Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman

Dr. Mark Gordon on Brain Trauma, Neuroinflammation & Revolutionary TBI Treatment for Veterans and Athletes

• Bruce Parkman • Season 1 • Episode 64

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What does it really take to rebuild your life after a traumatic brain injury?

Could your mental health struggles actually be caused by untreated brain trauma?

In this groundbreaking episode of Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman, host Bruce Parkman interviews Dr. Mark Gordon, a world-renowned expert in neuroendocrinology, TBI, and neuroinflammation. Together, they dive deep into the science behind traumatic brain injury, its long-term mental health consequences, and the treatment gaps that continue to fail veterans and athletes.

Dr. Gordon explains:

  • The devastating effects of cytokine storms and neuroinflammation on the brain
  • How neurotransmitter imbalances drive depression, anxiety, and cognitive decline
  • Why traditional medicine is slow to adopt evidence-based, hormone-focused protocols
  • How his work has changed lives for veterans suffering from invisible wounds
  • The importance of moving from research to action—and making cutting-edge treatments accessible now

This episode is essential listening for veterans, athletes, caregivers, and anyone ready to explore what's really going on inside the injured brain—and what can be done to heal it.

 

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 📲 Be sure to follow, share, like, and subscribe to support brain health awareness and bring real treatments to those who need them most.

 

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-gordon-md-63536656/

 

Produced by Security Halt Media

SPEAKER_00:

Hey folks, Bruce Parkman here, and welcome to another episode of Broken Brains, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma in two forms: repetitive head impacts from contact sports and repetitive blast exposure for military service. And how these two conditions are contributing to the largest preventable cause of mental illness in this country and what we need to do about them. And we reach out to the best researchers and scientists and advocates and victims of these conditions because this is not trained in our medical nursing or psychological curricula. And you, right now, are the first point of defense for those that you love. Today on our show, again, our first returning guest. I'm so excited, man. Dr. Mark Gordon. Dr. Mark Gordon is a renowned expert in interventional endocrinology and neuroendrocinology with over 25 years' experience of working with veterans, professional athletes, and civilians suffering from the effects of traumatic brain injury. Dr. Gordon is a thought leader in his field, sharing his research with doctors worldwide to improve TBI treatment outcomes. His extensive work on reducing neuroinflammation and addressing TBI-related symptoms such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, dementia, Parkinson's disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and post-concussion syndrome has led to the development of Millennium Health's range of liposomal supplements. These supplements have helped thousands of individuals manage their TBI-related symptoms and improve their cognitive function. Dr. Gordon's expertise has gained recognition in popular media, to include the Joe Rogan podcast six times, last time I counted, and the 2020 documentary Quiet Explosions, Healing the Brain, which shares inspiring stories of those veterans and others who have recovered from TBI. And I'm here to tell you those brain supplements are pretty powerful medicine. I got some people I love on them. I've taken them myself. Dr. Gordon, welcome to the show, sir. How have you been? Alive and well above ground. Thank you, Bruce. Yep. When you're on this side, sometimes that's all that that's all that counts. It was so great to have you at the summit a couple weeks ago, man. I mean, God, what an amazing group of folks there. It was uh just uh I mean supercharged. Absolutely supercharged. Yeah, it was uh it was absolutely, man. I mean, it was it was it was just a great group of people. We didn't even know 90 days before who was going to speak. And uh I just uh you know, I want to thank the Mac Parkman team for putting that together, man. Outstanding job. And and Mark was absolutely you know one of the of the highlights because he comes in with these just you know amazing presentations on how to take research that has already been researched and put it to use. And that's something that we're gonna talk about. Is like we're done with the research for research sake. So, Mark, where do you want to start today, man? Because it's when it comes down to brains, you're the man.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, um, I think the best place to start is at the beginning. And I think uh at the beginning is to let those people, with what your introduction included with what I address in our Millennium Health program, is all forms of trauma. So concussive and subconcussive. I've basically started removing the use of words like traumatic brain injury from our vernacular, our lexicon, because people have a preconceived notion of what is a TBI, and a lot of times it's wrong. They think, oh, I got to be knocked on the ground and uh unconscious or nearly unconscious, which is not the fact, as we know with the repetitive head injuries, uh repetitive blast exposures, that you can have small chipping away at the chemistry of the brain because of the inflammatory processes that are set in motion by these traumas. And it is these um inflammatory processes that respond to the trauma that lead to all the complications that we see in our practice, that you see, the NFLCs, all the sports world see, as well as civilians, just people at home who have a slip and fall, or else a car accident or a bicycle accident, and they totally ignore it. But as we know, you and the team know, having those micro traumas, those subconcussive, those repetitive head injuries leads to equate out to a major head trauma and loss of consciousness. So, in understanding that any form of trauma, and also surgical trauma, we ignore that. Surgical trauma, you break a leg, or you go into surgery, or you certain medications, these can induce changes in the biochemistry of the brain that's equivalent to what happens with a subconcussive trauma or a concussive trauma. So understanding that at the baseline allows us then to move up to the next level. The next level is that these traumas cause circuitry in our brain to produce abnormal chemicals as well as they uh decrease or denigrate, decrease the amount of things called neurotransmitters, which are responsible for keeping us on even keel. Neurotransmitters like epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, um, GABA or uh yeah, GABA, uh, these regulate our personality and our cognitive ability. And so when the inflammation alters this chemistry, we start being perceived as having the term depression, anxiety, bipolar, obsessive compulsive, uh cognitive impairment. And then if it's allowed to continue, we end up with things like what is classified as neurodegenerative diseases, which is like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, CTE, uh ALS, TBI, PTSD, all these forms of degeneration of the brain because of chronic inflammation. In the presentation that I gave at the Mac Parkman uh summit, number two, was that the alteration in these chemicals create those conditions, those disease conditions. And we know the pathway. We know inflammation creates a certain group of chemicals, like we hear about things like hyperphosphorated tau protein, which becomes NFTs, which are neurofibrillant tangles, which are the hallmark of CTE. But it's also found in every single one of the other conditions, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS. They have the same chemistry. And they have a chemical that is the trigger, which is called beta amyloid or amyloid beta. Amyloid beta is the one that's usually associated with Alzheimer's. But guess what? It's also found in all the other neurodegenerative diseases. So inflammation uh trauma, inflammation, beta amyloid begets the CTE chemical NFT, non-neurofibrillant, which creates the micro mini strokes because it accumulates around blood vessels. And over time you lose more and more blood vessels, and that loss of blood vessel is equivalent to a stroke. So you have these micro strokes that one doesn't create a problem, but over the course of time and having repetitive head injury, it adds to the quantity of these uh micro strokes that you have until it decimates an area of the brain that controls frontal lobe. So you're unable to uh decide good and bad, you're unable to do sequential procedures, you're unable to have executive functions to making decisions. Your personality changes because in the frontal lobe, a lot of the hormones, neurosteroids, the hormones of the brain, are in the frontal lobes because that's where the major demand is. So pregnenolone, progesterone, allopregnanolone, DHEA, DHT, testosterone, estradiol, they're all in the frontal lobes. So we lose that. So then we come to the research. And I I love Dr. Pearl, okay? I love him from the past. He and I were both invited to Imperial College in London in 2020 to lecture or to give a presentation for the Ministry of Defense for England to the surgeon, military surgeon general. And I had been trying for two years to contact him, crickets, don't hear anything. And there it is, I meet him and I explain. He says it's my office's fault. But the key to what Dr. Pearl uh did when I first met him was he did 20,000 histological, looked at sections of brains of veterans who had died with a diagnosis of PTSD. What did he find? He found every single one of them had a physical damage, physical area of damage. And he said in an article that came out in the New York Times, he said, How is it that a hundred percent psychiatric condition, PTSD, we're only fine we're finding physical damage to the brain? It's gotta be something else that's doing it. So in my presentation, I talked about the mechanisms where the inflammatory chemicals that we call cytokines are released, and they're chronically released because you have repetitive trauma or the system fails to defend ourselves, and we develop all these pro-inflammatory cytokines, which lead to the destruction of chemistry and structure. That's why in Alzheimer's we see atrophy of the brain. In all those neurodegenerative diseases, we see shrinkage of the brain. In normal uh healthy individuals, quote unquote, um, over the course of their lifetime, their brain atrophy shrinks a little bit. But those with as the slide I showed you, it increases with one trauma, the shrinkage increases logarithmically. Just incredible. You the small drop and then the deep drop from one trauma. So we know, and this has been 20 plus years in the literature, we know this pattern I just laid out for you. So the question is why are we still doing research? Why is research still being done? Why is it still that they're complaining we don't have definitive biomarkers to diagnose these things? And what is it? Uh how does a um a neurologist do a definitive diagnosis of CTE in a patient? What's the definitive test? When they do you know what it is? They they don't have one. Well, when you're dead. That's it. They wait until you're dead before they say, hey, let's do a brain biopsy. Oh, look at all these neurofibrillal tangles, all the CTE protein, the phosphorated, hyperphospholated tau protein accumulated around. But we know that happens because it's part of a process. You put gasoline into your car that has an empty tank that's stalled on the highway. You put gasoline into it. What happens to the car? It starts. You know cause and effect. But for some reason, this cause and effect, there's a wall. It's like we want to go and research this until the cows fly or you know, monkeys fly, or whatever it is. And the researchers have done a phenomenal job. They've defined all this. I do translational medicine, which means I read their research and I put it together into a story that makes sense. And that's what I gave you guys was the story of how trauma begets all those conditions. So, in that lineage, that journey of pathology, we see what can stop it. We know what makes it, so we can stop it. But they're not spending time on focusing on the treatment because their treatment, they're looking for pharmaceutical products where in nature, you know from psychedelic uh psychedelics that's plant-based medicine. We know there are other plant-based and natural products which can alter the inflammatory cascades in the brain. And for 30 years, that's what I've been researching. And that's took 16 years to develop the product that you love so well. The product that, you know, when I was on uh J.R. Rogan in January, you know, took it on screen. The stuff works.

