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.
Produced by Security Halt Media
Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman
Waves, War, And The Hidden Cost
What is the hidden cost of fighting wars at sea?
In this episode of The Broken Brains Podcast, host Bruce Parkman sits down with retired U.S. Navy SWCC operator Anthony Smith to expose the long-term neurological damage caused by repetitive blast exposure and high-impact boat operations. They discuss how years of sustained force on the water can lead to traumatic brain injury (TBI), diffuse axonal injury, and what’s now known as operator syndrome. This conversation sheds light on why many veterans are misdiagnosed, under-treated, or ignored—and why awareness, advocacy, and better treatment options are urgently needed.
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Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman is sponsored by The Mac Parkman Foundation
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Chapters
00:00 – Why Repetitive Brain Trauma Is Being Missed
02:22 – Anthony Smith’s SWCC Background
03:25 – The Physical Toll of Fast-Boat Operations
08:56 – What SWCC Operators Actually Experience
14:28 – Diffuse Axonal Injury Explained
18:54 – Survey Data on SWCC Cognitive Decline
22:21 – Military Discharges and Health Gaps
23:58 – Sustainability in Operator Health
28:24 – Beyond Pharmaceuticals: New Treatment Approaches
32:26 – VA Disability and TBI Claims
39:21 – The Future of Operator Brain Health
43:44 – Advocacy, Awareness, and Community Action
Connect with Anthony Today!
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-smith-m-a-03027121/
Website: https://millenniumhealthstore.com
Operator Syndrome: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32052666/
Produced by Security Halt Media
Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the MA Parkman Foundation, where we'll look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma from two perspectives. First, repetitive head impacts from contact sports. The second, repetitive blast exposure for our military veterans and how these two conditions are affecting not only the brains, but the mental health of our parents, I mean of our children, sports, athletes, and veterans. And why is this important? Because this concept is not trained in our nursing, military, scientific or suicide prevention communities, which means you become the front line of defense and you have to be knowledgeable about this. So every time we have on a podcast, we invite leading researchers, scientists, people that have been impacted by this, veterans, you know, parents of unfortunate lost kids and authors to talk about every aspect of this uh issue because we want you to have that 360-degree perspective of it so you can make informed decisions. On our show today, another amazing guest, I was so happy he was able to come on, is um is Michael Anthony Smith. Mr. Smith is a retired U.S. Navy Special Warfare combatant craft crewman with over 24 years in naval special warfare. He has more than 12,000 hours on SWIC fast boats, and Mr. Smith has endured millions of subconcussive impacts in the extreme physical toll of maritime special operations, an invisible battleground that has left countless operators with lifelong injuries, and many of them not here anymore. After retiring, Michael became one of the leading voices documenting the true cost of this mission set. He conducted a groundbreaking survey of over 300 former SWIC operators revealing near universal signs of traumatic brain injury, chronic pain, endocrine dysfunction, and the broader condition of now known as operator syndrome. He has recorded over twenty-five special warfare combat crewmen TBI interviews, giving a voice to the men behind these missions. Today he continues to advocate for recognition, research, and access to life-changing treatments for the SWIC community and the broader soft world. Mr. Smith, welcome so much. Anthony, welcome so much to the podcast and appreciate the time you're taking to come on, sir.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Bruce. I appreciate the inviting me here. And I've been following you for a little while and watching your videos. And uh I really uh I'm appreciative of what you're doing with uh repetitive pet injury. And I saw your story about your son, so um, I feel a lot for you. So uh thank you very much for what you're doing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, I appreciate it, man. Like it or not, Mac has made me a better human being. Yes, sir. And you know, what we got going on right now is uh an amazing testimony to that young man. And it starts with people like you that have been on the front line and done a job that none of us ever thought from a perspective of mental health, brain wellness, physical well-being, that it would have this amount of impact on our operators, right? Right? So, first of all, I mean, before we dive into this, we got a lot to talk about. Tell us a little bit about you know about yourself, Anthony. How did you where where did you grow up? Uh, what led you to join the the Navy and how did you end up being a special warfare combat craft crewman?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so I I grew up in Fadville, North Carolina. You're familiar with that place.
SPEAKER_00:No way! Not the vacation zone. No, I didn't know you lived in paradise, known as Fort Bragg.
SPEAKER_01:I think I walked around I walked around the mall there as a kid and I saw all the army guys all the time walking around the uniform. Um, I don't know why I didn't join the army, but uh one of my buddies kind of talked me into joining the Navy when I graduated high school. So I joined the Navy in 1986, went into the Fleet Navy and spent 10 years out in the fleet. And then uh I saw special warfare fast boats. Uh one day out on deployment, they came up alongside of the ship I was on, and I'm like, what the hell is that? But um that looks cool, I want to try it out. So I joined SWIC, went through uh to SWIC school in 1996, class 20, and um from that point on became a special warfare boat operator or SWIC. So I spent my first eight years in the teams deploying most of that time, training, going overseas, going to the Middle East. Um about the eight-year mark, I I went into training department for about two years, and then right around that eight-year mark, um, I had a grandma's seizure kind of out of nowhere. I was getting ready to go back into deployment cycle again and go to Iraq. And uh so when I had that grandma seizure, um, when you look at traumatic brain injury, repetitive head injury, I had a host of things that kind of manifest um that are all secondary to traumatic brain injury um from 2004 to 2010. 2004, uh I went through a medical board, they tried to kick me out of the Navy, and then uh I fought that. Spec war kept me in. I finished up my career uh doing recruiting and training guys to become Navy SEALs or Navy SWICs and retired in 2010.
