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
The Overlooked Connection: Brain Trauma, Neck Injuries, and How to Heal.
In this eye-opening episode of Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman, Bruce sits down with Dr. Sasha Blaskovich, a chiropractic expert, to uncover the often-overlooked connection between neck injuries and brain trauma. Dr. Blaskovich shares his personal journey with concussions and explains how damage to the craniocervical junction and neck ligaments can worsen brain injuries, leading to long-term issues like inflammation, tinnitus, and neurological dysfunction.
The conversation dives deep into the mechanics of head trauma, the underdiagnosed nature of neck injuries, and how repetitive impacts—common in sports and physical activities—can cause lasting harm. Dr. Blaskovich emphasizes the importance of proper diagnosis, chiropractic care, and alternative treatments to improve outcomes for athletes, veterans, and anyone suffering from brain and neck trauma.
Tune in now to learn how understanding this vital connection can revolutionize recovery and brain health. Don’t forget to follow, share, like, and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts to support this vital conversation!
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Repetitive Brain Trauma
02:10 Dr. Blaskovich's Personal Journey with Concussions
05:12 Understanding the Craniocervical Junction
09:06 The Impact of Neck Injuries on Brain Health
12:22 The Underdiagnosed Nature of Neck Ligament Damage
13:33 Diagnosis and Treatment of Neck Injuries
20:51 The Cumulative Effects of Repetitive Head Impacts
24:04 Inflammation and Pressure in the Brain
25:14 Chiropractic Techniques for Neck Alignment
28:22 Understanding Head Injuries and Their Impact
32:50 The Connection Between Sports and Neurological Issues
34:39 Research Gaps in Brain and Spinal Health
39:23 Personal Stories and the Importance of Awareness
45:07 Navigating Treatment and Diagnosis in Healthcare
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Website: drblaskovich.com
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Dr. B’s Concussion Breakthrough: Exploring the Hidden Connection to Neck Injuries and a Simple Guide to Naturally Heal Your Brain
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Produced by Security Halt Media
Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Broken Brains with yours truly Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the Mack Parkman Foundation, a show where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma and its impact on our children, athletes, professional players and our veterans.
Speaker 1:Today we have Dr Sasha Blazkowicz, and this is going to be an exciting conversation because he's on both sides of the deal.
Speaker 1:He's not only a doctor he's also been through this as a football player but he's a board-certified chiropractic doctor who specializes in assessing and treating head and neck injuries. He's played football for over a decade and he's been working with injured patients for over 20 years and has extensive firsthand knowledge with about every possible condition, pain and trauma associated with the head and neck, which we all know are the primary causes of the issues that we discussed on this podcast. He's devoted his career to helping people going through the same problems he has because he has firsthand knowledge as somebody that's played professional sports and he's obtained his doctorate of chiropractic from the University of Western States and has a bachelor of science from the University of Calgary and a doctorate in podiatry from the Netherlands and he's helped many professional athletes, from football players to NHL players, overcome their injuries and sustain their ability to perform at a professional level and helped them when they've left the professional league. Dr Blaskovich, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate the time today.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. Bruce, Really appreciate that intro. That was quite extensive.
Speaker 1:Hey, man, denny doesn't mess around man, he gets it all to me right there right now. But we're all about head and neck, man. We're all about why are you focused on this trauma.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously, tell us how you got involved. It looks like you played a lot of sports. Sure, yeah, I was playing quarterback and I threw the ball down the field and a linebacker came through a gap and basically just tied my arms up and I was admiring my throw as it was going down the field and, uh, we just landed backwards and my head hit the ground and he landed on top. He wasn't much of a hard hit, but it was just the way that I was not properly prepared for that impact that. You know I got my bell rung and you know I was diagnosed as a concussion.
Speaker 2:But fast forward 30 years now I realized that when that head impact happened, when I hit the back of my head on that hard ground, that there were sheer forces that occurred between my skull and my upper neck that actually severed a couple of ligaments or severely stretched a couple of ligaments that basically act to stabilize my head on top of my upper cervical spine.
Speaker 2:And so for the longest time, the going diagnosis, the working diagnosis, was concussion.
Speaker 2:But it turns out that what happened is I actually had a severe sprain of the ligaments in my upper neck that rendered my upper neck unstable and by that instability, the extra shift that happens in an unstable upper neck tends to irritate and repeatedly stimulate the brainstem and also block off some of the drainage that the brain makes as far as fluid that's got to go down through the upper neck and bathe the entire spinal canal and so that causes a back pressure up into the skull which then poses brain-like symptoms.
Speaker 2:But the actual origin of all that is not actually a malfunction in the brain, it's a glitch in the drainage system between the brain and the neck. And so that's kind of what I've discovered a lot discovered on myself first of all, and it's a dynamic process, so it's not always as irritating to the brainstem structures as other times, and there's many factors that you know probably take an entire day's lecture to go over. But bottom line is is that the upper neck seems to be the massive missing link in these concussive-like diagnoses where all imaging and all examination procedures don't actually show anything objectively on the brain. That this has been in my opinion, in my experience, the missing link in those cases where all efforts were put on discovering what's wrong with the brain, only to find out that it's actually the brainstem region that's being irritated, causing a back pull up into the brain rendering those symptoms, but that's not the origin.
