Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman
Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman is presented by The Mac Parkman Foundation
The mission of this show and the foundation is To serve as a source of information, resources, and communications to the community of parents, coaches/Athletic trainers, medical staff, and athletes that are affected by sports-related concussions and to raise awareness of the long-term implications of concussive and sub-concussive trauma to our children.
Broken Brains will also explore how Concussive Trauma impacts our Service Members and Veterans.
Join us every week as Bruce interviews leaders and experts in various Medical fields, as well as survivors of Concussive trauma.
Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman
#16 Inside Brain Injuries with Dave Philipps: CTE, PTSD, and Psychedelic Treatments
Join us for a critical examination of the invisible wounds afflicted on our soldiers, athletes, and children. Renowned New York Times journalist Dave Phillips joins us to shed light on the often-overlooked traumatic brain injuries that our service members endure due to repetitive head impacts and blast exposures. These injuries, which lack a single identifiable incident, leave many veterans suffering severe PTSD-like symptoms, leading to misdiagnoses and sometimes unfair disciplinary actions. Together, we discuss the urgent need for the military and medical communities to recognize the repetitive nature of these injuries and the importance of implementing training solutions, such as virtual simulations, to mitigate harm.
We also journey into the realm of psychedelic therapies that offer transformative potential for veterans grappling with trauma and addiction. Hear personal stories from former special operations soldiers who have found new hope and healing through substances like Ibogaine and ayahuasca, having exhausted traditional treatments. These powerful alternatives challenge traditional mental health solutions and hold promise for recovery, providing profound insights into forgiveness, self-acceptance, and improved relationships. We explore the broader implications of these treatments, emphasizing the necessity for further research to ensure safety and effectiveness.
Finally, we tackle the broader societal implications of brain injuries beyond the military, touching on contact sports and the stigma surrounding mental health. The conversation underscores the critical need for awareness and support for those affected by traumatic brain injuries, especially within the military and sports communities. We wrap up with a compelling discussion on the focus of sports journalism, advocating for a shift towards diverse storytelling beyond Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Our heartfelt thanks to Dave Phillips for his invaluable insights and contributions, amplifying our collective understanding of these pressing issues.
Join Blue Fusion and Horse Soldier Bourbon for the inaugural Special Operations Army vs. Navy Tailgate Event
Celebrate with us and support veteran wellness. Your participation helps fund The Mac Parkman Foundation's Veteran Program and Team American Freedom.
Your sponsorship ensures vital education, screening, and treatment for veteran mental health, aiming to reduce the tragedy of veteran suicide.
Enjoy food, beverages, and live music by Razor’s Edge, one of the top-perform
Produced by Security Halt Media
Hey folks, it's Bruce Parkman again.
Speaker 1:Welcome to another edition of Broken Brains.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, bruce Parkman, hosted by the Mack Parkman Foundation, where we take a look at the issues of repetitive head impacts and repetitive blast exposure and their impacts on the brain, health and mental illness of our veterans, our athletes and our children, and we scour the world of research and publicity and suffering to find people to come on this show that can talk about these key components, about these issues and why we have not moved far in addressing the largest cause, the largest preventable cause, of mental illness in this country.
Speaker 1:Today we have a very, very special guest, mr Dave Phillips, a renowned author and reporter for the New York Times. He's been a national correspondent for the New York Times and the author of three non-fiction books, and he's been highly focused on the wars in Times and the author of three non-fiction books and he's been highly focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which makes him highly relevant here. Mr Phillips has worked for New York Times since 2014. He's won two Pulitzer Awards and the articles that he has been writing have been unbelievable in addressing these key causes, and he also one of his key books was the book on Edward Gallagher, I think it was called the Rogue Seal I think, if I got that right.
Speaker 1:The Rogue Seal Alpha and this book, which I have not read yet, just found about it is going to be absolutely critical. And his last two articles, which were addressing the pattern of brain damage and its pervasiveness, and Navy SEALs have died by suicide, and the last article on Pentagon data showing high suicide rates amongst troops opposed to blasts, are just unbelievable windows into this world that not too many people know about. Mr Phillips, thank you so much and we welcome you on the show.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Thank you. So how'd you get in all this man? I mean, I came across your. The first article I saw from you was on the Marines that were coming back and they had that's how it happened.
Speaker 2:So I've been writing about the military for 15 years and of course I've written a lot about PTSD and TBI and you know the so-called invisible injuries of those wars because they were a big deal. But I always thought, going into that, that if you had a TBI it's because something went wrong, the enemy tried to blow you up or there was some sort of accident. It wasn't something that happened when everything was going routine and safe and as it should. And then I got a call from a bunch of artillery guys who'd come back from Syria where they'd been fighting ISIS. And these guys they had been in combat but they had never seen combat because these artillery cannons they fire like 10 miles. They'd never seen the enemy, they'd never been under fire. And yet they came home with symptoms that you and I would think of as PTSD sleeplessness, nightmares, hypervigilance, anxiety, a short fuse, all this stuff that is textbook PTSD symptoms. But it didn't make sense to them or anyone else. And a lot of them were having other really bizarre symptoms that basically boiled down to psychosis. They were seeing things and hearing things that weren't there, and what I figured out through reporting with these guys is basically the routine exposure to their own weapon they're operating it as it should, everything's going as designed was giving them brain injuries. And here's what's really important. It wasn't that one blast of firing this weapon was hurting them. It was that because these guys had fired a very high number of rounds you know, several hundred or thousands over like a six-month period that repetitive head injury was causing this problem. And so because of that, because there was no one injury event, no attack by the enemy, no one you know falling off the top of a Humvee or something like that that a medic would record as an injury, according to the Marines and the Army, these guys had never been injured. So they come home really with a lot of issues, but those issues were overwhelmingly either dismissed as, like kind of civilian scale behavioral health issues, add, depression or they were dismissed as punishment because a lot of these guys started misbehaving or having really weird behavior and that was written up as hey, you're being a bad Marine, you're being a bad soldier, we're going to kick you out. And so we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of guys who went through this and never got any answers.