SPEAKER_00:So let's talk about a lot of the first you mentioned boats, man, and I got boat porn fever, man. I I'm a boat captain. I love boats, man. It's kind of crazy. And I love those kind of boats. Yeah. But I you know, I don't like what they they do to us on these kind of missions. But so when you went to get kicked out, what were they gonna kick you out for? Were you mentally unstable or were just physically incapable of doing the job? I mean, you just had a grand mile seizure. Yeah. Did they attribute that to your swift combat boating, or did they just say it was out of the blue, man, and all of a sudden you're like an epileptic or something?
SPEAKER_01:The EEG showed irregular cellular activity in the front left lobe, which is indicative of uh diffuse axonal injury, um, which comes from millions of subconcussive or uh diffuse axonal injury uh impacts. Uh they couldn't really attribute to anything. 2004, there was no talk in Naval Special Warfare about traumatic brain injury, wave slamming, repetitive head injury. Everything in my medical record from 2004 to 2010 is not connected in any way to traumatic brain injury or my service.
SPEAKER_00:So when you when you started getting looked at for these health issues that are coming out of nowhere, what what what was the what would they say the cause of all these the you know the grand mall and all these other problems were from?
SPEAKER_01:Uh just that cellular activity in my front left lobe. Um so they they couldn't attribute it to anything that I did in the military. And then the second thing And just the point Yeah, keep going.
SPEAKER_00:I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_01:The secondary things that came up, yeah, I mean there's things like anxiety and depression and those types of things that come up, and those things uh were all attributed to me toward the end of my career trying to retire. So Okay.
SPEAKER_00:So they but they probably classify that under PTSD or something?
SPEAKER_01:I never had a PTSD rating while I was active duty, and that came when I went to Tulane. But I had currently probably 30 to 40 different comorbidities that are secondary to TBI, and and the majority of those that I had when I was active duty, insomnia, sleep apnea, central sleep apnea, none of those things were attributed to brain injury.
SPEAKER_00:So, I mean, and I guess the point that I'm I'm trying to make is that they had absolutely no awareness at all that what you were going through could have been associated with your job. No. And we're we're gonna talk about that. And then just because I gotta ask, what kind of medication were they throwing you on for all these comorbidities? Well you must have had a bag of drug.
SPEAKER_01:I was one of those guys that decided I wasn't gonna take any of those drugs. So they put me put me on anti-seizure medication for a couple of months. I I was like, look, I've only I only had one seizure. I'm not epileptic, epileptic. They said I was, but I never took seizure medication.
SPEAKER_00:So let's talk about the job of a swick boatman. All right. So let's talk about yeah, the job and the boats, the velocity. Oh, I mean, you know, at our summit this year, as I'm uh we talked before the show, you know, Dr. Pearl came and talked about uh this whole, you know, the he presented a case of of a combat, you know, crewman, uh a swick boat operator, and this is the first time that he has associated CTE with a military. Usually it's blast exposure, which has different indicators of damage to the brain. But this was the first time he saw, you know, you know, exact evidence, like, and it was the worst case of CTE people have ever seen. So let's talk about the job of a SWIC boat operator operator, educate our audience on what does that entail?
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, get beginning right around 1990, the SWIC community transitioned into speed boats, kind of like cigarette-style boats. They go about 60 miles an hour. Um, they slam into waves every one or two seconds, and they hit the impact waves uh 15 to 20 G's according to Special Warfare Group 4, who just submitted a Vulcan uh request for information trying to get mitigate 15 to 20 G impacts and specifically trying to mitigate traumatic brain injury. So Spec uh Group 4 just submitted that online, and I have copies of that. But uh these cigarette boats, we use them primarily for the SEAL teams. If they hit a target anywhere in the world that's maritime, in the in the ocean or the rivers, we are their insertion and their extraction platform. So we go in with boats, we insert them onto a ship, whatever that target might be. They take that target down, and we provide overwatch with cruise serve weapons, 50 cars, those uh types of weapons. And then uh if there's a hot extraction or something where they're they're getting into it, we come in and provide that hot extraction as well. So that's our primary reason that we exist, insert extract.
SPEAKER_00:And these boats, these are not like the cigarette boats I see out at the sandbar, man. These are military badass craft, man. What kind of what kind of propulsion systems do you have? Are they jet propulsion or the outboards, or what do you have?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, most of the ones that I was on, and uh most of the ones that they have today are they're our water jets. Um we had MTU 12 uh 12B diesel engines on the Mark Files, which I was on. And uh these things, they just they take off, man. They go, they they kick those big rooster tails up and they just punch through everything out there.
SPEAKER_00:And when they say everything, what kind of what kind of waves have you driven these boats in? You know, because you don't get to pick the best, you'd like to pick the best weather conditions for missions, but sometimes God don't work with you like that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we train at night and we do missions at night. So I've been out there uh and done a few hundred miles in eight hours going full speed, and then it's only three or four foot maybe, and then I've been out there where it's over 10 feet, and we can only do five to five to ten knots at the most, and it took 18 hours to do the same trip. So we go on all C states, we go at different speeds depending on how bad it is and how bad it's speeding us. But when you're out there moving, like I said, 60 miles an hour, you hit a wave every second to two seconds, and that's uh 15 to 20 G's. I have uh data that shows 40 G sustain impacts as well. So there's a lot of different research and and things out there showing different things.