Speaker 1:Now, what is that focal point in the neck? I can't remember From the chiropractic perspective.
Speaker 2:Cranioservical junction is what it's called.
Speaker 1:Yes, sir, and we've had a meeting that I went to where a chiropractic doctor was. They actually have a machine, I guess that can you know target that area. Are we talking about the glymphatic system and as that part of the brain, or what fluids right now, when you get that kind of a concussion, are being blocked, so that our audience understands that, sure, and how does that impact the brain?
Speaker 2:Sure, it's the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, and so ultimately, you know, lymphatics will get affected. But the main vessel that's involved here is the formation of the cerebrospinal fluid which the brain makes inside the center of it, and these structures called the ventricles. They're basically caverns, and inside those caverns the amount of blood or plasma from the blood that gets across what's called the blood-brain barrier, dictates how much CSF cerebral spinal fluid the brain will make in those ventricles. And then the equivalent amount that's made has to drain through the upper neck in order to keep a balance or equilibrium of how much is made to how much is drained, because if you make more than you drain, that means that you continue to make and it starts to pool in the brain. And what ends up happening as a first course of events is that the ventricles will swell out a little bit and as they start to swell, they start to seep out some of the cerebral spinal fluid into the brain, between the skull and the actual brain. So you have what would be termed hydrocephalus, but it's rarely diagnosed as such, and so but it does cause pressure on the brain, which can result either in cognitive difficulties and or just a simple headache or constant pressure in the head or pressure in the ears or blurry vision. It can cause a gamut of things that aren't truly being caused by a defect in the brain, but it's caused by a backpooling of fluid that the brain is making as a result of our blood circulating nonstop and forcing then plasma across the blood-brain barrier and then the ventricles make an equivalent amount of CSF as to how much plasma has been introduced to them and then that has to go into circulation and if more is made than more than is drained, you get a back pooling and you can get a whole gamut of problems. And you know, in a long term, you know trajectory pattern.
Speaker 2:If that is long enough standing or recurrent enough that it repeats itself often enough, and frequently enough you can actually get hypoxia or a reduction in oxygen and nutrients to the adjacent brain tissue that's right outside of the ventricles.
Speaker 2:And so an example you'll see that when people get discovered or they get diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, inevitably, if you track the research, the vast majority of their so-called white plaques are periventricular, which means they surround the ventricles.
Speaker 2:Which would pose the question of you know, is that because these ventricles are swelling because of this phenomenon that I just explained, causing them, those adjacent brain tissues adjacent to the ventricles, to be squeezed a little bit and voided or devoided or reduced in how much oxygen perfusion gets to those tissues and they go into a different metabolic state which can change their appearance on an MRI from gray to white or whatever the signal sequence is that they're using on MRI.
Speaker 2:So it'll show up as a sclerotic plaque and the assumption that I always had is that that's dead brain tissue. Well, research has shown that if you can alter the fluid dynamics, some of those white plaques will dissolve and disappear. If you can alter the fluid dynamics, some of those white plaques will dissolve and disappear. And does that mean that they were dead? That likely means that they were in a hibernative state, causing their morphology to change, which gives them a different appearance. And then, if you reduce the hydrostatic pressure on them, they get more oxygen and nutrients back to them and they get out of the hibernative state and start metabolizing properly and change their color into what we would expect to see on an MRI scan.
Speaker 1:So you're saying that does this start at the neck? Because we know that when you have a concussion, you have inflammation, you have swelling and in very, very pronounced cases, you have that edema. You have that buildup in the brain where they have drill holes and relieve pressure. You're talking about the same type of phenomenon where you have pressure within the brain causing cognitive and behavioral deficiencies. That's stimulated by damaging the neck muscles.
Speaker 2:The neck ligaments.
Speaker 1:The neck ligaments.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right so then the only recourse that the upper neck has then to maintain a proper alignment and stability would be the muscles. And the muscles can't invariably hold onto that amount of work and forces long-term, and that's why we have ligaments. Ligaments hold our joints passively together, whereby there's some amount of movement, but not too much. And so, for example, when you sprain your ACL in your knee or tear your ACL, now your knee is deficient, it actually moves too much. And so the only when you sprain your ACL in your knee or tear your ACL, now your knee is deficient, it actually moves too much. And so the only worst problem that you can have happen there is that eventually you'll have degenerative arthritis where they've got to replace your knee.
Speaker 2:Well, when that happens anywhere in the spine, the spine's number one job is to protect the spinal cord and brainstem, and the skull's number one job is to protect the brain, and the skull's number one job is to protect the brain.
Speaker 2:When you have an infringement upon that capacity to protect, the thing itself that's supposed to protect can now be the thing that encumbers. So when you have too much movement between two spinal bones, those actual spinal bones that are intended to protect the spinal cord will now irritate the spinal cord because they shift too much and they nudge up against the spinal cord and any even hydrostatic pressure, so them just displacing. Fluid, which is a viscous fluid inside the canal, can actually displace the spinal cord. So you don't have to have physical contact of the bone on the spinal cord, you can just have an excessive pressure or displacement of hydraulic fluid in there that will stimulate the spinal cord, or in this case the upper spinal cord, which is the lower part of the brainstem, and then you get what would be called cervical medullary symptoms, which are anything that the vagus nerve basically is involved in. So heart rate, blood pressure, temperature control, breathing rate, vision, hearing, the transmission of bowel movements, stomach acid, even some reproductive things are governed by that.