SPEAKER_00:

Stuff works. So it's it's just amazing that we look at all these, you know, the RHIs, we assume they're absolutely innocent, they're innocuous, they don't harm us yet, you know, that that uh, you know, that but that we now know that it's neuroinflammation that is overridingly the risk long-term of damage to the brain. So let's talk about that, because on one side you have the chemicals, that the chemical imbalances there, but in order to get there, we have to get damage. And you talked about cytokines and then how cytokines activate microglia that come in, they turn into macrophages, they they start eating the brain, right? They consume the you know the cancerous cells, they consume the dead cells, and then because of the continuous hits, what happens? You get more cytokines, you get more damaged neurons releasing more cytokines in this storm. I think they call it a cytokine storm.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, we've just never called it a cytokine storm, but I agree with you. It's the same thing in the brain cytokine storm.

SPEAKER_01:

And what happens?

SPEAKER_02:

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00:

It was just that you go But the but yeah, but the intent is, and that's what we ended up, you know, as I studied this more, is that the brain starts eating itself. Like because these cytokines keep responding to the injury, you have this overabundance of pro-inflammatory junk in your brain that over time becomes excitotoxic, it starts degrading brain tissue, and that's where we get not only the damage that you're talking about, and I want to talk about how that's correlated with mental illness, because that's really sometimes the only thing we can see. Right. But yeah, so I mean, just uh you're you're spot on.

