Injury." The time has passed that we only talk about adapting to an untreated brain wound.
The TreatNOW Coalition has been working for over a decade to end service member suicides. Part of that mission is to get out the word about Concussions and TBI-PTSD, and their symptoms. We also educate about treatments that are available to treat and heal brain wounds. The establishment has tried for over a decade to reduce the 22 suicides a day. Yet today after over 80,000 suicides, the suicide epidemic is increasing alongside the COVID pandemic. The veteran suicide epidemic is fostered by treating TBI/PTSD as a psychological medical condition treated with an array of various prescription cocktail mixtures that has contributed to an opioid addiction epidemic.
And those travesties exist alongside brain wounds that keep happening: TBI-related Emergency Department Visits, Hospitalizations, and Deaths are over 2.87 million every year. Millions of people live degraded lives due to brain wounds that may or may not even be diagnosed. Over 877,000 service members post-9/11 suffer from brain wounding. The answer from "established medicine" is typically drugs, talk therapy, workarounds to cope with your "new normal," and endless research that avoids a central fact: brain wounds can be healed. Merely tamping down symptoms with drugs and devices and palliative care is NOT all that you can do.
The medical community and the military and organized sports have not kept up with modern, alternative medicine, particularly with treatments they may not even know or even talk about. It begins at an auspicious time.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the use of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over 200,000 people probably died as a direct or indirect result of those decisions. The technology changed the face of war and the course of history. In the case of brain wounds, we know that millions of victims of untreated brain injuries languish, seemingly without even knowledge of healing technologies that already exist. Those technologies, which doctors typically have not studied in school or in practice, are safe, effective and relatively inexpensive. And their use can similarly change the course of medicine and countless lives.
The mystery is why "established medicine" is so slow to adapt to new evidence about "invisible wounds" and the technologies available to heal. The TreatNOW Coalition continues dealing with active and passive resistance to changing the standard of care for Concussions/TBI/PTSD/suicides. We have heard a litany of excuses for over a decade about how HARD it is to know what is wrong, much less what to do. It would be laughable if it weren't so serious for the wounded: nearly three million new cases of TBI-related emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths including over 837,000 occurring among children.
Multiple overlapping epidemics brought the TreatNOW Coalition to this inflection point. We have been watching the worldwide dialogue about how to stem the suicide epidemic, and now we see a parallel in the dialogue about the pandemic. Brain-injured and COVID patients all suffer from assaults on the body that lead to hypoxia: not enough oxygen getting to the brain and body systems. Oxygen starvation. Concussions, traumatic brain injuries, post traumatic stress and chronic mental and physical health issues share many characteristics, and inflammation and oxygen starvation are high on the list for causing damage. Solutions are available that medicine simply does not recognize nor employ.
We as a nation have hundreds of thousands of citizens languishing with brain wounds that degrade their quality of life. We have thousands of COVID victims who are surviving the disease only to be facing long-term consequences of ventilators and degraded body systems that are oxygen-starved.
We deal daily with the pain of military family members and the wounded who contact us with pleas for help dealing with brain injuries. Working mostly pro bono, we connect patients to clinics and care givers who breathe new life and hope into families – over 7,500 to date. We collaborate with hundreds of doctors and providers and clinics and researchers whose minds and hearts are open to alternative therapies that are safe, effective, and inexpensive when compared to a lifetime of diminished lives on welfare with a degraded quality of life.
With over 17 clinical trials completed since 2007 on over 650 TBI/PTSD patients using hyperbaric oxygen treatments, the medical evidence is profound. This Blog will explore what is being done, by whom, on all sides of the issues confronting people with brain injuries. An overarching goal is to change medicine for the better, so that the medical profession adapts and adopts treatments that work.
Medicine is slow to change. If victims of brain injury and serious cases of COVID are to get another chance at normal lives, we have to turn up the dial on facts, on evidence, and on truth about what you can do to demand treatments that will help heal brains and rebuild lives. .