Speaker 1:And that's just to list a few. So in your estimation, you know, given the fact that I mean neck ligaments are, you know, pretty much well, I'd say, the neck right, whether it's a concussion in football, hitting a soccer ball, you know being tackled violently in rugby, or you know, getting checked in hockey, right, I mean, your neck is always at risk. I mean I'm a tight row, I'm a front row prop, I'm a tight head prop in rugby and I I mean that's why I got turtle Everybody calls me the turtle. I have no neck right, it's just a neck and I got a shoulder. So I mean what in your estimation? I mean, how common is this injury in our athletes? I mean, how common is this injury in our athletes? I mean, because everything that we're talking about that impacts the head, impacts the neck, I mean you can't, you can't get away. So I mean you know this seems like this is a it could be a fairly common injury that is not being diagnosed when we have, especially when we have, a concussion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's an extremely underdiagnosed and undiagnosed condition, I think, on a daily basis. I'm so incredibly shocked to find out how many people out there have a variation of this condition, if you want to call it, and that would be dictated by the severity of their symptoms. But the percentage of people out there walking around and it's not just from sports is massive. I think it's the most massively underdiagnosed phenomenon as it relates to the concussive. You know, the global concussive phenomenon, if you will. You know, concussion is, I think, a very vague term that assumes that it's all brain Too vague.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, we spend so much money. Yeah, we spent so much money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the frequency and the prevalence of this upper cervical, you know, ligament damage to some degree, in some variation is ginormous. Yeah, like again I said, it ceases to amaze me as to how frequently I see this. And you know, sometimes people end up coming here 20, 30 years after the fact, and they've been chasing their tail for that long only to finally get some answers, and in some cases too little, too late.
Speaker 1:So what's the means by which we can repair this, or how do you treat this? Is this all you know? Chiropractic work? Is it manipulation? Is it drugs? You know, obviously not playing sports for a while. I mean, what do you recommend when an athlete comes to you and says hey, you know, I've been playing for 20 years, right, and you, you know, identify that he's got ligament damage? What are the characteristics Like? Do you run a blood panel? Is there a brain scan? How do you determine that? Number one you have pressure. And number two that you know, you know. And then how do you treat that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the problem with determining the pressure is that I don't think a normal has ever been studied Like. They only study this when there's the obvious, like when you say that they got to tap into the skull to release the pressure. Those are the obvious cases and that's a needle in a haystack. The rest of the people don't really fit that criteria, so their symptoms are vaguer and much less obvious, and especially when it gets into the chronic phase where they've been dealing with this for decades that the diagnostics of figuring that pressure component out are subjective. So you'll have 10 radiologists sitting in 10 different rooms and they'll all have a different opinion on whether they think it's hydrocephalus or not. But at the end of the day MRI scans, ct scans, regular x-rays they will generally show subtleties that indicate that the upper cervical spine has somehow been compromised. Whether that's the peg that belongs to the second cervical bone is not perfectly centered where it should be, it's off to one of the sides and that'll be deemed generally by radiologists again as a normal variant. And unfortunately it's rarely a normal variant, if at all ever. And so picking up little things like that and then combining that or correlating that to the clinical symptoms that the patient is talking about. If they're saying they got persistent headaches, they got blurry vision or double vision, they got fullness in their ears ringing in their ears, their heart races when they're not exercising, they're having breathing difficulties, they're having digestive issues, they're having temperature control issues, irritability, forgetfulness, mood swings, you name it. There's, you know, probably another 20, 30 things that they could possibly have. Then you combine all those things together and say well, based off of the injury that you had and how you explain the event happening and the chronicity of what you've been going through and some of these subtleties on the imaging, it's highly likely that you have damaged ligaments. And if, at that point in time, the gold standard for determining whether they do or don't is to actually do dynamic x-ray, which is literally moving x-ray, so they'll go side to side with their mouth open, they'll bend their head up and down so that you can triangulate, and they'll do rotation as well, so you can triangulate in three dimensions which ligaments, whether left, right, both front, back, were compromised or are compromised, showing the instability.
Speaker 2:And at that point in time, there are a few different things that can be attempted. For example, if it is assumed to be just a positional thing so that the upper neck bone or the atlas is out of position, causing a long standing. You know what we call a functional stenosis. The bones are supposed to line up like that, but if one is slightly offset it reduces the internal diameter at the junction point of those two bones and as the simplest form of trying to correct that is a upper cervical chiropractic technique, which there are several of that would then push that back into alignment in a very benign, non-forceful way, providing then a reopening of that canal as those two bones meet and a person shouldn't have reduction in symptoms. If they actually have instability, that's pathologic. That correction won't stay and they'll say that you know your adjustment's not holding and it's repeatedly not holding and what that means is that they likely have permanently damaged ligaments which would not allow for that to be held, no matter what you do to it as far as adjusting and realigning.