SPEAKER_02:

Um the analogy I use is cytokines are like um hot water put onto a block of ice. And over time, the more hot water you put on the block of ice, the smaller it gets because it destroys the ability of the tissue, the neuroprotection, to protect it from these damaging chemicals. So what happens is there are things called free radicals. We got a lot of names of free radicals. We got two classifications, reactive oxygen species, ROS, and reactive nitrogen species, RNS, which interact with systems and destroy chemical processes. They interfere with natural chemical processes like uh making of uh dopamine in the brain. So in one of the sections of the of the presentation, uh I talked about a nasty chemical, proxynitrite, which is a reactive nitrogen species, which selectively damages two hormones that make serotonin in our gut. Our gut makes 90 to 95% of serotonin, then it goes into the brain. The brain only makes 5 to 10%. So the majority is in the gut. So this peroxynitrite inhibits two enzymes that produce both uh serotonin and melatonin. So why why is it that 100% of the vets that I see, they have insomnia, they have depression, and they have fatigue. It's because of the damage to these chemical pathways. And then the peroxynitrite, for some reason, selectively damages another enzyme in the cells that make dopamine, and therefore you end up getting Parkinson's. I on one of the slides I talked about if you're in the military and you never had a traumatic brain injury or never had a concussion or subconcussion, which is unlikely, your risk at 65 years of age and older for developing Parkinson's is one to three percent. But if you have one traumatic brain injury, it goes from 53 to 86 percent increase in having uh Parkinson's after 65. Um multiple sclerosis, one head trauma increases your risk by 30 percent, one head trauma increases your risk for ALS by 70 percent. Alzheimer's disease, 50 percent. So what am I saying? All those conditions have a pre uh predisposing causation, which is trauma that begets the inflammation. Okay? So what we do is we do two key test groups. One is uh called the 28-point biomarker panel, which looks at uh 24 measured hormones and supportive chemicals for the brain, and then four calculated. And then we're just in the process of uh working with a company that has a very cost-effective blood test for those inflammatory markers, 20 of them. 20 inflammatory markers. It's called iExpress Genes, is the name of the company. The co-founder is a um graduate of Bragg. He's a Apache helicopter pilot. Ended up falling into this company, uh, and we met at the beginning of the year, and I looked through their information. The FDA approved them. We've tested uh people on it to see the results from you know, commander of uh a um uh SEAL team uh to helicopter pilots to uh one of our patients, uh lieutenant in the Navy who had uh multiple sclerosis on our protocol. He's now uh November 23. He's been in full remission, no symptoms, doing phenomenally well. And MS is an inflammatory process. So when we get the laboratory work done, it tells us what we need to fix. How to it tells us also how to fix it. So that's what we do. And the instruments we use to fix it are these alternative complementary products that have an incredible amount of research on it. And what we did for 16 years is in clinical application, we applied the science to the problem to treat it. They got better.

SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk about that for a little bit because you know, one of the things, well, one of the main things when I talk about the protocols that you uh propose is number one, we believe that if the brain's balanced, then the treatments that are going to be leveraged to improve the brain, whether it's HBOT, TMS, neurofeedback, photobiomodule, all are more effective. But what are you balancing the brain with? Because this is what when I tell people what you're actually using, it's like this is not pharmaceuticals, right? So talk to our gang. What what's what is in your products right now? Because it is this is not an expensive approach, a long-term lifetime approach to fixing somebody's brain, especially when it comes down to the chemical reality of what they're dealing with.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. And that's understanding uh that means taking an understanding of why the brain shuts down. So this inflammation shuts off signals to allow us to make the hormones in the brain. I mean, we don't, I mean, we, meaning the global we look at hormones as being sex hormones, reproductive hormones, gender hormones. But it turns out every one of our hormones has a multiplicity or pleotrophic effect. They have multiple benefits to the body. Turns out that testosterone helps to shut down four of those pro-inflammatory cytokines and increases one of the most important anti-inflammatory cytokines called IL-10. The four bad ones are the IL-1, 1 beta, tumor necrosis factor alpha, and IL6. These are destructive, pro-inflammatory. So if we can modulate them, mitigate them by influencing why they're released and how to decrease that, which is what we do, we can get an improvement in the inflammation. So what can happen next is the brain could start producing its own hormones. And in producing its own hormones, they have the secondary benefits. Estradiol drops an inflammatory pathway, pregnenolone, allopregnenolone, uh pregnenodiol, uh progesterone all have benefits on the brain. I presented a little bit of that in the presentation. A pharmaceutical company made a drug called brixanolone, which is our allopreanolone, which comes from uh cholesterol, which antidepression, anti-anxiety, drops inflammation, increases GABA, so you sleep better. 99% of the vets who come into our office or into our practice, I ask him a very simple question. How many hours are you in bed? One Marine said, 13 hours. I'm looking at his lab results. He said, 13 hours. I said, damn, you must wake up feeling great in the morning. He said, Doc, on the contrary, I wake up like I never put my head on the pillow. I'm looking at his results. Zero pregnenolone, zero progesterone, which means he can't make allopregnenolone. Two weeks later, he's sleeping like a starting to sleep like a baby on replacement of pregnenolone, which is the precursor, okay, to all those chemicals. So what we do is first address the inflammation and we supplement with small doses of the hormones which the laboratory 28-point biomarker panel tells us. Deficiency of this. We use a computer software to analyze it because humans cannot analyze it at the depth in which we have perceived we need to analyze the laboratory. So we put the lab results into the program and it prints out a 12-page report telling you not only um what's deficient, but how to treat it. So it gives you predictive treatment. Okay? So the software answers the question. You know, I presented it to Rear Admiral at the Pentagon who thought it was phenomenal, but the government doesn't like things like this. They expect their doctors to be able to be able to do that. You know, to be able to understand how growth hormone and pregnenolone interact, um, growth hormone and thyroid, growth hormone and um you know, all the hormones, they're all interaction. It's it's why don't why don't they understand this?

SPEAKER_00:

I mean they're a doctor, you're a doctor, you know.

SPEAKER_02:

I just kind of say the area they're in, uh what I've practiced for the past uh 21 years is neuroendocrinology. Neuroendocrinology is about the hormones of the brain. And in what I've fallen into, or the rabbit hole I've dug for myself, it's not just about neurology and hormones. It's about neurology, it's about immunology, it's about pharmacology, it's about psychiatry, and it's about endocrinology. All those things make up this area neuroendocrinology. And that's what I've spent the past 30 years, unknowingly for 10, uh looking at nine, looking at this area, and that's what's allowed me to do what I'm doing right now. Uh I presented the last slide I presented uh at the uh summit was uh a study of 840 of our clients between 2019 and 2021, where there was uh 78.3% of those participants were 50 to 100% better in one year.