Speaker 2:And when I discovered that, when I learned, oh okay, you can be harmed by the routine operation of your own weapons I asked. The natural question is like well, how often does that happen? And where else is it happening? Is it just these artillery cannons? And these things are like 30 feet long and it wouldn't surprise you that this might be damaging. But is it just that? Or is it a mortar? Is it a .50 caliber machine gun? Is it a shoulder-fired rocket? And so I really started looking into it, and that is how I've spent the last year and how I'm continuing to report going forward, because, just as with these artillery guys, it seems like, over and over, this type of injury is kind of not being recognized.
Speaker 1:You know, mr Phillips, you know, after you wrote that article, I corresponded with you and talked about what I have, you know, come to understand through the health, through the death of my son, is that it is the repetitive nature and I would like you to know that you are the first reporter to get this right, that I have seen, and I've like you to know that you are the first reporter to get this right, that I have seen and I've been on this system, I've been on this subject challenging the CTE community, you know, with their focus on concussions and CTE, challenging the military community, because it's not all of it but obviously a significant contributor to mental health problems within our military. So I want to congratulate you.
Speaker 2:I got to tell you, bruce, the one thing that's really like motivated me on this is we don't get a vote in what the enemy does you know, armed conflict by its nature is chaos, but we definitely get a vote in terms of how we train service members and how we design weapons, and so if we know that that training and that weapons design is harming people, we can do something about it, and so I think, spreading that awareness, I'm motivated to know that there are people out there who, if they understood the issue, they care about people and could make things better, and so I don't know if we're starting to see that happen, but I think maybe there's a chance that we can do some good.
Speaker 1:And it is moving. And it's articles like you that are like yours that are driving. For example, I've been at two military related brain conferences in the last two weeks and I got shown pictures of you know like I used to train? On the door right, green beret, sergeant, major on the door, no blast shield. You know, ready to go, number guy, number one guys are stacked, number two's right behind them. Hit the. You hit the charge, you hit the door man, you're in there, you're doing your flow drills the whole nine yards. Um, you know, and, and, the, the, and. So you're getting all that last exposure by simply getting around the corner from the building. You go to zero.
Speaker 1:So, to your point, in combat we have to leave it on the field. It's just like football, rugby, any sports game, I mean, whatever happens on the field stays on the field. But what happens on the field and in combat could be a small percentage of the overall exposure that these veterans are getting. And I think, to your point, the military is now just starting to look at where are the positions when you drop the mortar round. You know we're, and they're starting to measure this, they're looking at blast gauges, but we're 24 years or 23 years into these wars? How do we go back? So to your point. You were saying that some of those Marines were actually thrown out of the military for their actions, which were probably not too, you know, normal when they returned after all this trauma, or haven't been exposed to it for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know, talking to you about that training one of the things that I've learned, you know, I've talked to a lot of people who are either still active duty or recently were and I'm asking them hey, did you get exposed to more blast in training or in combat? And none of them even pause, none of them even have to think about it, unless they were hit by like a truck or an ied or something. They're like oh, it was training, it was like 80 training, um, and like that. That can both sound like really frustrating, but it also means that we have an opportunity to change things. We don't get to change what we do in combat necessarily, uh, or at least we have less of a vote but, but training, you can do interesting stuff.
Speaker 2:And I'll tell you, in the last six months the Marines have started looking at using a shoulder-fired weapons trainer. That is virtual, you know. You essentially stand inside a room in a uh, surrounding 360 video game. You're holding a real uh, uh, you know, I think they actually call that recoil-less rifle on top on your, yeah, anti-tank, yeah, yeah, you got bazookas good term yeah, uh.
Speaker 2:So like are those guys gonna shoot? Learn to shoot real live rounds? Of course they are, but but can they also practice on this virtual thing where they're not getting that blast to their head and will that help protect them? Like yes, and so I think it's solutions like that that they're starting to look at. That only happen when we start talking about this stuff, right?
Speaker 1:It has to. I mean, I was in Senator Rick Scott's office. We were talking about the same issue with kids, and now we're getting ready to go back to DC and talk about veterans issues and his chief of staff looked at me, says look, if you want to bring attention to some, make the buzz, otherwise we don't pay attention. And you're starting that you can't ignore these articles anymore, mr Phillips. I mean, it's not that. And then they came out last week showing the suicide rates that were actually limited by military occupational specialty. And it is so black and white that if you're around artillery pieces or you're a mortar man or you're an EOD guy and it's like where have we been to not see this? Why haven't we not seen this in all these?
Speaker 2:years. You know what I think it was honestly is I think that the military was so proud of itself for recognizing PTSD that it thought everything was PTSD, because remember, in Vietnam, a lot of that stuff was brushed aside, dismissed In the 1980s, it was finally formalized.
Speaker 2:We went into Iraq and Afghanistan. We're like, we're going to be different, we're going to be better and we're going to recognize this. So they brought in all these psychologists who will have you sit down and talk about what you were afraid of in war but that was never the problem, right? And they brought in all these mental health folks man, I remember being at Fort Carson in about 2009,.
Speaker 2:And their whole idea of how they were going to get around this problem back then is they were going to teach people resiliency. You know they were like, hey, if you've got a strong family going in, if you've got a strong belief system, if you've got healthy, you know habits in your life, all of that stuff is going to give you resilience. So when you come back from war, ptsd is not going to bother you. And hey, look, all that's true. I'm not going to say that strong family support isn't isn't a great thing to have, but they were completely missing the boat, right, they weren't even thinking like, okay, but what happens if you spend eight years in your twenties firing a 50 Cal machine gun? Um, and so it just wasn't part of the conversation.
Speaker 2:Nope it wasn't talking about anti-gravity man.
Speaker 1:You conversation? Nope, it wasn't talking about anti-gravity man. You know it was fun, it's not funny. But you know I talked to. You know I'm an older guy, I'm a cold war vet. I retired in early 01, before the world went nuts, right May of 01.