Speaker 2:And at that point in time you have then this neuromuscular system that I explained earlier, when the ligaments are permanently damaged. So like the acl in the knee, anybody who's damaged their acl and and either knows or doesn't know about it, all they know is that they have perpetually tight hamstrings, perpetually tight calf and protect perpetually tight quadriceps because they're all trying to compensate for this boat, this joint that's moving too much. And so in the neck the same thing happens with the neck muscles and what you can do is basically, as those muscles cinch down and go into a sort of really contracted state to protect themselves but also to protect that extra movement that's happening, you can actually expedite their return back into function by just doing acupressure or ischemic compression on them, which means pressing and holding and squeezing everything out of them, so that when you're done squeezing, the only thing that gets into that voided muscle tissue is fresh blood full of nutrients and oxygen. And you've now reset that muscle and its ability to basically govern the bone or the upper bone going out of position and it pulls it back in. So then, when this is happening dynamically, it goes out of position, the muscle sense that and they pull it back into position. And then you go through your day and it goes out of position, the muscle sense that, they bring it back into position, but they can only do that for a perpetual amount of time and at that point in time they'll seize.
Speaker 2:And so the technique that I use on myself generally, on the vast majority of my patients is this ischemic compression or sustained pressure technique, which then resets the muscle interface, the nerve muscle interface, so the muscle can actually sense itself being pulled out of position, and then pulling the bone back into position. But that needs to be repeated, sometimes multiple times a day or very frequently, so I can teach patients how to do that themselves. So the first, like I said, is the atlas adjusting and, assuming that the adjustments don't hold you've got this neuromuscular technique and assuming that either that's too much for a person to feasibly and logistically do and or to go to someone to passively implement that on them. And from a treatment standpoint like coming to me, for example their third course of action would be to do some kind of interventional or regenerative injection therapy, which is either prolotherapy, plateletelet-rich plasma or stem cells, in an attempt to try to initiate some collagen regrowth in the fibroblasts. That would be then either reproducing or correcting or healing some of the ligaments that have been damaged. So that would either thicken them or shorten them, reducing the amount of this offset that happens and hopefully that'll last long enough where it'll be good for a long time, or they might have to repeat it in a year or whatever else, and if that all fails assuming that all of the proper areas were injected, and that again is dictated by doing an emotion x-ray and determining exactly which ligaments and where are damaged, so you can direct the injections to the proper spots.
Speaker 2:But if that all doesn't work, then the last recourse, especially if someone's having debilitating neurological symptoms that are you know daily, would be cervical effusion surgery, where they basically go in and bolt together C1 and C2. And in the case that it's just C1 and C2, and then that instability becomes immobilized completely and these people generally get a new life. If it gets to that point where you know they'll still have pain and stiffness and discomfort, but you know, the, the nausea, the dizziness, the vertigo, the heart palpitations, the blurry vision, double vision, the cognition stuff all really goes away. They're just left with stiffness and pain in general after that and some you know, fluctuating flare-ups of this and that. But the major neurological um cascade of irritation goes away with the immobilization by surgical fusion of that area.
Speaker 1:And I can understand, like from a concussion right, a one hit, you know some, or one or two hits, car crash, you know where. This absolutely is something that needs to be, you know, looked at, and I can also see it for long-term athletes like myself that have been playing a lot of contact sports or been in the military over time. How does the issue of repetitive head impacts or repetitive blast exposure where you have a damaged brain okay, you have a damaged brain that brain, you know, is producing behavioral, cognitive, psychological disorders. Number one you know, how does that impact? Number one you know, how does that impact? I mean, you know it sounds like a question on on the fluid, like when the CSF over time, if does it have to be recycled, like a lot, like when we have a concussion and we have all these, you know, the chemicals, the endorphins, everything that's been released to deal with the injury to the brain. We do know that those chemicals over time produce become toxic, right, they start degradating the brain. We do know that those chemicals over time become toxic, right, they start degradating the brain instead of persisting it because of a long-term chronic inflammation.
Speaker 1:Here we have long-term chronic pressure, right, and often in cases, I would think we probably have both right. If you have long-term chronic pressure from contact sports, you absolutely have taken thousands of hits and now you've got a combination of problem, a combination of issues here that both can be impacting. You know some of the overlapping system symptoms that you said the cognitive, psychological. You know some of these mood disorders, right, depression. What are your recommendations for athletes that are coming out either having pain or even car crash victims, to go ahead and kind of separate where there is a history of repetitive head impacts and ligament damage? How do we separate the two so that they both get treated, so that they both get treated Well.
Speaker 2:First of all, it's cumulative. No matter whether you look at just the brain as an entity that's being injured or the ligaments in the neck, anytime you add more fuel to the fire you're going to have a likely progression of the problem because it's a cumulative effect. So anytime you have repetitiveness, the likelihood that you're going to do a little bit more micro damage each time is highly probable. And when you go back to do a little bit more micro damage each time is highly probable. And you know, when you go back to the pressure, the pressure is inflammation really. So it's not being called inflammation, but it is.