SPEAKER_00:That's yeah, and that would all be dependent on the C state. I mean, you might hit 10 to 20 G's and one or two feet, but you know, you start hitting three or four, the Gs go up. And what what kind of restraining system? Like, do you I mean do you have seat belts? Do you have or do you have like those race car belts? What do you what do you have when you're uh when you're when you're driving these boats? What what keeps you in your seat?
SPEAKER_01:We had aircraft seats, they were called SD seats, they had harnesses in them, like full suspension harnesses. We would either stand or we would sit, depending on how bad it was and what we're what we were experiencing. Standing or sitting, you're still getting that force applied through your body and it's magnifying as it goes through your body. So I sat quite a bit, and unfortunately, when you're sitting, those G forces are going through your lumbar spine all the way up through your cervical spine, and I have 31 uh vertebrae fractures.
SPEAKER_00:That's in that's that's my entire And then what do you have on your head when you're doing this stuff? Yeah, I mean, obviously if you're going into a hot extraction, you don't have no plastic helmet on your head either.
SPEAKER_01:No, if we're doing a regular training type missions, uh, we still have a a comms helmet on, but then they use ballistics and they use night vision as well. So you're adding quite a bit of weight to that to that fulcrum and that that rotational force.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so you're hitting these waves at 15 to 20 G's, you know, or whatever you're hitting it, plus you've got the added weight of this helmet on your head while you're wow, man. That is I mean, that's a that's a that's a lot.
SPEAKER_01:And um there's um one thing that happens with this is let's say you're sitting down, uh you're taking a 20 G impact. That 20 G is is it's transferring through your uh your uh your pelvis, through your thoracic spine. When it gets up to your cervical spine, your C5, C6, C7 is the fulcrum. So the fulcrum is basically that pivot point where a lever is doing this. So that C5 is where everything is pivoting, your neck and your head, and then as it comes up about seven or eight inches up here is is either double to three and three and a half times more the rotational force of what this is getting. So if I'm getting a 20 G impact at my C5, which my C5 is only 9mm right now, it's it's almost crunching down on my spinal cord, I'm getting double that, so 40 G's or even 50 G's on the frontal lobe and on the center of my brain where most of your your communication system is inside of the brain that's right there in the center. And we get we get severe diffuse axonal injury in that part of the brain. And I've sent over 100 guys to Tulane, and every one of the guys that went there were diagnosed with central processing disorder, all of them.
SPEAKER_00:So let's talk about a diffusal axonal injury because uh that's that's a lot more complicated than you know the same the the head-on hits that you get like in contact sports. Can you dial into that a little bit more?
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, I'm not a brain expert. I'm I'm actually working very closely with Dr. Maroon, who's been on your show before.
SPEAKER_00:Dr. Maroon, the guy that thinks that kids should be playing contact sports. Not a big fan of that guy right now. Yeah, but he's he's a good guy. Uh yeah. Crap, nowhere going on with this. A diffusal axonal injury, because I mean, if you want, I mean, so for the audience, is that you know, a diffusal axonal injury, from what I understand, is like is like when you instead of getting hit head-on in football, is when you get hit from the side. And you got all these twisting forces, you got it's just a more serious brain injury or impact than just you know the the front-on kind of uh that were the accelerometer-driven kind of uh hits that you take, like when you hit tackle in football, you know, you get it's like when you get hat hit from the side, it twists and it really adds a lot of a lot more damage, I guess, is what I'm hearing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so um going back to the fulcrum and your neck uh as a lever arm and your head being at the at the end of that fulcrum or into that lever arm. Um that head is rotating. It's causing rotating uh rotational forces, and those rotational forces from 20 G's on my neck or 40, 50 G's, or even, it can be up to 120 G's as rotational forces. So all of those microscopic cells, neurons, and everything else in the brain, uh tissue, white matter, gray matter, that stuff is shearing. So it's actually just tearing it. It's it's doing microvascular shearing of blood vessels all throughout, and it's doing tissue shearing all throughout. So we don't have a focal point with a lot of the guys that I know personally that have dementia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's already in their early 60s or even early or mid-50s. It's not it's not on one location, it's across the entire brain. So you're shearing those pathways that are communicating to each region of the brain, and as you're shearing those pathways, it's creating that central processing disorder, which is mostly like your cognitive dysfunction, vascular dysfunction, endocrine dysfunction, limbus uh limbic system dysfunction. There's every system in the body that's controlled by the brain is affected by this.
SPEAKER_00:And that's what I want the audience to understand. Is like we we talk a lot about contact sports here and blast exposure, right? And so, you know, blast exposure, you're on the range, you're in the shoot house, you know, you frag a room, but say you're on the range all day, okay? You might take, you know, just say top end, a hundred blasts, right? Between frags and hitting the doors and all that stuff. And then of course the company with shooting and stuff like that. But when you're in a boat, I mean, and you're on an eight-hour mission, like you said, I mean, those that's tens of thousands of hits. That's thousands of hits right there of like the same magnitude that you would take tackling in football. Wow, man.