Speaker 1:And you know, and I and I hear about ah, these guys, this PTSD, this suicide, they're a bunch of girls, bunch of pansies, and I'm like whoa, wait a minute. Number one there is a serious problem here with these, with the way that we have fought these wars, because, unlike Vietnam, unlike Korea, unlike any other war out there, if these guys aren't in war, these guys and girls, they're training for war. So their exposure has never, ever stopped. I mean Vietnam, you did, then they go back, and you know Vietnam, you did one tour, you know you did, then they go back, and you know vietnam, you did one tour, you know you did two, if you were maybe unlucky, but you usually had to volunteer. Three was almost unheard of. I think I've met two guys and they were nuts that went back to vietnam for multiple tours right here, you know, you know multiple tours right like 10, 11, 12, because we don't talk about it much in in vietnam doesn't mean it wasn't there, right Like that's true.
Speaker 2:A head injury is a hard thing to spot because it may show up years later and it may look like a lot of other things.
Speaker 1:And that's another big problem is that you know, we see it. There's some sports athletes that you know come apart. We see it and we don't see it because it's not even recognized in our society Men and women who have served in the military. You know, friends of mine, that you know. When I came out with my mental health problems anxiety, depression, panic attacks, all the things you don't want to talk about and I was very open about them, and then my struggles and then how I've worked through with different modalities to get back to for my family and all my buddies start opening up. Oh, wow, hey, you know, hey, who. Who are those doctors? Again, right, because it, it, it, it needs to get out there. But to your point, no, nobody talked about it. We had to be tough.
Speaker 2:I think that that we need to like talk about, which I think is so important, because I've spent a lot of time saying, hey, these injuries are are out there, but uh, and I think that's really important. What I haven't spent much time with is like, hey, there's good treatment out there that you can seek out. It's not like one of those things where you know you have a TBI and you've got the black mark, You're going to get CTE and go nuts and that's it, Like there's a lot of help out there, there's a lot of treatment and people should seek it out.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a lot of hope and what we're aware about now. So we have four huge gaps when it comes down to this issue. Number one we don't have any education, awareness or advocacy. Our repetitive blast exposure is only understood in the research communities, the science communities because we haven't standardized it or come up with some kind of protocol. The rest of the VA, the rest of the military doctors are trained at our military schools and repetitive head trauma is not taught, not taught especially to links to brain damage and mental illness. Right, then you know we get with that. We have no diagnostic protocols yet. The traumatic encephalopathy syndrome protocols were actually endorsed by NINDS in 2019 and yet have to be validated. Yet we have not validated them.
Speaker 1:And those are four easy questions that cover blast exposure. And now we've got things like the GBEV, which is your generic blast exposure variable, and we can quantify this. And then we have no billing codes that cover repetitive head impacts. That's the third issue. And then the fourth one is, to your point, these treatment plans. We've got the same suicide rate, if not bigger than it's been for 20 years, because we have not changed how we looked at mental health. It's drugs and therapy.
Speaker 2:Yet all these modalities, it's like hey, have the courage to go get help. You know which is like stigma on the guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it is. And then you know the VA says well, we have to only use FDA approved modalities when you have soldiers taking their lives. I think it's time to look at these modalities like hyperbaric oxygen and photobiomodulation, vagus nerve stimulation, supplement programs, the psychedelics All of them have thousands. I'm not saying it's the 100% secure for everybody, but we have way more people saying this has helped me, this has kept me here.
Speaker 2:Then the drugs and the therapy you know speaking of psychedelics, I just got back from Mexico where I was there with a bunch of green berets and seals who were were, uh, pursuing that treatment plan and I'm going to write about it. It's not published yet, but essentially these are all guys probably in their mid forties, who they're recently retired. They've tried everything that the VA has to offer it's and it's not doing anything for them. They can't sleep, their marriages are falling apart, they're, you know, have bad anxiety, and so they're kind of at the end of the line. A lot of these guys have been suicidal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:And they are interested in this. This um psychedelic that I'll be honest, like I've never heard of uh called Ibogaine or Ibogaine.
Speaker 1:And they are just so about it.
Speaker 2:And I um you know it has spread through the grapevine of special operations with such speed. You know, because if you're in special operations like, maybe you read the New York times and maybe you think it's, it's a bunch of bullshit.
Speaker 2:But if another SOCOM guy talks to you and says, hey, this worked for me that's the truth, and so it spreads like crazy and you know, time will tell if this is effective or a trend, but it's certainly where the interest is for a lot of these guys, because they're not getting effective help, they feel like, through the standard channels.
Speaker 1:No, sir, I mean, I am very involved with the ayahuasca clinics down here in the Florida area and, to your point, not only have I been through the modality myself and it has changed me profoundly at myself and it has changed me profoundly. I have watched individuals that are on their last legs, that have been snorting heroin, that have multiple suicide attempts, that their families are broke they broke them right and they'll admit it. And I see these men and women come in there and they're like I want to get back. This is my last chance to be a better father or mother, to be a better husband and lover and dad and everything I can be and I have nothing else. And I watched both times I've been there and I've watched these people leave with hope that they've dealt with trauma, they've gotten rid of trauma in their minds, they have taken a positive step. And they had to commit. They had to go to clean for two weeks off SSRIs, off all these other things.
Speaker 1:Me, I did it because I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm pushing veterans in the VA and if I haven't done it, I can't talk about it Right.
Speaker 1:So it's not that, uh, you know, um, uh, you know, for me it's more of a, like you, it's on a journey right To write about this stuff and to understand it better, so that if I do talk about it, I've been there and I've walked the walk. So but to your point, sir, I'm seeing these plant medicines. I had a Navy SEAL call me up and he's telling me, bruce. He says I don't know what this is, but I know men that were absolutely gonna take their lives. They were going to eat a nine that weekend and we got them to Mexico and they came back and months later, cigarettes, alcohol, sex you name your addiction problems, no, ssris these men are back and some of them have been back for years, because they started it, you know, a couple of hours ago. But to your point, it would be awesome for you to focus on this for the world, because it is, it has amazing potential.