Speaker 2:And so what hasn't really been looked at is this you know this notion that inflammation is determined to be present in the brain with a brain trauma, but the swelling inside from the extra fluid is a mechanical pressure. That is, an inflammatory process. That isn't necessarily chemical, but it does come with a chemically mediating component. But that hasn't really been studied. Is that this? You know, is there actually inflammation? On a microscopic level maybe, but is the inflammation possibly being caused by an overall increase in pressure in the entire system, causing actual mechanical squeezing of the brain?
Speaker 2:tissue causing the inflammation on a microscopic level, resulting in the thing that you get diagnosed with, or you see, that hasn't been studied, and I believe that's a huge component of the inflammatory process, because we know that when you squeeze any other tissues, whether it's muscles or whatever else, as they start to basically be starved off of the proper supply of oxygen and nutrients, they start to break down. So you have the breakdown products, which are inflammatory in nature, chemically being displayed in an area where you simply have mechanical compression. And so the same thing I would propose would be happening or could be happening in the brain you have simple mechanical squeezing of the tissues and, as they start to become hypoxic or anoxic, their breakdown or their change in metabolism could release inflammatory chemical products that could be, you know, sensed that aren't really that the tissue itself is breaking down, but it's being squeezed into a hypoxic state which allows for these you know, acidic products to be present in the area when tested for.
Speaker 1:And then we do know that you know inflammation in the brain does deprive you know the long-term inflammation deprives, you know blood, oxygen, nutrients, everything that the brain needs to heal. And it's that chronic state of inflammation, due to those repetitive impacts, that is driving that. So now, from your perspective, if we can get the atlas joint tightened up, we get it straight, does that allow the fluid to drain? Then Does that release the blockage? It does, you know, okay. So is this something that any chiropractor can perform or do they need to be specifically trained on this procedure?
Speaker 2:Sure the upper cervical adjustive procedures. So, where you're just realigning the atlas, there are a few more well-known chiropractic techniques that specialize in that. Probably the most common one would be NUCCA, n-u-c-c-a. So there are chiropractors that finish chiropractic and do extra training and lots of extra training and how to implement NUCCA, how to properly triangulate the position of the atlas so that they can position it back into place in three dimensions according to the imaging that they perform.
Speaker 2:And another variation off of NUCCA NUCCA is done with the hands, so the doctor does it with his hands. And then you have ATLAS orthogonal. So basically ATLAS again being the top neck bone, and orthogonal simply means that in three dimensions they determine how they need to correct this thing and they use an instrument to do that, which is an impulse instrument that isn't actually mechanical but more of a sound impulse. And then they have advanced orthogonal, which is atlas orthogonal with just a bit of a twist to it, and so those three techniques are probably the most commonly implemented as far as you know, trying to correct the position of the atlas in a very scientific and three-dimensional way.
Speaker 2:Okay, but the neuromus yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, no, I just remember when I went to the chiropractor and he would take my head. I could never relax, man. When he started snapping my head back and forth, hearing all those joints crack, man, I could not get, you know it was. It was hard to relax, so, um.
Speaker 1:But this is, uh, you know it's extremely interesting because you know, of all the athletes that have played, all of them have to have damaged leg. Let me throw something at you. You said when you went back you got tackled, you hit the helmet. Now we got everybody wearing these mattresses on their helmets. That we know does nothing to stop the movement of the brain inside the skull. And I talked to one high school coach. He said those things cause like every concussion. They only had like one concussion that they knew of. Of course the kids never report like 50% of them, but it was caused by that helmet hitting the turf and catching on something, that pad thing. What are your opinion on those things and how do they impact the neck? You know you got a bigger area to hit, you got more. You know you got a lot of. You're adding surface and mass. I mean, you know, as a chiropractor, what's your opinion on those parts? I mean.
Speaker 2:I preach that all the time when I explain my scenario. Is it okay if I get a model to just show you what I mean?
Speaker 1:Yeah, go for it. So this is the upper neck right here.
Speaker 2:So we is the upper neck right here. So we got the skull right here. We got the Atlas, which is C1 and C2 here, and so, for example, my hit so this is this is the bottom of my of back, of my back of the head. So what you end up doing is you've got the head here and if you look at where the neck is, so there's a gap between where the bottom of the skull is and where the bottom of the C2 is. Can you see?
Speaker 1:that Okay.
Speaker 2:Yep. So if I land backwards, which I did, and the back of my head is the first thing to hit the ground, it's wonderful that I have a helmet, which is really it's a futile thing, because what that does is it takes, if I can hold this together, this bottom point of my skull right here, and now you're going to add whatever profile of helmet which is going to be a gap here and now you're going to add whatever profile of helmet which is going to be a gap, whatever.
Speaker 2:So now you've actually increased the surface as to where my head stops. So normally my head would stop here without a helmet, right? And then this here so say, the impact happens and I hit my head like this, so this stuff is going to shear down, so the head hits the ground first, but there's still momentum in my upper cervical spine, so it's going to shear downward like that and that's where the ligaments get torn.