SPEAKER_00:

So let me ask you a question on that. I mean, we've got everybody out there screaming for double gold standard, double blind tests. They want biomarkers, they want, you know, and they're gonna research until the end of time. And meanwhile, veterans are gonna die, kids are gonna kill themselves, and athletes are gonna die, everybody's suffering with all this mental illness. And I don't I don't want to get to that. But here we when we talk about not just your protocol, but whether it's H-bot, neurofight, I mean, just pick your non-traditional approach to healing the brain or improving brain health. The the the the amount of patients that say this helped me is always 75% enough. And my daughter is a nurse practitioner of psychiatric medicine, I've mentioned this before, and she's got a 25% chance of any drug that she prescribes actually being effective. And then, of course, she's like, Dad, these are going to kill these kids over time. It's crazy. I don't, you know, but we've got all these protocols, including yours, with these amazing success stories behind them. Why, when it comes to insurance, it comes to the VA, right? Why are these not being adopted? Because over time, we're talking about a lot of healthcare money that we might not have to spend. And uh we're not exactly uh, you know the most frugal company country in the world, right? We spent we have spent a lot of money. We got a big debt problem here. So what what what in your you know, to your mind, why why why are these not being you know uh adopted as you know reasonable protocols to address an issue that we're still trying to figure out when we have suicidal ideation, homicidalation, mental illness, all these other social ills associated with them?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Uh it's a great question. And the answer that I've been giving for the past 15 years has been that the cost for our treatment for one year is about$5,000 for everything. Okay? We don't use any traditional pharmaceuticals for depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia. We don't use any of that. Because in 78%, 78.3% of our population, they throw off their medications and they're doing better than what they were on the medication. So the system, the medical system, whether it's the VA or in the civilian population, is all about the knee-jerk response. Oh, I've got a medication to give you, I've got a capsule to give you, I've got a tablet to give you. And I think that is the reason. And why, I can't answer it, but why the powers that be don't want to look at programs like ours or programs like HBOT, programs like uh Spec Scan or some of the other uh protocols. They're now starting to look at uh PAT, the psychedelic assisted therapies, which I personally feel is has its merits, but I don't think it's needed until you find someone that fails a protocol that has a high percentage of benefit. Now, we've got 78%. That means 22% of our patient population don't do as well. Well, my daughter found out one of the reasons why they don't do as well. That was a public a paper she and I published in the beginning of the year, the influence of COVID-19 infection and vaccines on the gut. We know, and you know, gut brain is tied together. If your gut's disrupted, what happens is it sends cytokines to the brain and disrupts the brain. So what did she find? Yeah. So what we found was COVID, infection or vaccine, destroys a lot of the major bacteria in the gut that keep us anti inflamed. Acomacea as being the most important one. Why we're seeing more gut cancers, why we're seeing more turbulence. Cancers with spike protein related uh conditions. So looking at the gut more intensely. It's not just you have nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. It's what is the matrix, what is the makeup of your biota or your your microbiota, which is the uh bacteria that are in your gut. You know, this is and I was on the phone today with uh did a consult before you guys on a 41-year-old uh Army Special Forces guy who came to us 12 months ago. August was 12 months. He's 80% better. And when my daughter addressed his gut problems, he went from 60 to 80 percent better. And he's talking to me about stopping the protocol, which I say, great. This is the purpose of our program is to get you better. How does that do that? If we can restart your brain's functioning by dropping the inflammation and give it a little push on certain avenues, you can heal. We had from Fort Hood um a colonel in uh major in Fort Hood six months on our program, he's off eight to eleven medications, and he stops our program. He's now running that project in Austin, Texas, for HB 381, which is a bill to get funding from the state of Texas to treat a hundred Texans who happen to be veterans. But until that happens, I'm self-funding. No one gives me, donates any money to me, generally speaking. Um, and everything I do is to generate funds. And, you know, from the last Joe Rogan uh generated enough funds we brought in 91 more veterans into our program. And we've got we've got a number, you know, 50 some odd more people waiting to come in. And so this is what I've been doing since uh 2009 is funding uh funding. And uh my partner, Andrew Marr Greenbray, EOD, who was blown up in his fourth tour of duty, who uh not a scratch on his body, but six months later he's on 13 medications, full-blown alcoholic and suicidal. He ends up coming into our program, rapidly improving, improves in three months. He ends up going to Pepperdine while he was living in California. He went to Pepperdine and got his MBA, and now he's in Texas getting his law degree. It's a guy who's on 13 medications, non-functional, non-functional.

SPEAKER_00:

Mark, uh you know this, right? I mean, we deal with all veterans all the time with bags of goodies, right? Oh, you know, this oh this causes a side effect, you know, or you know, you're you know, Mr. Happy don't work. Oh, we got a pill for that. Oh, and that caused this, we got a pill for that. And it's like whack-a-mole with these pills. And there's no concern for or it seems to be that, well, what's this doing to the veterans' overall mental health? And I will say every veteran I've met that's been and I have not had to go through this. I mean, when my mental health stuff came up, I was knowledgeable enough to just start with you know, the psychedelics and then work on my brain health and stuff like that. But these guys are just going to the people they trust. And the people that we trust are just not trained. What would it take to get this knowledge that you have, right? And we've talked about licensing your tech to the government, right, to do the blood tests or whatever. Because I mean, we're healing veterans for a$5,000 a year. Uh that might be like 15 pills. I have no idea what they I mean on insurance. I know that I used to get charged$100 for a Tylenol not making it up when I got hospitalized, right? Oh, yeah, dude. No, right? Who knows what these pills are? But um what would it take to educate folks, man? I mean, the biggest gap in this issue of repetitive brain trauma, and not only that, brain health overall, right? Is and you're talking, we're talking repetitive brain trauma for athletes and veterans. Let's talk about falls and accidents and car crash victims and skateboards and horses and BMX and and oh my God, that presentation that Dr. Pearl did on the Navy boat guys, right? Yep. The swick. The swick. There are so many ways to harm your brain, domestic violence, right? Abuse, violent crime, that and we don't touch the brain in any of this. In any of it. From a brain health perspective, from a brain treatment perspective, it's all pharmaceuticals. And when you're unhappy or you're suicidal or whatever, it's therapy. I think we've I think we've already proved that this don't work, right? Correct. So what would it take to, in your mind, to say, look, I've got a modality that's got you know this amazing track record, right, of men and women that have come back from horrible, I mean, what you're doing with stroke victims and multiple multiple sclerosis and a lot of these uh, you know, uh other muscular dystrophy and other neurodegenerative disorders is is flat out amazing, right? Uh this is a benefit to the country, right? So what what what would it take to educate and you know do some you know tests? Um have you have you done trials with the military before or you know, insurance companies or anything to um see?