Speaker 1:You know and nobody knows if it's the end cure, but I'll tell you one.
Speaker 2:There's a researcher at Stanford who's tracking some of these guys and trying to gather data. And by the way, the data is very strong, that you know. A lot of these symptoms disappear pretty much overnight, you know. But anyway he was saying to me when he was describing this research. He said you know, it reminds me of what happened with scurvy. The Royal Navy back in the day hundreds of years ago knew scurvy was a huge problem. It's a nasty disease where basically you start to rust and fall apart from the inside because you don't have enough vitamin C. But of course doctors didn't know that, they didn't even know what vitamin C was. So the Royal Navy had this contest where some of the best physicians in Great Britain were trying to come up with like well, what's the problem and what's the treatment? And they couldn't figure it out. And it was sailors at like a low level, that sort of figured out and passed through the grapevine like a lime bro and uh, that sort of thing is is going on now.
Speaker 2:Now we have to be careful, right, because, like ibogaine, ayahuasca, they're pretty serious. You know, this isn't taking the tylenol um, but if we can gather good data on this and find out if it works and how to do it the most effective and safe way, it may be better than anything we have now, because a lot of the things that we have now are not working for for these types of folks.
Speaker 1:And to your point, when guys get there and they say, look, I'm on my last, my last leg, it is better than anything we have because they've tried it all, they've been there and one of the things that we you know I'm not going to get on my soapbox, I'm a big farmer but we can't turn this into a pill and keep people. This is not. You know. We treat mental illness like it's a lifelong, like it's incurable. It can be curable. I mean, I've come back from a hell hole of a ride, but I went to stay. I took stelae ganglion blocks, which only soft and law enforcement know about, which I highly suggest you take a look at those for PTSD, depression, anxiety and fight or flight. Nfl guys don't know about them. I'm pushing a lot of those in that direction. But the psychedelics journey and then just mindfulness, yoga, meditation, all that stuff, a six pack lasts me a month, you know which used to last me an hour, you know. But to your point, sir, it does come up Like I go to these conferences and I got to the point at this last conference I was at and I and I just stopped everybody Cause I had the mic you never give me the mic and I said look, I've been listening to all you guys talk about research and biomarkers and we're 10 years and longitudinal studies and all this.
Speaker 1:We've got a problem that we need to start fixing right now. I mean, when we got, we got almost. I know if you, if you take the 22 veterans a day since the war started, that's 150, 160,000 dead kids. Okay, we lost eight to $9,000, 9,000 of those children in that war. Those wars which to me is an old vet shouldn't really been fought at that scale. But they're gone. We've got to make amends to that. But how do we go back and address that to your point, sir? We've got that. That's 160,000 dead people, right? Dead veterans.
Speaker 2:Well, what makes me tear my hair out is is it's not that the DOD hasn't spent a lot of money on traumatic brain injury? Oh, my.
Speaker 2:Lord and I did some reporting looking at Navy SEALs.
Speaker 2:So the DOD set up this beautiful brain lab in Bethesda, maryland, one of the best in the world, and they started gathering brains of all sorts of veterans, including a lot of special operators, and they started looking at these career Navy SEAL brains and of course, the lab will tell me what their results are.
Speaker 2:But I tracked down all the family members, and the family members know, and what I learned was every single one of these SEALs that they looked at has a traumatic brain injury from repeated blasts, so every single one that we know about. But here's what drives me crazy they spent all the money on this, they've done great science and there was no uh, as far as I could tell, uh, no, effective delivery of that information to the folks who actually run the seals. You know, uh, and so we've got the information, but how do you make it into action? How does it get built into training? And I don't think that that's happening right now. Now the military tells me that it is, but when I talk to Joes who wear boots, they say that not too much has changed.
Speaker 1:I can say that US SOCOM has taken this on as it is one of their largest topics. Because of the way that we train, we tend to train harder. Because we're smaller, we have more resources, we can train harder. I mean, and we have men and women, I've been told, that have psychological disorders that have never been in combat just because we train so dang hard. I've seen it, right, have psychological disorders that have never been in combat just because we trained so dang hard. I've seen it. And so right. So how do we? You know, number one, they are now looking at a whole bunch of ways to fix this. But, to your point, you know, we're 23 years into this fight. Okay, so if we're going to make it better, going forward, how do we look back at those suicides that could have been line of duty, nose right, where the families don't get benefits, they don't get any help, they don't get any closure, right? And if we looked at these guys and these girls, if we looked at their military, I'm not saying that all of these guys and women suffered from repeated blast exposure, but a significant percentage of them being special operations, eod, infantrymen that were downrange.
Speaker 1:If you look at that report which VA told me was leaked. I brought it up at a conference. The VA was up there. I said now, based on this, that was leaked, you can't talk about that. I go no, wait a minute, wait a minute. If it's not in the NNL, I know it's not real, but it has your VA stuff all over it and we should talk. Why can't we talk about this? You know, because there is a correlation here. I mean, you guys, we can't, even they don't even have suicide statistics before 2011. How do you lose that? How do you not track this Right? And where do we get the data that we need to be informed so we get? This is not about pointing fingers. This is not being saying you messed up, you messed up. This is about collectively, as a country. We didn't know. We now know. What do we do to make it right and what do you? Some of your? What are you?