Speaker 2:And if you look inside here so that that tooth-like structure that you see right inside there. So when the head hits and this stuff continues, you can see how that goes backwards into there and what's behind that tooth-like structure is the brainstem. So the initial impact is that that tooth belonging to c2 this thing right here, where are you? This thing right here so that thing smashes into the front of the brainstem, causing this sort of concussive like blow where you see an mma fighter or sydney crosby even when he got clock playing hockey. Just kind of they like they're done right like to it, to it, to it.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, he's been like guarantee his cumulative yep yep, and you see them going to the fencer stance and do all these things and that's that's brain stem. So they say it's brain but the writing mechanism is brain stem and sir and cerebellum, so that that's a whole nother story. But you add a helmet to this whole scenario, right? So now the back of my head is not here, it's down here.
Speaker 1:So now the amount of shearing that can happen in these areas is much greater, yes, and then with a cushion, you're at another two inches on top of that.
Speaker 2:So the head's hitting probably four to six inches. Yeah, it amplifies that shearing. And the more you amplify the shearing, the more load you put on the ligaments and the more prone they are to failure. And when they fail, like any ligament in the body which the ACL has been studied the most, there is no healing. So you can have scarring. But at the same time, if your ACL was, let's say, as a rough, let's say it was four inches long, and when you tear it or or some failure tear which means you don't fully tear it but it's still stretched out, it's at four inches and three-eighths or four inches and a half. So now you've got three-eighths or a half inch more play in the knee joint and it's prone to partially dislocating or grinding up your meniscus inside there with time, whereby that happens when you're 18, and by the time you're 40, you need a new knee okay, wow, I mean.
Speaker 1:So this is something that, basically, if you've played a lot of contact sports, you should get a you know evaluated for it if you're having symptoms.
Speaker 2:You know if you're living with daily pressure in the head or blurry vision, or irritability or forgetfulness see that makes sense tonight is all that.
Speaker 1:All those symptoms right there do make sense from a.
Speaker 2:Those are all, all signs that the vagus nerve or the cervical medullary junction region where the brainstem meets the upper spinal cord, are somehow being irritated or stimulated in a way they shouldn't be.
Speaker 1:Wow, I wonder how many you know you don't know how many veterans I talk to that have tinnitus. I mean, and we all assume it's from a lot of blast over pressure, loud noises, whatever. As a matter of fact, I'm giving a call to my friend right now. He's had these. You know, he's been doing the VA for years for tinnitus that just will not go away. And you remember that CEO of the major corporation that killed himself after taking some COVID shots and he could not get his tinnitus, drove him to the point where he took his life and who knows what kind of inflammation could have been going on that, you know, could have been a result of all that.
Speaker 1:So where's the research on this, doc? I mean, you sound, I mean you're making sense to me, I'm sure you're making sense to the audience. I mean, we've all in contact sports, you know, had neck injuries, had injuries. You can't play contact sports, any contact sport, even heading soccer balls, without shifting your neck and your head around because of the forces, the unnatural forces at play. And we love our sports. So we're going to keep playing sports, got it? So you know where's the research and science on this? I mean, is it? You know what needs to happen to make obviously education is a big part of this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, let me start out by saying uh, let me start by saying, going back to the, you know where you're talking about, the veterans and just the blast effect and all that stuff, where they're not being physically impacted, there's a vibrational frequency, um, coming through the air.
Speaker 2:That and and what's been I'm actually doing this today from british columbia in canada, canada, this podcast with you and just out of Vancouver here, out of UBC I think it was in the early 2000s or the late 90s. They actually did a study on the startle effect. So where you have basically a loud noise occurring and these people would whiplash themselves just by getting startled and that sort of initial startle response, they would actually damage ligaments in their neck by being startled and that's why you have, for example, I remember also in the late 90s that some of the ZR1 Corvettes, their actual audio system, their stereo system in their vehicle, when it sensed a rear ender about to happen, it would turn up the volume of the music so that the actual whatever the guy was listening to would get louder, so that he would be pre-engaged, he would be startled by the music, so that when he got hit it wouldn't be as impactful to his spine in the sense of whiplash. So he was pre-prepared for it. So he's prepped for it.
Speaker 1:What so they were already planning for car crashes when they designed it? Yep, that's nuts man. And as far as research.
Speaker 2:I think there's very, very little research, unfortunately, in the correlation between what's being talked about in the brain and even the lower part of the brain, upper brainstem. So you know, we talk about the concussion and the CTE and all that stuff. Well, there's also a phenomenon called Chiari, which you may or may not have heard of, and that's where part of the cerebellum drops down into the opening of the skull and actually takes up space that only the brainstem should have inside that opening and sometimes, because of all those effects, the inside of the actual brainstem spinal cord swells out and they call that a syrinx or a syringomyelia. And so these things I think are part and parcel connected to upper cervical instability and that has not been studied and I hope that at some point in time soon starts to be studied more, because the tendencies that I've seen in the connections that I've seen between the upper cervical instability and these other sort of named conditions are very, very obvious and as far as it goes with, you know, the as I discussed earlier, sort of touched on earlier MS and the you know fluid pressure increasing in those ventricles and the plaques being periventricular in most cases A gentleman named Dr Raymond Damadian he actually invented the MRI technology.
Speaker 2:He was operating what's called the Phonar Corporation in New York and Phonar has upright MRI scanners and they design proprietary hardware that is able to determine when the MRI pulses as the CSF is circulating, so they could actually find voids, or flow voids, they call them so where you see, for example, drainage tubes going up and down the front and the back of the spinal canal, where the one disappears as they're doing the sort of basically the what they are yapping a lot here.