SPEAKER_02:

I know Yeah, I left insurance in uh 1999 because the writing was on the wall that they were going to be controlling uh my practice in all physicians' practices. So why I pulled away from insurance is because I kept on getting my hands slapped for putting my patients through our panel. At the that time it was maybe 18, not 24 markers. Took 14 years to develop the uh 28-point biomarker panel. So they would um reject the the claim. The patient would have to pay for it, and then when they had to pay for it, they had to pay like$2,000,$1,800 for the laboratory testing. Okay. So, yeah, so that was part of the reason why I pulled back is because they'd reject the the claim and the patient would get nailed for paying the full amount. And then um in 20, you know, from 1995 to 2007, I worked with a lot of people from the NFL and NHL and all the professional sports people. Um you're talking about motocrossers to take care of the motocross guys, the professional skateboarders, multiple traumas. And um it became obvious it was cheaper for me to pay the lab for the lab test wholesale and pass it on to my patients than it was to put them at risk of having to pay the full retail price. Full retail price was$2,800 for the labs. Just for the labs. Okay, so this was the system that I started in uh 2009. I went to the guys from the NFL when I went to New Jersey to meet with them and one of their organizations, and I asked them for help, financial support to help me open up a division for our veterans. Back in 2006, 7, there was very obvious that uh our our veterans, our military needed help with the traumas they were having. Suicide rates were sky high and so forth. And they basically said uh no, they didn't want to help. So I quit working with them and spent two years, 2007 to 2009, developing things to generate money so that in 2009 a news article went out talking about the Millennium Health Centers and our new veterans project, free. And we had since 2009 veterans coming in. And then in 2015, met Andrew Marr uh and his brother Adam Marr, who's a great proponent and out there with psychedelic assisted therapy. He helped with Texas, helped with other states getting their legislation in play. I think he's in uh Tennessee and Alabama. He just met with Congress and promoted our position as well, which was very appreciated. But um, you know, uh it's recognition of what we're doing is out there. I mean, I meet a lot of people who say in the military uh hierarchy, they know of the work that I'm doing. I said, so why don't you help? I was called by the seventh, I think he's the seventh secretary of the VA a few years ago, who saw the movie Quiet Explosions on a Saturday night. He contacts a couple of his friends, finds my home number, calls me on a Sunday at four o'clock in the afternoon, and uh we have a short talk, 30, 40 minutes, and he asked me, How can I help? And I said, Well, get me a group of doctors in the VA that I can train. I'll do it for free. I'll pay my own way just to train them. He asked me three wishes. Number two was look critically at the work that I have. I've got, as of today, we have 12,478 people involved in our process. We've got thousands who have graduated because again graduated. Graduated. Graduated. This is not a lifelong issue. It's like you have a car, you're in an accident, the car is sitting in the garage all broken up, and you say, I better go and take it to the repair shop and get it fixed. You take the repair shop and they fix it, comes back spitting brand new. It graduated from the repair shop, right? It now works, looks great. This is what our goal is with our veterans. It's not to addict them or commit them to lifelong use of anything that we have. But I will be honest and say that some people like our brain rescue three, some people like our Neuroshield, our mushroom product, some people like testosterone, some people like clomin, whatever. If that's what it takes to keep them at a level they perceive is necessary and their blood work is great, I only see them once a year. That's it. That's it. Because it's not about me trapping them in a system. It's about me educating with them. I spend an hour uh with each one every time we have laboratory work, educating them. They get a handbook which has 90 pages, which when they're capable of reading and comprehending, it teaches them what I'm doing so that they can be in control of their own life.

SPEAKER_00:

That's so you're educating your patients too. Not only do you want the recurring revenue stream from a lifetime client, you're educating your patients so that they can take care of themselves. Right. I mean, this is what this is what doctors used to be all about. That's right. It's in the stethoscope, you know. And, you know, it's uh it's a shame that, you know, I I mean, number one, I can tell everybody in this podcast that Mark Gordon is not, you know, he's not playing around. When he says he gives veterans treatments, he provides them discounts. If they can't afford it, he reaches into his pocket. It's just amazing what he's done for our boys and girls. And um, you know, and it and it with the success record you've had, I just uh it'd be interesting. And as you know, a lot of people might not know, we won a grant this year for$750,000, and we're gonna give at least 50 veterans free treatment from Dr. Mark Gordon to get to get their their brain, you know, get their brain um help. Let's talk about the you know, so some people always get with us because when you start talking about suicidality and anxiety price, start talking about mental illness. So, in the journey that you talked about from that trauma, all right, and you know, the resulting, you know, coup, counter-coup, inflammation, here comes the cytokine storms, all the chemical processes during the route, how do we get to mental illness? Where does that start becoming part of the problem? Because right now, when you're not that that is often the only, whether it's a veteran or an athlete, it is the first indicator, like the indicator, like you know, concussions, you have an indicator, right? You can't walk and all that. But this is the first indicator we might have sometimes that you know somebody's uh somebody's hurt. So how do we how do we how do we get into that, right?