Speaker 2:some of your thoughts on that I mean what makes my head spin sometimes is how fundamental and huge our ignorance is about this. So basic questions. What level of blast is, uh, damaging? Right, if you shoot an m4 does? Is that damaging? And if so, is it only after you know a certain number of thousands of rounds or something? We don't know um, what about how, how often you get exposed to that stuff? Does getting exposed to it once every four months versus like every day make a difference? We don't know.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I notice in the career guys is they start having problems in their late 30s or 40s. That's when things really become noticeable. Is that because of some biological change, your brain is less resilient? Or is it because of some, um, uh, biological change your brain is is less resilient? Or is it because that stuff is piling up? We don't know, um. And what about the shape of the blast wave you know is? Is a low big boom like a grenade better or worse than a really high sharp peak like shooting a, a shoulder-powered weapon? We don't know. So, uh, all this stuff, oh wait, one more thing. We don't know. How do you test to know if somebody's injured or not?
Speaker 2:we got like 10 different ideas that are promising, but we got zero ideas currently that work, and so I I mean aside from and this is grim but true cutting people open after they're dead, then we can see it, but as far as diagnosing reliably when people are alive, no, you can get a group of symptoms, but that's all you can get.
Speaker 1:And that's why, after you wrote that article, I wrote you immediately, because when you started talking about mental health, mental illness is the first indication. Right now, cognitive, psychological, behavioral disorders are the first indication that we have that a soldier's had too much exposure or an athlete has had too much exposure, even though the impacts on the brain from repetitive head impacts and blast exposure are different. There are two different pathways to the same problem a damaged brain and mental illness. But we're not trained as a society to say oh, you're acting weird, well, it can't be your job, it can't be those thousands of artillery shells that you lobbed. And you're sitting there. You know somebody touched you and you're a child, or you've seen too many dead bodies or whatever, or you're just crazy and you need to fix this. And then the soldier can't fix it. They spiral, they booze it up, hit their wife, whatever it is right. The next thing you know they're on the streets with an entire medical system that is unprepared and untrained to address this issue of repeated blast exposure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I feel like, even when it's obvious, even when you don't have combat exposure, complicating things and making people wonder about PTSD, I've seen the military miss it even then, because I wanted to answer the question okay, can we see this type of injury in the absence of combat? And I was able to find a bunch of artillerymen, especially National Guard guys, who had never deployed but they'd been firing big mortars for 10 years. And all of those guys, or at least a large number of those guys, had these symptoms and they would go and try and get help. And you know it's easy for me to look at it and say like, oh, the guy had a TBI, but when he goes into the hospital, the diagnosing rules that the clinicians use are if you have a TBI, you have to have an event that can be identified.
Speaker 2:Did you fall off the back of a truck? Did somebody drop something on your head? You know, did a water malfunction blow up? And all of a sudden you were dazed and confused. These guys had none of that. You know, they just been doing their job for 10 years and now they can't think straight or remember where their house is. So they weren't diagnosed. They were like, hey, we don't know what's going on, maybe you have early stages dementia.
Speaker 1:They were diagnosed. They were wrongly diagnosed. They were diagnosed. You may be with a diagnosis, you're just staying up to the right one. Unfortunately, we're going to misdiagnose you because we know nothing about this.
Speaker 2:That's a huge problem. If you don't have a good diagnostic and right now we don't have a good diagnostic and right now we don't how do you know who's injured and who's not? No, and it would get even more complicated when you start paying people, whether they're injured or not, because then someone's a gold brick or they're not, and that's really tough.
Speaker 1:No, and it is tough. You know. And to your point, when I wrote, when I wrote this book, I I read 200 research papers and it was right in front of me that you know my son had this severe mental disorder that caused him to take his life that and that, that that we know that through medical research, that these disorders have been caused to damage brains that are damaged in the area by contact sports, so to say. And then I I said, why aren't we correlating contact sports with the damage of mental illness? I wrote a book here in the military, you know we got to do this. We're now understanding that military. You know we got to do this. We're now understanding that we know. We now know, and to your point, we don't have any diagnostic protocols. We have no billing codes because TBI's got 50 of them, because that's what the military focused on, TBI. There's more billing codes for TBI than there is for, I don't know, anorexia, I don't know, but there's a lot of billions of dollars worth.
Speaker 2:Billions of billions of dollars focused on okay, an important thing, because TBI does hurt you.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of billions of dollars worth, billions of billions of dollars focused on, ok, an important thing, because TBI does hurt you. It's a car crash, but if you stop exposure, your brain can heal. You've got a really good chance of taking care of that brain heal. But if you're training for the military and you're in the army and you're not going to heal, you know, it's just like if you keep crashing your car every God dang day, right, you're not going to heal. So I think that the military, like the, I would say, the CT community, focused on the wrong thing. They focused on the wrong issue and I think that's where we're at right now is not only do we have to move, we have to move fast with things that are out there, and that's the importance of your work, mr Phillips. Is that the attention on this issue outside of your reporting is not there. No, and I know I read all over the place and I am, I, you know, I'm, um, you know, and I deal with the researchers in the in the rb space.
Speaker 2:For years and years I did the same thing. Like I missed it too and it's only now. But like once I saw it once. I now see it everywhere you can't unsee it.
Speaker 1:You cannot unsee it. Every mass shooting, like the guy at West Point that you wrote about right.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean you know 18 years chucking grenades or whatever, and I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't written about those artillery guys. I was like wait a minute. He was a grenade instructor for this many years and when he was 39 years old he started hearing voices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I mean his brain. And thank God that that, uh, the medical examiner in Maine preserved his brain and sent it to the one of the best brain labs in the country. Um, we got answers right. It would have been so easy. Literally the.
Speaker 2:Here's what the army has said about this brain, and and and for listeners, this brain was was dissected and analyzed by the, the boston university lab, which is is one of the leaders in the world and certainly the leader on cte, and they found extensive damage. That that is the pattern of it is repeated head trauma, not one trauma repeated head trauma. So here's how the army dealt with this problem. One, they never told anybody that this guy had worked for years as a grenade instructor. I had to find out by going around their back and talking to the guys who actually worked for him.