Speaker 2:But as the scanner basically is told to pulse a scan, it's when the heart pulses.
Speaker 2:As I was telling you earlier, our heart rate is in direct proportion or in direct sync with the rate of flow inside the brain and spinal canal.
Speaker 2:So every time our heart beats, plasma goes across into the ventricles, the ventricles then circulate CSF in there, and so he was able to determine or design this hardware product that measured a person's pulse on their finger with a pulse meter. And every time the heart beat because it varies it's not always, you know, at so many beats per minute it varies and it was able to sense that and then tell the MRI scanner when to pulse a picture, and so they piece all those pulses together and they create a video loop and it's called a SINALOOP. And so what they showed is that a lot of people with MS have voids in their flow, whether it's inside the brain somewhere or in the upper cervical spine and sometimes even in the mid cervical spine, and by correcting some of these malpositions of the bones, they could repeat the CSF flow study with the upright MRI scanner and see that now you can see full drainage, and then they would also then rescan these MS patients and note that in some of the cases that the actual plaques were gone within 45 minutes.
Speaker 1:And how were their symptoms from MS Also reduced, severely reduced? I got a guide. I got a guide that I'm going to send to you man. I mean he's a good friend of mine suffering from MS and you know I've got him. You know, anytime I come across anything that can help him and that comes to the crux of the problem here I mean, doc, I mean you're, you sound like you're out there. You know I had to write a book for parents because there was no guide on how much contact sports your kids can play, what are the risks to their health. And I've got a. I got a dead son. He's behind me right now.
Speaker 1:You know, you know, and and how much of this is just? You know the medical community not wanting to. You know the big battle between chiropractors and doctors that went on. Now we have chiropractic care in our medical clinics. We got chiropractic as an accepted, you know form of treatment right now and it sounds like a lot of these.
Speaker 1:You know very, very severe issues. We're dealing with blurry vision and tinnitus and dizziness and depression and you've got to bust it up head to think that you could possibly go to a chiropractor and spend a couple hundred bucks and get your symptoms relieved and fixed. It's not what I think the medical community really wants to hear. But you know, I think we're moving towards, you know, an age where I mean we've got to get this knowledge out there. So for our audience here is there like can they, you know? Obviously, if you could just go through the list of you know the symptoms that you know, obviously you have to have played contact sports or you had to have some form of neck trauma in the form of a concussion, and it could have been a long time ago, right, I mean a car accident when you were a kid. Something like that could still be affecting you to this day. Yep, again, it's progressive and cumulative.
Speaker 2:And so you know to what? To the? To what you said, I also wrote a book and published it in 2019. That sort of really goes into in a layman's way, this, this notion that the upper neck is connected to these things in a lot of cases, and it's called Dr B's concussion breakthrough, and that's simply my story. I mean, I was, I was diagnosed with a concussion and it wasn'ta concussion. I can I can you know, stand behind that 100% that it wasn't a concussion, it was a concussive like blow, but my problem is in my upper neck. But anyways, it's called Dr B's concussion breakthrough.
Speaker 2:I can't tell you how often I have, you know, people, people calling me or coming here, going, and I read that book or listen to it on audio. It was literally my story and you know, the more I it's out there, the more I hear that that people can really jive with that because it's literally, you know, telling everyone's story that we go through is that you have these, these deficiencies and these symptoms and you start having, you know, problems with family and friends and you kind of withdraw from social life and do all these things. And there's an absolute reason for that and being able to put it in its place, knowing that you have a particular pathology. So for myself, it took me 12 years of self-searching and becoming a chiropractor, which wasn't the reason why I went into chiropractic. This happened as a dumb luck thing because I was already in chiropractic or going towards that. But at the end of the day, you know, it took me 12 years to figure out why I was the way I was and and to come to grips with that, and that you know to try to help my family also understand you know why I am the way I am. That it's not that you know. You know daddy's always angry. Daddy's got this background noise happening in his head that you, he can't get out of there, and the more he has time to think about it and dwell on it, the worse it gets. And so you know, when I got to go, you know hide for a half hour and work on my neck muscles so that it relieves the pressure in my head and makes me feel better. You know, give me that half hour and you know, and I'll be a different person and I am so that all that kind of stuff is in the book.
Speaker 2:And you know, my co author and I, we, you know drew on our, you know dozen and a half or so things that we kind of, you know, gravitate towards on a daily basis not all at the same time, whether it's, you know, breathing exercises, meditation, you know, mindfulness, you know, forcing ourselves to think the glass is half full as opposed to glass empty, half empty, like all these things, ourselves to think the glass is half full as opposed to glass empty, like half empty, like all these things that are beneficial in their own way to helping us feel better about ourselves and be better. People are all in the book there for, you know, anybody to freely read through and try on their own. It's really not rocket science, but the fact that we all look normal and look like we have, you know, everything that we should have physically. It's really hard for even our loved ones and doctors and other people to you know, come to grounds with the fact that we are actually broken on the inside. They just can't see it. All they see is the manifestation of our either our anger or our, you know, apparent disregard for, you know, enjoyment of life and whatever else they might think. And we're all malingering, but we're not. And so to have, you know loved ones, you know learn. This stuff beside the person who's dealing with it is of utter, utter, utmost importance so that the support group is there and it's legitimized. And sometimes legitimization requires actually seeing that there's damaged ligaments by way of doing a motion x-ray and seeing that there's physical hard evidence that explains why somebody's having brainstem-like related symptoms, so that everybody can kind of put it in its place and support each other Because, at the end of the day, people are just genuinely good people and they're brought to a point of frustration because either their own lack of understanding or the lack of understanding of their loved ones, which they expect and feel like they should be entitled to have.