SPEAKER_02:

I agree with you that a very clear indicator of something off in the brain is obviously a psychological alteration in personality or a cognitive impairment where they're not remembering things or forgetting things or they're not speaking clearly, dyslexia develops. So how this all transpires, it was buried in what I said in the past, so I'll pull it to the surface, is that the alteration in the chemistry due to the inflammation doesn't allow us to make the neurotransmitters that we need that regulate us. So when you're deficient in serotonin, theoretically you develop depression. When you're deficient in uh melatonin, you develop sleep deprivation syndrome, which is associated with anxiety, aggression, irritability, depression, uh fatigue, cognitive impairment. When you start having elevated peroxynitrite, you start losing dopamine. And dopamine is important for that elation, the upfeel that you have, the positivity in your system. So what happens is the chemicals, the hormones, the neurotransmitters, and the receptors, you know, you have it's uh what they call a key and lock, you know, theory or a key and lock modeling, where the key is the hormone, the lock is the receptor that recognizes it. And every key has its unique lock. So testosterone has its own, um, epinephrine has its own, norepinephrine has its own, dopamine, serotonin and GABA. They all have their own special lock and key to turn and start a process, and it's usually genetic processes, okay, where it generates a response, and that response is a chemical. Okay. So we lose that. And in addition, you know, these neurotransmitters are produced in neurons. And at the end of the neuron called a synapsis, where it communicates with the next neuron, what happens is it doesn't make the little packages of vesicles, packages of hormones to release into the cleft, the communication area between two neurons, and it can't send the signal from point A to B. So it stops it. So you don't have the continuity of flow of messages, of data. That's how you get data impaired, and that's why some of the nootropics, some of the brain smart peptides that we're working with now enhance cognition, improve strokes, as we've seen in our population, improves multiple sclerosis, improves Alzheimer's.

SPEAKER_00:

So what are you seeing beyond, I mean, the repairing of the brain health and the resulting improvements? What about the actual brain itself? Are you seeing any evidence that you're providing neuronal growth, um, you know, repair, you know, or assisting besides the fact that we got to get the athletes to stop playing and the guys to start blowing themselves up, right? You know, what do you are you seeing any evidence of impacting the actual physiological damage to the brain itself?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Um you have to remember that, what do they say, only one-sixth of the brain is actually used. The rest of it is sitting idly there waiting for something. In a study that was done on the progression of Alzheimer's disease, what they found was if you looked at patient people based upon their educational level, high school graduate, two-year graduate, AA degree, college graduate, specialty pharmacy, veterinary medicine, MDs, and so forth and so on, the higher the credentialing when they get Alzheimer's, the slower the processing. Why? Because they have more engrams, they have more tracks of ability in their brain. Because we've got, we don't use, you know, five-sixths of the brain we don't use if that's an accurate number. It's pulling it out of you know past readings. But so you can lose a lot of brain before you have problems. Okay. But to answer your question, there are specific chemicals like brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which can help with re uh neuror regeneration, neurogenesis, new nerves, and it's been documented. T3 thyroid helps with that. Growth hormone helps with that through a couple of pathways. Growth factor and also dropping pro-inflammatory cytokines. Um, we can stimulate the cells that generate myelin coding of nerves called oligodendrocytes. Now, the oligodendrocytes, before they become myelin-producing, are called OPCs, which is oligodendrocytic precursor stem cells. So you can actually, it's a long name. OPC. Yeah, it is. OPC. You can look up OPC. I can handle that. I go. OPC, yeah. So you can actually improve their myelin production as well as you can maintain them as stem cells, generating growth factors with good adequate levels of T3.

unknown:

Wow.

SPEAKER_02:

Thyroid T3 is the active form, T4 is the precursor. And uh I just got a paper um uh accepted for publication by um Military Medicine, which is talking about the influence of reverse T3, the abnormal form of T3, and neuropsychiatric conditions. Okay, so I don't know when they're actually going to release it in the in their uh magazine, in their publication, but I'll find out and I'll disseminate it. I got my ALS paper published in neurology uh two months ago, three months ago, whatever. And uh it's all inflammatory. It's all inflammation.

SPEAKER_00:

So let me ask you this question. This was just in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about how researchers, it's kind of like the selflic and ice cone. They write the research papers that are then vetted by the researchers that then go behind a paywall. So taxpayers that fund research now have to pay again for access to the research that they paid for. Where does where do your papers end up? Just curious, man. Is that you do you end up behind paywall? Because when I write, when I you know, when I wrote my book, I was paying$38 for access to a research paper that I wanted to get to from, you know, L L whatever, and uh Mary Liebert and all this.

SPEAKER_02:

There are ways of round that, okay? There are ways of which I do a lot because I go through three to five articles a day, and sometimes the articles are in fr behind a paywall. So I have means of getting it. Uh people who have access through academic institutions. When I used to be with USC, direct access to the National Library of Congress, so I got it all for free. And when I stopped or got kicked out of USC for teaching their students the truth of medicine, how to practice good medicine, as opposed to knee-jerk, here, take this. Okay. So anyway, um, yeah, I hear what you're saying, but what I found out recently is that some of these journals charge you two, three thousand dollars. Uh, dude, it's crazy. Yeah. To get you published. To get you published. So you're right. You're paying, you know, your tax dollars are going NIH to them, and then you've got to pay behind the paywall to get access to the article. You're a taxpayer payer.

SPEAKER_00:

It should be free. And you wonder why these researchers just keep researching. I mean, I am all over the CT community only because they knew about this disease. Why? In 05, oh, you know, you know, they picked it up. Nobody, they just kept researching it. They still want to research it, and yet nobody thought about children. Like, how can you focus on a disease that affects adults and wonder if kids are playing the same sports, right? How does this impact, right? Same thing. Craziness. They still want to, they want to, they want to keep researching concussions. We have spent billions of dollars on this research right now, and we have, you know, we still don't have any really good concussion protocols out there. We have very, very minimal concussion treatments. We have nothing for repetitive impacts out there in terms of diagnosis, even though the traumatic and cephalopathy syndrome protocols were approved by NINDS for validation. Yeah. We have all this research and we have no action. And you're coming in on the action side and you are taking research and turning that into action. Where do we go from here? How do we fix that? Should we just say, look, you're not getting any more research unless you do something with this? I mean, these researchers don't even work that they won't even work together on the same problem to solve it for society. Right. It's just horror, it's dysfunctioning. Oh, get out.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Uh at the meeting, Frank uh Larkin made it very, very clear, crystal clear to all those researchers that were present at the Sunday. He said, okay, now let's get together and talk about how to take this into action. Okay, he was very clear about it. This is what I've been spewing for seven, eight years, that we've got an actionable solution, not the solution, a solution. Okay, because I know there's probably a lot better I can be doing, and that's why I continue my reading and writing, is because I'm still looking for that. So the people who do CTE, they've got how many brains? Let's say they've got a hundred.