Speaker 2:And two, when it did come out that his brain had all this damage, they said oh well, 10 years ago he fell off a roof. So they were ready and appear to have doubled down on saying, like, this is not a problem, don't worry about it. And so I can't tell if they're embracing this change and realize it has to happen, or are trying to circle the wagons and do damage control. Quite frankly, I see both at the same time happening, which maybe is typical DOD right, it's full of millions of people and they're not always doing the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. I will say that because I am close to US SOCOM and its efforts are. I mean what they're doing for brains are unbelievable.
Speaker 2:I actually think SOCOM is in its own class.
Speaker 1:That's the tip of this big spear right that we've got to get going. And I think that the militaries, I think they're like the sports leagues If we admit we got a problem, what do we do? And they're admitting it's like the NFL just shortened its kickoff. If you watch the NFL, well, when you change something, you've admitted you got an issue right. And so here in the military, by just having that report and looking at the stuff, they know they have an issue and I think, and I don't know, but they've got to have a better, and I'm sure that behind closed doors they've done this Been like what are we going to do?
Speaker 2:Not fight wars, you know, like this guy's being unreasonable and that's not, I don't think, what anyone's talking about. If you understand the issue and you learn how to reduce exposure, that's a good thing. Another thing that's intriguing. I haven't done any reporting on it, but people may be genetically predisposed to injury, um, and if we start to learn about that, you might say like, well, this guy shouldn't be around artillery, but he'd be a damn good like mechanic. Um, you know, we can still. We can still do stuff um, that, uh, that minimize. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:I haven't heard that yet, but I I would not doubt there could be some.
Speaker 2:You can still do stuff that minimizes harm. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:I haven't heard that yet, but I would not doubt there could be some predisposition. And the other thing that I've heard from a number of neurologists is they say hey, look, yeah, we know that blast exposure is a little bit different from the type of exposure you get in football. You know the kinetics of it. The physics of it are not quite the same. The injury looks a little different. Fundamentally, what you're doing is you're damaging the connections between different parts of the brain, and so those two things can kind of be put on the same plate when you're putting it on the scale of whether someone's injured or not. And so that raises the question.
Speaker 2:Well, when you go into the military, they check you for all sorts of pre-existing conditions. You know the joke used to be flat feet, but now it's all sorts of stuff Asthma, pre-existing conditions, yeah, you name it. Guess what they're not checking for. Did you play football, and how many times did you get hit? And what if that's a pre-existing condition? Because high school football is like a main line for recruiting football, and how many times did you get hit? And what if that's a pre-existing condition? Condition, because high school football is like a main line for recruiting. Those are the guys you want right. They know how to be on a team. They're not afraid of a little risk. They can, you know, get told to run a play and they'll run it.
Speaker 2:It's tough as a high school level, right, yeah, and but like, how do those two things interact and and is that a liability?
Speaker 1:And that's what I'm trying to. So what it all comes down to, mr Phillips, is exposure. It's the aggregate exposure. So we're working on the sports sides like look, play brain safe sports till 14, prefrontal cortex starts. We say 18 because you're an adult man, you want to play football, go play, all right, you know, but in this, these crazy parents, in these sports man, they get so insane about it. I was like, right, if you play one season of one contact sport unlike my boy you played rest football, wrestling and snowboarding and all that pain you know, at least limit the exposure, but by limiting.
Speaker 1:If we took contact out of practice in football, we could eliminate 80% of the exposure. They could play one game a week, one season a year. They'd go in the Army and do whatever they want. Same thing in the Army. We have to limit exposure. If we took the exposure out of training we could fight all the wars we had to fight and be the baddest dudes out there. You still have to shoot that weapon every now and then. You still got to get used to the chaos of combat, the explosions, the bombs. You know making decisions under stress that you cannot take away, but you don't have to do it every day, and that's my conversation with a lot of military leaders right now.
Speaker 2:And I think that maybe that it's easy for them to view it as hey, if we limit that stuff, we're going to limit our effectiveness. But there's another side to the coin that they don't think of and I've seen it firsthand and I'm probably going to write about it soon. And that is okay. If you're the baddest dude in the platoon and you get promoted, and you get into another platoon and you get promoted and pretty soon you're like the senior enlisted guy in charge of a company or a battalion maybe. Well, guess what? That's right at the age where these problems start showing up. And so you have guys who now are in a position of serious responsibility and have a lot on their plate, who may be having difficulty sleeping, having difficulty making decisions, having difficulty keeping their temper, making good judgments, and that can seriously impact operations. And I'll give you an example, since you mentioned my book Alpha at the beginning.
Speaker 2:This is a book about a 39-year-old Navy SEAL chief who takes over a platoon, takes it to fight ISIS in Iraq and essentially he goes off the deep end and then his guys all have to deal with it.
Speaker 2:When I wrote the book it was before I did any of this TBI training and I really thought this was an example of a bad dude who somehow had slipped through the cracks bad dude who somehow had slipped through the cracks. But I view it differently now and I think that one of the things that he was really dealing with was this type of injury and all of the bad decisions that he was making, all of the rash things that he did. You know, can't all be put on him because he had been a breacher, he had been around a lot of explosives, he had fired a ton of Carl Gustavs, um, and if he wasn't thinking straight, part of it may have been how they're running things and that type of liability which was a huge embarrassment for the Navy SEALs, um, and ruined a lot of his younger enlisted guys' lives. Uh, you know, could have been all because he'd been exposed to a ton of blast.
Speaker 1:I would not say with all, of course you know, absoluteness, if that's even a word, but there's no doubt in my mind that that amount of exposure that we have as special operations veterans you cannot, especially if you are a master breacher and you're involved with this. I, I, I know a guy that we we from Colorado Springs. I used to live there and I lived up in Woodland park for years.
Speaker 2:And we got a call.
Speaker 1:I'm a 10th group. I was a the B210 sergeant major. I retired in May of 01. Yes, sir, emerald city, back there in the back there. Yeah, yeah, one of our guys was a master breach when I was in seven special forces group.