SPEAKER_01:Let me break that down a little bit. If you're doing 50 knots, which is pretty much what I did the entire time I was on that mark five, at 50 knots in one hour, you're having you're yours for impacting every second. So that's 3,600 impacts in one hour. So if I do an eight-hour run at that speed, which I've done many times, that's over 28,000 impacts. When you look at historically with NFL players that were deceased and 60 years old with level four CTE, they only had about 30,000 impacts in their entire career. We can get that in one day. Wow. In just one hour. 30,000 in one day. In just one eight-hour run. I've done I've done a trip, training trip from New Orleans, auto up to Virginia Beach, 1,700 miles on a boat going 50 knots.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. How long did that take? You must have re refueled at sea or something.
SPEAKER_01:We did we did a few hundred miles a day and then we would pull into Key West and all of these different ports and kind of do our things. Key West's not a bad place to pull in. We had a bunch of places, I mean. I'm making it sound really bad, but there were some good parts of it as well.
SPEAKER_00:You know, that's not a bad place to pull over, man. No, man. Wow, dude. I mean, and that's what Dr. Pearl in his uh presentation made so apparent. It's like, look, we don't this is like like probably the worst job to have in terms of what we're doing right now. So I mean, so obviously the impact on the the SWIC boat operating community has been uh quite significant.
SPEAKER_01:It's very devastating. Those those 300 individuals that were in my survey, I found 80, 90 percentile uh levels with over 40 different comorbidities. And uh I know Dr. Chris Free from Operator Syndrome. Um I speak with him quite a bit, text him. He gave me about five different surveys that he uses to clinically assess patients. And I use all of those surveys, build them into I would collect all my information with my interviews and with my survey. So everything in my survey was actually a clinical question that is asked by our practitioners. It wasn't something that I just made up. But 40 comorbidities uh and on average everyone had at least 30.
SPEAKER_00:Dude. And and and a quick question were any of these men, and I don't know if there's women that performed these duties, but were any of them released early from the military for being impulsive, you know, you know, for just not you know being able To get along with the military because they were mentally ill or what making stupid decisions, as you know, we all do.
SPEAKER_01:I know one one guy who uh was jogging to work one day, blacked out, crashed into some trees, head-on collision because of his TBI. He just said, I'll quit. Um, I know other guys that um a lot of guys toward the end of their careers, everyone's abusing alcohol, everyone's having behavioral issues or you know, personality changes and those types of things. So back then we just said, hey man, you're not acting correct, and um we're gonna we're gonna do something about that. So that happened quite a bit. Everyone, there was a study that came out in the late 90s, early 2000s that said this was an official study, that 100% of SWIC operators have injuries by their 10-year mark. Not one injury, but multiple injuries. We were the we were the highest rated injury uh MOS in the military.
SPEAKER_00:I mean I think there should be, you know, between you know I mean, there's no reason now with the evidence that we have that these men, and especially if they were like kind of given the boot or they had to leave early, should not be able to go back and get full compensation for their military service, get retirement, get their bad conduct discharges or other than honorable discharges reversed. I know because I know that when they were probably booted, they were booted for you know incompatibility with military service, some crazy thing. It wasn't because they were ill, because nobody knew how to associate their job with their mental illness.
SPEAKER_01:I know one guy specifically, um, he he had about 17 years in the Navy and he got busted down, he was at E6, he got busted down to E3, I believe, and kicked out of the military by our community. And uh he doesn't have a retirement. He has 100% disability. That's basically all he has. And he was just diagnosed uh with um Alzheimer's. He's only he's 63.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's the kind of stuff we need to we need we need to take a re-look at that. And uh maybe we might be able to talk offline because that's that that's the tragedy right now, because not only him, but you know, there's I would say thousands of other veterans that have been released since 9-11 because of the impact on of their of their service on their brand, they make you know they they make dumb decisions. Or in in your case, I was gonna I was gonna ask, I mean, like that guy blacking out. I mean, I can imagine that some of those those hits are that hard where you know you might even black out driving a boat or something. I mean I don't know if that's ever happened.
SPEAKER_01:Really. I look at my numbers, but it was um about 30 or 40 percent of the guys had claimed that they blacked out. On a mission. That's not being knocked out, that's blacking out. That's blacking out. And there was a there was a high number of high number of people urinating blood and that type of thing as well.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, and this has gone on for uh quite a while. I mean, the the command must have known that there had been some kind of I mean, you just can't have an entire unit pissing blood, blackened out, and complaining of head injuries. I mean, did they was there any attempt to try and you know, you know, regulate this through either, you know, dialing back training or I mean, or did uh th there's just no doubt that these conditions are associated with your job. Was there any attempt to ameliorate the impact of the job through reduced training, reduced exposure? I mean, you can't do that in combat, right? We've got to leave it on the field in combat. I got that. Uh, but was there any attempt to to to to try to relieve the the the you know these issues on on the personnel that have to do these jobs?