SPEAKER_00:

They got my son's brain. There's a thousand of them up there.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, so let's say, just for the sake of this argument, they've got a hundred. And what did they find in these hundred people? That if they had repetitive trauma, they developed CTE, which is the hyperphosphylated tau protein, which become which is what they call neurofibroutangles, which and uh surrounds the microvasculature and causes it to clock. Okay? So of the hundred cases, brains they have, what percentage of them have that scenario? 100%. So the question is you know it's a hundred percent. You've got a thousand brains, ninety-seven percent. You've got ten thousand brains, ninety-four percent. So you know cause and effect. Now let's focus on how to modulate what causes beta amyloid to be turned on, which if you go deep into the literature, beta amyloid increases inflammation to cause hyperphosphilization through um it's not cow modulin, it's uh it's another chemical, which increases the inflammation, and uh tau protein becomes extra phosphate to it, which causes it to break off from the microtubules, and that becomes this tangle that enshrouds vessels and causes them to s to clap in the simplicity of it. We know. So we know things that will stop that from happening. Zinc. Zinc will slow down beta amyloid, testosterone will increase the removal of beta amyloid. In a presentation that I did last October in Utah, first time, was the hormonal approach to Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's is beta amyloid, but beta amyloid's in all those diseases. So I just pulled it apart and showed them every step of the process how we can influence it with hormones that are already on record. I didn't make anything up. It's all translational medicine, meaning that people who are 10 times more brilliant than I would ever be already have the solution. It's just getting it and addressing it, making it public knowledge, uh, you know, public knowledge so people will say, hey, we've already got the answers here, but it's being blocked, it's being hidden. Why? Because there are other narratives that want to play the game. And, you know, the last Rogan, we talked very shortly about the big scam that was done on beta-amyloid as being the cause for uh uh Alzheimer's. Turns out that 95% of the cases of Alzheimer's are due to another enzyme, which is called delta secretase. And that occurs, start being made in larger quantities after head trauma. It's made in larger quantities after 65 years of age.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I mean, if we just got rid of head trauma, we wouldn't have this issue. Now, I mean, to talk to Ann McKee's in her defense, she has taken enormous amounts of beatings from you name it, the leagues, the press, the whole nine yards. And after we funded that study with her, that showed out of all the under 30 brains, 42% had CTE, 100% had structural damage, 100% had behavioral cognitive and psychological disorders, and 80% of them, including my son, died from CTE, I mean from um suicide and overdose. And Anna Key readily admits that CTE is caused by repetitive head impacts. So before we even get to where you're coming in to help the brain, we could make sports safer by delaying exposure, taking the exposure out of practice, and guess what? With a combination of Dr. Mark Gordon's protocols and saving it for game day, you can make tens of millions of dollars in the NFL, and you could be a normal dude, right? And guess what? You know, and this is the, you know, this is the action it's not taken, right? CDC has one line for RHI and their concussional things, not even mentioned. NIH never even mentioned it. And yet, you know, you're taking a lot of the RHI-related research that's out there, which since 2021-22 is nobody even looks at CT right now because they understand it's RHI. It's not CT. You'll die with CT, you're not dying from it.

SPEAKER_02:

And then RHI will be disappeared, and I'll say neuroinflammation.

SPEAKER_00:

Hey, well, I mean, I don't care. As long as we get rid of pot water right now and kids stop playing these damn sports till their brains ready, I'm all about it.

SPEAKER_02:

Let me ask you what it is. Neuroinflammation, yeah. Okay, let me, yes. Let me ask you. When you were out on patrol or went out into theater, you put on a flak vest. You put on a Kepler vest, correct? No. Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Not in my day. Post 9-11, yeah. We had these flak jackets, bro. They were a joke. Like they were like up until 2001. Well, let me say, all right, when I went to Kosovo, we were uh we had body armor. When I did the war in El Salvador in 1990, we just walked around in uniforms, dude. And the Army had these flak jackets in Vietnam. The only thing they were good for was some grenade fragmentation. Didn't stop anything else, bro. But yeah, nowadays you're right. They put that thing around.

SPEAKER_02:

The last few years of the war, the body armor was special, okay? There was it worked. So what you protect yourself against the possibility of a round coming your way. Right. So what we've looked at was the influence of the products that we have on improving what's called biological resiliency. Biological resiliency is like putting on a Keflard vest. It'll protect you from some of the damaging hits because, as you know, helmets only protect the superficiality of the skull, the scalp. Yes, sir. Yeah. The brain floats in fluid, cerebral spinal fluid. So it still jars around. So the perception that any helmet is going to stop the internal coup counter coup or rotational forces that create the biggest problem is zero benefit. It's just making sure you don't need stitches on your scalp, or you don't get possibly a compression fracture of the skull. I got that. But the brain still rocks and rolls in the calvarium, in the skull. So, you know, people say, oh yeah. You know, when I used to did my stint with the NFL guy. You know? Oh yeah, the brain this the all we need is a better helmet. Yeah. Yeah, the analogy that I use on one of our uh medications is um you know you can drive a Porsche straight in at 60 miles an hour into a wall and then put your seatbelt on. Or else you can put your seatbelt on and then drive into the wall. Okay? So what I feel is that you can pre-treat in order to give yourself some modicum of additional benefits. Alcohol in our vets, you know, all I do is take care of our veterans and active military. So I tell them, look, it they're heavy drinkers. Um a lot of them. They think alcohol will help to fix their TBI related or their neuro inflammation. It actually makes it worse. So they notice, hey, I stopped drinking, I'm feeling much better because the drinking adds inflammation to the brain. You know, certain medications or smoking cigarettes, uh, smoking weed, um, certain drugs like um narcotics shut down three major hormone pathways. You don't want that. You don't want to lose your ability to make testosterone, DHT, and all those other things. Um chronic inflammation, gastritis, ulcers will shut down the hormones in the brain. We have the worst drugs. Statin drugs lowering cholesterol. Right. That's bad. Statins horrible. It killed my mom.