Speaker 1:He was out in the middle of Colorado, got a report. He was claiming that there were people shooting at him and all this crazy. So we got one of the local motorcycle groups to go investigate and we brought him in and we ate at the Western Omelette down there in downtown and he's talking to us. He's like man, you, these guys follow me everywhere, I'll stay in a hotel, they're right next to us. He's like man, these guys follow me everywhere, I'll stay in a hotel, they're right next to us. And we're like Joe, are you okay? He goes. No, I'm not kidding you, man, it's been going on for years, dude. And so we actually put people around his house and then he said, hey, I'm going on a trip.
Speaker 1:He came here to Tampa where I liveivity that is all part of the fact. He was a senior demolitions instructor at our special operations training course, our Sephardic course, then in our special. You know, he's been around bombs his whole life, man, and I've tried to reach out to his family to let them know like there is some closure here. Joe wasn't crazy. Yeah, joe had a brain injury, right. And that's the kind of closure that we're not giving our families right now, because we're not even trying to even understand this thing right.
Speaker 2:It's like that injury doesn't just fall on on the service member, it impacts their kids, it impacts their wives, it impacts everybody around them, because those people aren't given the tools or awareness to like even know this is going on. So to a certain extent they blame themselves. You know, like if the marriage falls apart, you're trying to take care of the kids, your husband's blaming you for all sorts of crazy shit, like yeah you're like a. You're a 20 year, eight year old army wife.
Speaker 1:You don't know what to do with this and you don't know, and you know, and on the side of things that I deal with with the kids on, on the other side of things and on the veteran side, I mean, we've had families, uh, incarcerate their children because they were out of control when they were suffering from a, a brain injury from contact sports. But it it comes out hostility, aggression, you know, you know crazy actions, and they're like I can't deal with you no more, I'm going to put you in jail or I'm going to lock you up and they're like and then when, after the kid passed, and then they they come, they, they read this book, or they, they, they are in the military.
Speaker 1:They list the articles like oh my God, yeah, oh my God. I divorced this man who was the father of my kids Cause I thought he was crazy.
Speaker 2:The hardest thing about this injury is it erodes your support network right. It pushes away all the people that might be able to help you.
Speaker 1:Yep, oh man, when I went through my dial man, I was not a good husband. I'll tell you that, bro. I mean I had to come out, I mean I was dealing with a lot of stuff. But I see this now and I see this. So many guys have talked to us right now and then it's just there. So it's just, it is there. And because it's not understood or widely known, everybody knows concussions are bad, but nobody knows that you can become mentally ill from your military service, and I think that's what the military is dealing with.
Speaker 1:That's what they're afraid of. I think it's not. What do we have to do going forward? Okay, we got to make changes. We got to do training better. We know there's a problem. It's. Looking backwards is oh my god, what do we do? How do we, how do we start this conversation in the in the nfl nhl major league rugby is going to have to have this conversation one day too.
Speaker 2:you know it's like all right. Does this become kind of a burn pit situation where it's like, hey, we now forced to realize that we exposed all you guys to this really harmful stuff, and we are not going to be forced to realize that we exposed all you guys to this really harmful stuff and we are not going to be able to sort out who was impacted. So we're just going to have to presumptively help you guys?
Speaker 1:I don't see any other way to do it. No, but to your point, we now have diagnostic protocols that we can use for a clinical assessment. We can look at your brain. There's like DTI scans, spect scans, qeg, you know all these other new scans that can look at molecular level damage. They can look at white matter uh, water traction through white matter. They can look at all kinds of stuff. And if you have a gbev or a dd214 saying that was a green beret master breach or whatever, yeah, and you've got a tes protocol with psychological, behavioral, cognitive disorders and you got the scan. All, right, now we can, we can. We got all these modalities you talked. Right now let's go get you treatment, but none of this is covered. You went to mexico. Every one of those guys was covered by a non-profit, yeah, or paying out of pocket, yeah, to take care of, to give their family one last show, to give themselves one last hope. Which?
Speaker 2:is like four to ten, twelve thousand to $10,000, $12,000.
Speaker 1:Yes, sir, right, and none of this is covered by VA or TRICARE, and that's what I'm working on here, you know.
Speaker 2:One of the guys there was a longtime Green Beret sniper. Which group is it that oversees the Middle East? Is that fourth?
Speaker 1:It's usually fifth group that started. Fifth and third group kind of share the area.
Speaker 2:And he'd had a busy career, you know. And he, he comes in there like so many guys you've seen before with with, uh, just like his, his life falling apart. He's mean to everybody, he's paranoid, he's he's got a short fuse. So after that, after he takes the psychedelics at the end of the weekend, he's been through a lot psychedelically. He's been on a journey.
Speaker 2:He's talking to me and like tears are flowing down his face and he's just like man, like I, finally, I finally get it. Like I've been talking to an army therapist for like 10 years and they keep telling me I have to do this and realize this and know this and like, but how are you supposed to do that? And I just like knew this and like, but how are you supposed to do that? And I just like knew it, I understood, like I see, like the forgiveness that I have to have for myself and for others. And it's not that I see it, it just is. And he's just like crying and shaking his head and he points his thumb back at the house where, where he's done these psychedelics, he's like man, that stuff there that could have saved the army a shit ton of money.
Speaker 1:And I will tell you, under these plant medicines, you do realize that God's greatest gift of love is actually the most powerful element in this world.
Speaker 2:Well, so, tell me this, Bruce, since you've been through it like. What the researchers want to know is does it last Like everyone feels good on Monday after doing the psychedelics? How do you feel six months from then? How do you feel two years from now? Is this something that like recedes? Is it like taking a Tylenol, or is it something different?
Speaker 1:I think that the changes are profoundly. They're very profound, they're very deep because you and you get rid of, you feel like you've exhausted a lot of the trauma that you've kept in you for all these years. So I would say, on one level, if you take the integration, the lessons learned, seriously and you practice them every day, they, they are at least semi-permanent to permanent, and it takes some involvement. If you hang out with the bad crowd, you start snorting heroin again. Whatever, you know, dude, you know it's all.