SPEAKER_01:There has been ongoing since the 90s uh research and looking at new platforms, the way the hole's designed, the propulsion, padding on the boats, seating, pretty much everything on that boat, there's there's some way that they they've looked at mitigating the impact for sustainability of the craft and for sustainability of the operator. But like I said, back when I was an active duty guy, we it wasn't really focused so much on brain or any of that type of thing. We have tons of musc muscoskeletal injuries. Um but yeah, they're they're going in that direction, and there's a lot of things uh that I've found there's a lot of researchers that reach out to me on online, doctors, different people from around the world. So I have conversations with people all the time about it. But um in my personal opinion, there is nothing that you're gonna do on a boat. I don't care how you design it, I don't care what you do. It's just like kids playing football before they're 14. If you take a boat out in an open ocean with waves and going fast, you're gonna slam, you're gonna hit, you're gonna have whiplash, because we have whiplash, uh, whiplash associated uh disorder, which none of us are we're not diagnosed with it. Um, but that is gonna cause brain injury. That brain, that rotational force, that uh this diffuse oxonar injury, it's gonna happen. You can't stop it.
SPEAKER_00:No, and that's what we keep preaching. I mean, it's like look, the brain is in fluid. There's just there's nothing. You can you can put out 8,000 sibers looking for the greatest. The only way to reduce the impact on the operator is to reduce the amount of exposure. Okay, that's it. You can make a boat out of god dang cotton, and if you're slamming through water at 50 miles an hour, that brain is gonna move. So let's accept these facts and either have a lot more boat operators or we spend a lot less time in the boat and simulate, right? And simulate, you know, your missions, right? Because look, you got to get to a point on time. You gotta navigate in the dark, right? I mean, there's there's skills that are repeatable, and you don't have to do them for real all the darn time.
SPEAKER_01:You know, you gotta, you know, so I mean, I'm preaching to the choir, but uh That is something I'm not active duty anymore, and I've been out for 15 years, so I'm not I'm not very well plugged into group four and and what they're doing, but I do know that they're working on simulators, and that's that's one of the directions that they're going. I know that they have accelerometers that they're using out there to measure impacts. And I know there's a there's a new mouthpiece um that Dr. Maroon talks about all the time, and they use it in rugby and other sports, and they've gone and tested those mouthpieces on the boats, but that mouthpiece, I mean, it would suck to wear a mouthpiece, especially on a boat, but it would get real-time data every time that you're out there, and it would get a lifetime data collection of what type of hits that you took, how many you took, and what's your cumulative D force load as well.
SPEAKER_00:You can put those things on a helmet, dude. They don't have to go in your mouth. And the operators hell hate, this was c this came up because I was on, you know, I was I was an advisor more or less to General Fenton on brain health. And I got brought into a couple of really cool meetings. As a retiree, you know, I'm sitting at the SOCOM table and all this stuff. It was kind of cool. But, you know, he and I and I don't know, I think Admiral Bradley's gonna take this as serious as well, you know, coming out of the SEAL community. But, you know, the the the the one thing comment from the operator is like, I'm not running, you know, I'm not doing my mission with, you know, I I need my air. And you put a mouthpiece in my mouth, I got no air. I mean, they can strap those things to helmets. It's been done before. Um, the issue that we have in sports is that because nobody wants to know these true subcussive numbers, uh, because a liability, the helmet manufacturers say, well, that's gonna violate the warranty on my helmet. And they got all these ways to push away from it. So they go, but they have to go to mouthpiece. But I think in your case, in the military, we can slap those things on your helmets in a heartbeat and get out there and do our jobs and collect this data. But I mean, to your, you know, I want to get back to this point is, you know, Anthony, we've got to go back now. We've got to look at everybody that's been a SWIC operator, and we've got to, you know, you know, and and and and and and and and where they haven't been helped or they or they they need help, we've got to identify that and and get them out there. Now, obviously you have a pretty small community, so you guys are uh, you know, um uh you know pretty tight. What what treatments are out there that you guys are finding that is helping with the symptoms that you have? Because we deal mostly with brain problems here, but you know, now you're talking exoskeletal issues, you've got as you're talking to a guy just recently herniated a dish, so I'm feeling your pain here, man. But you know, what what's out there now that you guys are seeing on the treatment side that that offers hope to those veterans that have uh executed these positions? Okay.
SPEAKER_01:What I have been doing, I've I've independently done research for about four years, and I just kind of haphazardly made my way to Tulane uh TBR clinic three years ago, and I found out that they do a three-day, eight-hour assession, eight hours a day assessment, so three days long, and this is and they were part of what's called Avalon Action Alliance. So this is an alliance of multiple TBR clinics, Marcus's Institute up in Colorado, UNC Thrive, and several other ones. So the first thing, SWIC operators, and this isn't just SWIC, I've expanded my research to Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, Riverine, Marines, I've talked to SBS, Australians, I've talked to a whole host of people, and all of them have the same problems. But the first thing we got to do is go to those TBI clinics, get the actual diagnosis. If you didn't get to go to NYCO when you're active duty, and they can and they do a three-week IOP where they do a multitude of different modalities with yoga and breathing and and all those other uh modalities. So that's the first thing is just having it documented properly. I went, I partied up with uh the uh HBOT clinic called Aurelius up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, inside the University of Harrisburg. I'm kind of partnered with those guys and I'm sending our guys to them for HBOT treatment. So they have a modality where they're doing HBOT, TMS, and uh functional sports uh physical uh physical training all combined together with sleep coaching and some nutrition coaching. So I went up there with a cohort of guys. I did 60 hours of HBOT, 30 sessions of TMS, uh the physical part of it, and then the other things as well. And that made a big difference with cognitive processing and that type of thing. All the guys that went there had had drastic improvements with cog cognitive issues. Um so that's one modality of treatment. I've done the stalicanglion block. I'm gonna do that again. Do that again. Yeah. Vegas nervous stimulation, red light therapy, sauna treatments. I have a sauna sitting right here in my garage. I do that. I do that every day. And then um I've done uh Dr. Gordon's uh brain rescue three brain care cube. I've done that for a few years. Um I take gliotine from continual G, which Dr. Maroon kind of told me about. I take a couple of grams of uh DHA EPA omega-3s every day, and I I watched your guy that was talking about omega-3s.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But uh I've been doing that for a few years. Pregnetolone, which Mark Gordon talks about, uh DHEA, which he talks about. So I have a whole modality of things that I do. I have it all in a medical document that I make for myself. List every diagnosis I have, it lists every med I take, it lists all 130, 40 MRIs, cascans, x-rays, all those things. So I have it all well documented. But those are some of the things that we can do.