SPEAKER_00:

It killed my mom. I thought they were known. Those were plants. I thought they were made from plants or something, man. No kidding. No. The way it works. Well, if you're wondering nobody likes you, man. Well, I like you, but I mean, I'm talking about the big companies out there.

SPEAKER_02:

What do you do is read it? I have some vets coming in that are on statin drugs for lowering their cholesterol, and I'm finding that they're diabetic at the same time. If you look at the PDR, physician desk reference, and you look at every one of the statin drugs, they have a black box on the last page that says may cause irreversible type 2 insulin deficient, uh, insulin resistant to uh diabetes. No kidding. Yes, sir. So we've reversed 31 of them through an accidental finding and articles that are out there saying what we did was what worked.

SPEAKER_00:

Ah, that's a whole life change for a soldier, too, man. Ah 31 diabetics. You you can have all the pills you want, man. The army gives them to you. You got a problem, you'll go to medic, especially special forces, man. Your doc's your best friend, man. Ranger candy, motrin, and all that stuff, man. But all right, Doc. So as we close out, tell us about you. What's next, man? Where do people find you and your amazing treatments? What's next for Mark Gordon and Millennial Health?

SPEAKER_02:

Uh I'm finishing up a new book called Peptides for Health. Been working on it for about 2019 to now, getting my experience all with veterans. Uh, 136 veterans who had orthopedic diagnoses by the VA no longer have it. So I don't sell peptides. My practice does not sell peptides. What we do is we educate on the peptides and they find their own way. So, and every uh on every second Tuesday of every month, we do at 1700 Pacific Standard Time, we do a half an hour presentation on a new peptide, uh peptide that's in it. So the book will have 30 key peptides. It'll have some of the experiential uh results that we have from surgery to uh brain um strokes from MS, from Parkinson's, 95-year-old with uh Alzheimer's, crystal clear now. Okay. 92. He's in Florida, he's in Boca Raton. With peptides. Uh with our hormone replacement, anti-inflammation, and one peptide. And gray team, you know, gray team? They're in Boca Raton. They uh should probably connect you two together. Okay. So anyway, what's uh what do I do? My website is probably the best place to go to. It's educational and it's uh tbihelpenow.org. You can go under the science and read some of the papers that are in the process of getting published or have been published. Uh you can go to Biohack Yourself and see the work that I do with the biohacking world, and that's where six examples of the peptides that I'll be reporting on are there for Brain Smart, for musculoskeletal, ligamental improvement, and so forth. Um Bad Should Yeah, bad shoulder. And then if anyone's interested in uh getting a close look with the 28-point biomarker panel, um you can go to uh TBI Med Legal, T B I Med M E D legal L E G A L dot com and fill out a USA requisition form. We'll send you a packet of information and uh application to become a patient if you want. We also show what the majority of our people are on, uh, which is called the phase two protocol, which was developed at uh off the work I did in 2020 with the first recon group out of Fort Pen at Camp Pendleton with the Marines. So that's basically it. Um, you know, uh 60% of all our proceeds go into our veterans fund. Uh we, because of Joe Rogan in January, we opened up two new divisions. One is to help the wives or the significant others of our veteran who might be a civilian. So we have funding for them. The children, uh, the book, the proceeds from 100% of the proceeds from the book, Peptides for Health, 100% will go to our project with the children of veterans. Okay, we have a child who is three years of age. The father went through our program. He's in Montana or Wyoming, and his son had meningitis, ended up in the hospital, came out not well. The father, because he had been educated on our products, put him on one of our products that's usable for children. Two weeks later, the kid's better. Not perfect, but better. Cognitive.

SPEAKER_00:

When it comes to children, you'll take better any day, man. Tell them you'll take better any day. Wow. Anyway, so that's basically it. That's amazing, Doc. And I I can't thank you enough, folks. Uh Dr. Gordon, when it comes to veterans, is one of the most generous practitioners we've met. And this is no kidding what he's talking about. My son-in-law had a massive tumor removed from his uh head last year. Uh, he has been on Brain Rescue 3 and 2, and and he it has done amazing things to get this boy back into my daughter's life with my grandson. Right. Um, cannot say enough about what you're doing because this is action. This is what we're all we talk about on every show is saying what are we gonna do with all this research and books and all this? What are we gonna do about it? And you're doing something about it, but Dr. Mark Gordon, I cannot thank you enough. And if anybody needs more information, reach out to the foundation. We've got everything you need if you can't uh find Dr. Mark yourself. But Doc, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Appreciate it, Bruke. No, no problem. And remember, folks, man, the book, remember, the book's on our website. I am rewriting this. I'm 75% through. Give me another month and I'll knock it out with all kinds of new information. Get that going. Don't forget about our safe uh head smart app on the Google and Apple store. And then Army Navy game coming up December 13th. We've got 3,000 seats, a fuel concert partnered with Horse Soldier Bourbon, Blue Fusion, the Blue Angels. We got heated tents, all you can eat, all you can drink, watch party. We're gonna have all kinds of military leaders there. We're gonna have dignitaries there. We have awesome VIP seating, and I'll be making the hot chocolate with schnapps for everybody that shows up. And it's gonna be one hell of a time. Remember, 100% of money's raised, go to veterans mental illness and projects like Dr. Mark Gordon's. So see you there. You want a sponsor? Please let us know. Always look at a sponsorship. But, anyways, till the next time on Broken Brains, thank you so much for time. Remember, your child and you is a bet only got one melon. Take care of that puppy. We'll talk to you soon. God bless you all. Take care.