Speaker 1:We all have our devils, but I do believe that these plant medicines are a, a, a, a. I've, I've done it twice, um, uh, three months apart, and I learned new lessons each time, and I don't think it's like a pill, I don't think you have to take them every day. I mean, you know, I, I, I was on ketamine once a month for a year plus. I haven't been back in five months and I, I am. People come to me and he's like dude, what happened to you, bro? Like my sister runs my son's foundation, she's like, oh, my God, you are such a different man and and um, but I am, I. I absolutely believe that, um, and I would encourage you to go through an ayahuasca experience. It's not the ibogaine, that's supposed to be a masculine energy. The ayahuasca is more female.
Speaker 2:It seems like a pretty harsh journey. I mean, I was pissed off by these guys when they went through it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, it's not like everybody says. These are recreational drugs Bullshit. This is work, man, this is work. You come out of there. But the other side of this, dave, is that your brain is just. It's like you ran a marathon. You are tired. So, from the healing perspective, you do get a lot of energy going through that brain and I feel that that can help with neuroplasticity recovering, building new neural pathways. Um, cause you're? You're just like ketamine these psychedelics make your brain work where it doesn't work. It's an exercise, right, um? So I honestly believe, after um watching the outcomes there, um, and and hearing, like, what my Navy SEAL told me, bro, I mean, he was like, and I know one guy that went through three years ago hasn't smoked a cig, drank a beer, was a horrible husband and a derelict dad. So I think this is all about hope.
Speaker 2:And I've heard that story from probably like 12 different operators I've talked to. I'm like so how was it? They're like dude, it changed my life. And then they start listing off all the things that are changing. It's more than to your point point.
Speaker 1:It's more than just like a vision quest, like I saw something interesting, figure stuff out.
Speaker 2:Like no, like it changed my brain, man. Like like the, all the urges for addiction went away, my sleep got better. One of the dudes this is a funny story, but it just shows, like, how this stuff happens at a subconscious level. That same sniper I was telling you about, um, after doing ibogaine he comes down, uh, 24 hours later. He comes down in the morning after having a good night's sleep and he's like hey, how are you doing? I'm like good, how are you? He's like you know, I got up this morning I went to put my shoes on and I was like no, I think I want my feet to feel the earth. And then he smiled. He's like what the fuck was that all?
Speaker 1:about, but it feels good. Yeah, I uh my wife now wants to everybody I know wants to try it because of its impact on me, and but you, you find yourself, you accept yourself and I mean it is, it is. It was absolutely the most, uh, rewarding experience of my life. It was hard, hard, hard earned. Um, I feel so psychologically cleansed and I went through a horrible childhood, bro, horrible childhood and, um, and I had a lot to get out man, and then, you know, with the death of my son and all this, I was able to put it into a. You know, just just really come out on the other side and I'm in a much more loving, a much more kindly, a much more. I've always been a very devout man, especially recently, but, um, you just feel the power of God's love and and and and. To me it's like, hey, man, some dude in the Amazon figured out out of the 80,000 plans if I take these two pieces of bark and boil it and put it in there.
Speaker 1:I'm going to you know so it's.
Speaker 2:I wonder what our conversation as a society is going to be like five, ten years from now and all this stuff Like. Will we just be like, oh yeah, this is just part of your retirement package coming out of the Army.
Speaker 1:It could be because you know and I know we got to close down here in a little bit. I want to respect your time, but it is going to come down to that. It's going to be whether it's you play sports and you entertain people and people make billions of dollars off you and bet on you, or you're in the military and you serve your country, and I just want the listeners to know this. Ain't military Firemen who have to scrape bodies off the floor. Our EMS, our first responders and our police are all part of this pain, man.
Speaker 2:All part of this pain, often all people who served in the military too.
Speaker 1:So they get a double dip right. But we're going to have to have, you know, a recognition that we have problems here, that now we're going to. Now we're going to through mitigating exposure during training we can lessen the impacts on the future force out here. But when you get out, just like you get disability. You know, like I got rotator cuffs and back injuries from parachute. I got shot in the face. I got all this disability. You're now going to get disability for your brain and as long as you know that, hey, I can serve in this job and now I'm going to limit my exposure. So I'm going to be big.
Speaker 2:I got a pension, I got a disability and I got an option to fix me and I'm going to get some cash in my pocket, which right now isn't happening.
Speaker 1:That is nuts, and that's what you know. If you went back to all those operators down there and talked to them about this issue, most of them would not know what's going on and how to address it, and I and you can absolutely educate the VA on from a disability perspective as well. So look as we close out. What's next for Dave Phillips?
Speaker 2:man, new York times article writer, pulitzer prize winner. What's up, you got to stay focused on this. I think that the I think that the brain injury stuff is so important and that it's such a big blind spot because it comes on slow right, so the military is not seeing it. So what's next is that this stuff isn't just happening in the military from blast exposure. The nature of combat is that we're looking for an edge and that means that our vehicles are faster, more powerful, our weapons are faster, more powerful, and in all of that design we're not taking into account, like, the physics of our brain tissue. So I've got a couple articles that, like I'm working on right now right when I get off the phone with you, I'm talking to somebody else that are looking at that aspect. Beyond blast, this is a bigger problem and it's all part of the same problem that we've tried to prepare for war without thinking about the physics of the brain.
Speaker 2:Again it's a solvable problem, but we got to understand it first.
Speaker 1:Mr Phillips, thank you so much and tell all your NY New York Times writers that they're focusing on CTE. I keep telling the same thing. I'm like get off the CTE wagon. It's repetitive. Have them packs, please, educate them. But anyways, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show I spent an amazing conversation. Yeah, look forward to reaching out. You need anything else? Just reach out to us. We'll give them what we'll.
Speaker 2:I'll, my networks, your network, now, man don't worry about it, and thanks for all you do. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:It's my job, Folks. Dave Phillips, New York times reporter. Reporter. Cannot thank you enough for being on the show, sir. You have a great day.