SPEAKER_00:Are you seeing the VA given credit for this and disability when the guys go in? I mean, there's one thing, you know, you got osteoarthritis, you got the obvious things you can see on the x-ray, right? You got, you know, vertebrae issues, the whole nine yards, but the impact on the brains, you know, you know, it it's it's it's a it's harder to diagnose. And and I know personally that the VA has absolutely no clue when it comes to the association of MOS specific tasks and you know, impact on the brain, and then moving to a disability, you know, you know, percentage on that. What do you what are you seeing as far as the guys going in and and requesting disability for the impact of this on their noggin on their life?
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, there's two types of guys right now, and we do have one female that's that you asked about. One guy is the active duty guy right now, or lady, and uh they go to NYCO, they get uh they get the full assessment and everything. 80% of those uh individuals are are leaving the military with with the correct ratings and things like that. The other group of guys are guys like me, uh that we didn't have NYCO, we didn't have any of the stuff we were at when we were active duty. So I went to the VA Poly Trauma Center, I told them everything that I've told everyone else in the world, and they looked at me and said, you don't have any TBI connected to military service. So what they denied me when I when I submitted my claim. That kind of infuriated me to the point where I I had to dig deeper. That's when I went to Tulane. I spent four weeks in Tulane. I took all the documentation that they gave me, I submitted that again, and the VA still did not have my traumatic brain injury. So today I don't have a rating for TBI.
SPEAKER_00:Bro, then you and I need to talk because when I went to the VA, and they, and this is where we get Dr. Pearl involved and Dr. Pearl's study, because it's about education awareness. When I went to the VA, all I wanted to do was make sure that my tens, you know, because I had like I had osteoarthritis in every joint but like one elbow, right? And I said, Look, I don't really care about, you know, these things right now, but my brain ain't working right. I was going through a lot of mental health stuff. And I said, and I think it's because of all the trauma that my brain's been through. And they said, well, tell me about the trauma. So I told them about everything I went through. And the only thing they asked me, go, You got any scars? I go, come look at my eyebrows. So they come up and they look at my eyebrows and it's all scar tissue from rugby, right? He comes, what have you been doing? I go, I got cracked orbital bones and stuff. I go, dude, I was all army rugby for like, you know, eight years. I played semi-pro. And he goes, Oh yeah. He said, dude, and they, I wasn't even, I didn't need the disability. They gave me another 70% for my brain because I was able to educate them. And I told him, he says, How do you know so much about this? I go, dude, I I lost my son. I'm all over this issue, and I I wrote a book on it, and I started giving him the information. So I think what we got to do now is with Dr. Pearl's study showing what you guys are going through from a CTE perspective, it is absolutely irrefutable. And we got to get a package, and I do, I, and I do an uh, I can do a whole webinar to your community on this, where we can talk about this is what you tell the brine VA, you die, you get you have to, and you're already doing this, right? You're you're validating, you have your DD214, now we've got to validate the extent. So what we need to do is we've got to come up with the equivalent of a GBEB, which is blast exposure for RHI, where you can say, and you come up to those millions of hits every year. This is how many trips I took, this is how, you know, the you know, the approximate amount of comp, you know, and then you know, because once you document and validate it and the and you already got all the x-rays, the MRIs, you know, the you know, the dude, there's there's no reason for them to be dying. It's all education and awareness. Oh, you need to go find a better VA practitioner because there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be given a TBI claim based on you know the the impact of your job. And that is that is ludicrous. I'm so sorry to hear that, bro.