Speaker 2:And you know, my turning moment was for me a couple of decades ago, when I decided willfully to not let anybody feel sorry for me and most of all myself to feel sorry for myself. When I got rid of that expectation, things changed dramatically because I wasn't, you know, having background irritation and disappointment because somebody wasn't feeling sorry for me when I thought they should. I actually have an aversion to somebody feeling sorry for me when I'm at my worst, because it just puts fuel on my fire. I want to get better, I want to feel more vigorous and vital and to have somebody feeling sorry for me and saying, oh poor you. That just makes me irritated. And so, at the point in time where I decided to, you know, to not let that be the thing, to not have an expectation for anybody to understand how I feel, because they shouldn't unless they're going through that themselves, things became a lot better because my expectations were gone.
Speaker 1:Good for you and that's what we try to tell people is like. You know, mental health is our responsibility. And people there are people out there that you want to blame whoever you know blame you know whether it's the military or blame you know God, or blame you know what's done is done.
Speaker 2:What's done is done, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's you're. You've got the hand God gave you. Now, what are you going to do? Are you going to fix?
Speaker 1:the best enough about people to take. You know cold and you know I can tell my own story. You know the same thing, right? You know just, you fix yourself or there. But I think what people don't know is that there's ways to fix themselves, and so when we, when we are mentally ill, we think it's hopeless. Hey, I'm crazy, you know, like my poor son, right, he just thought he was nuts, I guess, and he had to leave. He didn't think he could ever get better and that's why we have this podcast let people know there's methodologies like yours.
Speaker 1:There's all kinds of hope out there in terms of treatment and supplementation and understanding and science, now that you know mental illness that has a physiological cause, like what you're discussing, can be treated, can be improved. But you have to take those steps. You need to move out and you need to educate yourself, because you know 95% of chiropractors out there are completely ignorant of what we're talking about right now, just like most of the medical and nursing and psychiatric community has no idea that RHI and RBE or neck ligaments can lead to cognitive and psychological conditions. We have an unbelievable amount of awareness to do and educate, and you're part of that. I really want to thank you for that. Before we close, a little bit more. What's Dr Blazkowicz up to right now? How can people find you? What do you got planned next? What's going on?
Speaker 2:Every day is chaos. It's really crazy busy. When people come and see me in person, they usually access me through whiplashcliniccom, a unique capacity to evaluate their MRIs and CT scans and other imaging studies, to look for things that the radiologists generally are not trained to look for. And even if they look for them, they will deem them to be normal variants, as I explained earlier. So people will then shift over to transferring me all their imaging for my opinion, and that goes through drblaskovichcom. So I started a special website for that so that people from all over the world, should they choose to you know, engage me in trying to help with their situation.
Speaker 2:As far as providing my two cents on something that has already been conducted with them, such as imaging studies primarily that I'm happy to have a look at it, and what I do is I look at all their imaging and I annotate, so I draw up arrows and circles and whatever else on their imaging to point to certain areas of interest, and then I will explain that to them through a Zoom call so that they have a good grasp of what I was demarking on their imaging and explain how that affects their neurology and likely is connected to their symptoms, and then hopefully they can take that and go to a local physician or specialist and hopefully get some direction there so that they don't have to travel all the way over to you know, because ultimately the diagnostic component is the number one thing in any kind of treatment avenue that you take is just icing on the cake, and unfortunately the system is put together such that they put treatment before diagnostics in nine out of 10 cases.
Speaker 2:So they, you know, try a bunch of stuff and see if it sticks and then if it doesn't work and you know you may be two, three, four years further they finally double back and go let's go see what's going on inside. And so I want to make a push for reversing that, so that the diagnostic component becomes of utmost importance and is done up front and then after that you can choose your direction more accordingly.
Speaker 1:Well, dr Blazkowicz, thank you so much, man, and you're right, I mean, why do we want to put treatment before diagnosis, right?
Speaker 2:That's just counterintuitive, you wouldn't want to take your car to the mechanic and have them start changing things and going we should change this and change that, only to come back and go hey, you know what? Let's hook it up to the scanner now and see what we got to do You'd be like I'm not paying you. I'm not paying you a penny for that.
Speaker 1:And that's how we do healthcare all the time. Well, I can't thank you enough. Website drblazkowiczcom. And don't forget your free book. Come to the website, download this for free, become informed on the issue of repetitive brain trauma and what you can do to help yourself, your children and those you love. Dr Blazkowicz, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it To our audience. Thank you so much for another great podcast of Broken Brains. We look forward to the next episode with you. Y'all, take care and Merry Christmas, thank you.