SPEAKER_01:Well, but I'll help you, dude. Let me know what I can do. I got I got what's called a SWIC occupational letter from Naval Special Warfare Group 4, and it lists a blast pressure from shooting cruise server weapons because we shoot millions and millions and millions of rounds. It lists parachuting for all the guys that they're parachuting, it lists um the boats for guys. Um and it says specifically in the boat section that um we took sustained 40 G impacts up to 64G impacts, it says is at 4,000 RADs. 4,000 Rads is it's right smack dab in the middle of concussion uh that they use in concussion protocol for the NFL. It says it right there in that letter. I submitted all of that as evidence. I'm I'm 100% total and permanent, um, and I have probably 450% without the TBI. Yeah. And I've been I've just been so focused on what I'm doing in this in this space with uh the research and putting information out that I have I have a letter from one of my primary care doctors saying, hey, I support him with his TBI claim. I just haven't thought it, man.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I mean the thing is if you got your hundred, you got your hundred, right? And now it's what kind of treatments will they will they sponsor? And that's what the problem is. Everything that you just talked about, stellate ganglion blocks, right? TMS. TMS is available in some of the polytrauma, you know, instance, HBOT. These just aren't covered by the VA. You know, vagus derm stimulation, your sauna, right, in a hot, cold therapy. And I hate jumping in that cold plunge, so I had to do it this morning. But these are not covered by the VA. And these are the only things that can help treat the brain. Yeah. Right? That's the that's the problem, is that you don't have, I mean, you've got, you know, you've got muscular injuries, you got, you know, you got you got a lot of problems. But you're when we comes down to mental health, unless we fix this, then we've got men and women on bags of drugs for anxiety and depression and panic attacks and mood disorders and schizophrenia or whatever their issues are, right? And that don't work because we're not treating this. And uh, and so to your point, even if you had the disability claim for TBI, they would offer you therapy and and and drugs anyways. That's all they got, which is that's what we're trying to change. So, man, that's that's bananas, man. But um, yeah, I mean, you've done a lot of work in this space, man. Um, and and he God bless you, man. I mean, for for taking the lead on this, because it wasn't until Dr. Pearl showed us died, and we're sitting there horrified, like what? And he had a video of a swick boat operator, and you need to show that to the VA. And you know, just at night, this guy going and he slammed into one brain and his head, all you hear him was go, oh, and you could just see what that was doing to that poor man's brain. That's everybody. But we've but we've got to do this. And we've, I mean, we've got to fight at war. We've got to get our seals in, we've got to get our seals out. They need cover under hot instractions, unless, you know, there's no unless they've got air cover there. So, what do you think is the future of this? Where where do you think the Navy, you know, that you got you said that they're looking at, you know, ways to mitigate the concussion, um, you know, better boat designs. You know, where do you where do you see the the future of this going? You ain't replacing these boats, you know.
SPEAKER_01:What I would like to see for all of SOF, not just SWIC, but SEALs, special forces, everybody that's kind of in that that uh community is that you get a minimum of 60 hours of H bot on an annual basis to repair the brain. And you know all about how how H bot repairs brain. That has to be mandatory every year. Get that reset on the brain. All of your retired people with with the long term issues need H bot every year. I did 60 hours, but it's been six months. So I'm kind of starting to go back and I need to get it again. So I shouldn't have to pay for it. It should be free. The uh stellaganglion block, the ketamine, all of those other things that are out there, they need to be available. We we need to go beyond pharmaceuticals and what the VA does, and we need to have access to these things. That's the first thing I think. We need a national registry for all fast food operators, not just WIC operators, who have been through this type of trauma that we're where we can be tracked long term because that's the brain health initiative with the DOD, one of their one of their pillars is tracking long-term problems with uh veterans and giving them care as they need. So that that needs to happen. We need to be tracked. No one, in my knowledge, is actually looking at the long-term issues that we have. And like I said, we have 40 different comorbidities that are all in this constellation of things that we're calling operator syndrome. Um, no one's tracking the long-term stuff for us. We have guys that are dying, man. I've tracked down seven dudes that have committed suicide. We just had a guy commit suicide a few weeks ago. I've tracked down seven or eight guys that have died by homicide, alcohol related. There's a bunch of other guys that have killed themselves that aren't confirmed. We have a lot of deaths. The Coast Guard folks, they have a lot of deaths that have a lot of suicides. Riverine folks, they have a lot of suicides. It's the same, same method of injury, and it's the same neurocognitive problems that all manifest, and and it's the same outcome where these individuals are getting to the end of it, and they're they're like, I can't take it anymore, and they're killing themselves. So there's there's a bunch of things that we need to do. The active duty side and fixing boats and mitigating things. That's not my space is repetitive head injury. I think fast boat operators have the highest amount of repetitive repetitive head injury out of any military MOS. And we're we're times 10 beyond deceased NFL players with states for CTE. We're we're 10 times worse than those guys. And we have a whole group of guys, cohort my age that are mid-50s, going into mid-60s, that are all starting to pop up with dementia and Alzheimer's Parkinson, CTE, and all of those things.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, yeah, I there's no doubt that when I saw Dr. Pearl, that's why I was I was trying to get you on the show so hard, is that I was completely like uh unprepared for that. And I don't think there is another occupation that is as damaging to the brain as what you do. And and like I said, over time, through the proper X, you know, mitigation of exposure through simulation, all that, we're still gonna have fast mode operators. There's no doubt about it. We have to, right? We have to. But to your point, when people get out, they have to know that even while they're in there, right, they've got all this new ways, you know, HBOT at the unit, right? All these ways to keep the brain optimized, that through reduced exposure, and then when they get out, there's all these treatments available for them to get back on their feet. But you can't be a boat operator for 20 years anymore, or 10, or maybe even five. You do it for a couple years, you have some fun, shoot a lot of bullets, and then you go back to the fleet, right? Because it's just too damaging. So I think that's some of the things that we're starting to talk about, where, you know, a lot of the a lot of the worst case are the guys that actually train the courses because they're out with the students all day long. They never the schoolhouse guys never get a break, man. You know? They step off one boat, get on another boat. And get on another one, and they're right back at it again. So, I mean, but there are ways to mitigate. There's a lot of hope here, man. And and you are absolutely leading the pack. So as we close out, Anthony, tell people about how they can find you. Okay. If they want to participate, and um and what else do you have going on, man? Let's brag about yourself here for a bit, because you've done an amazing job.
SPEAKER_01:My new email is anthony uh40g.com. So that's how you can reach me. Uh I have I have a YouTube channel, I have a lot of things on there. I'm gonna continue to put things on there as well. I've actually started a uh nonprofit called 40g reboot. I mean, it's just it exists. I it hasn't done anything. I'm not really working for it at the moment, but it's something that's coming in the future, and uh what I what I see with that is um just spending all of that time and and effort into getting guys to treatment, bringing more awareness, making sure that this problem is known. And it's and it's not just about it's not just about us. Like I said, the Coast Guard operators are all of those guys are having the same problem. Riverine, all those other entities out there, anyone that's in fast boats, they're all getting the same thing. Like I said, you can reach me on that email. But what I'm doing right now is I did another survey. I'm working with Dr. Maroon and a group of his doctors on his staff. The whole report is written. Uh, it's been submitted through uh RB through University of Pittsburgh, so we're just looking to get it published. So we can just bring more uh more awareness about what's going on in this community.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, it will and we'll help you with spreading the awareness, man. I mean, because there it just has to happen. It's uh it's appalling. And then it wasn't until it wasn't until you mentioned the river and the Coast Guard guys. I used to go watch them roll them boats around at the mouth of the Columbia River up in uh Portland, or Astoria, I think it was, where they got there, you know, I'm just like, God, these guys just rolling the boat over, you know, and I can't imagine because they they they hit it at high speeds too. And they don't have ships, they got smaller boats like you do. The surfmen and uh what's that?
SPEAKER_01:I think they're called the surfmen. I think that's what they're called, but um I just I just had uh a wife a spouse reach out to me. Her husband was a master chief and and he committed suicide. It's not deemed it's not deemed a suicide, but he was crazy, delusional, hitting things. He just uh he spiraled downhill really bad, and it's just like a lot of other guys that that we see in this community from this repetitive head injury.
SPEAKER_00:And that's what we need the you know, the folks out there, and I'll make this uh little pitch at you, you know, because look, if you're listening to these, you know, podcasts and you know of people that are struggling, and now you're aware that they have these backgrounds, and you can now associate, they're not just crazy, or they didn't just spend too much time in Iraq. They had a job that that that's that blew up their brain. We have so many ways to keep these men and women here, okay? They don't have to take their lives, but they have to talk, they have to reach out. And honestly, Anthony, I can't tell you the amount of times I talk to guys that are struggling, and then they won't move. It's like, look, we have eibogain, we have all these psychedelics, we have HBOT, we have everything out there. Here's the foundations. And somehow they get stuck. And it's like you gotta help yourself. You can't, you know, you know, you gotta, you know, you helped yourself in the military, you got through these wars, you can't just eat it, right? You can't eat it. And so many of our men and women are eating mental health issues that are leading to these horrible outcomes for not only them and their families. So, you know, this is a plea, right, to folks that are listening to please reach out to somebody, contact us, contact, contact Tony, because there are things that can help you. And there are people that can help pay for this. And and gosh, man, I mean, nobody should be suffering because they serve their country, right? And that's where that's where I get my anger bone going, and that's why we've got legislation up in DC that we're trying to get moving right now to make everything that you said, Tony, to make it available, to make it free, make it covered, because what you serve the country, they serve the country, and if this is an outcome, just like the VA, and the VA needs to really get off their butt and recognize this for the issue that it is, okay? And I mean, because when you walk in and you say I'm a swift boatman or I'm a riverine operator, they should automatically go into overdrive. It's like, all right, we already know you're a mess, okay? There's no doubt about it. You know, we don't have to really evaluate you. You know, if you've done this more than five years, you're a disaster. Okay, how do we get you fixed? And then we got to get them off this FDA crap of, you know, these approved drugs and all this stuff and get them to think outside the box. But that's my job. Anthony, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. And um, my heart's with you. I'll be praying for the SWIC community and for you know better outcomes in the years to have. Don't give up. Keep driving on, man. And is this any way that we can be of help at the Mac Parkman Foundation? Uh, reach out to me and let me know, okay? So I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Uh, no problem, man. God bless you. God bless you on your journey, and we will see you soon. All right, folks, another great uh episode of Broken Brains, man. Really appreciate you spending the time. Remember, we've got a lot going on at the Mac Parkman Foundation. The book is for free. I had to write it in pain. Go get it. It's 88 pages. Look, all right, one night, bag of popcorn, six pack of berry, whatever it takes. Read the book and be informed. Go get our app, Head Smart on Apple, the Google stores. It's the only app with not only concussion, but repetitive head impact information on it. And the books on there as well. And so, and keep going. Follow our events. The summits coming up next year. We're going to be picking some dates. We'll be follow-on with the Army Navy game. We're going to start having webinars for military service veterans and athletes on the issues of repetitive blast exposure and CTE for the boat guys, as well as repetitive impacts for uh sports. So go to our website, look for those events. They're for free. Get the information you need to make better decisions. And remember, as you walk through life, you only got one melon, especially your children. Take care of them and take care of this because it's all you got. We'll see you next time on Broken Brains with Bruce Parker. Thank you very much. Take care.