Healthy Brain, Body, and Soul

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“They Keep Telling Me I’m Crazy”: A Navy Seal’s Desperate Search For Answers About His Own Brain Injury & His Family’s Cause Now




All of this described in the article (including suicide) is so common after brain injuries, and for the most part, AMA does not have nor use the treatments that can be so effective. 
My husband’s first symptomatic concussion was in October 1997, with countless more subsequently. We have found and continue to use treatments for him that WORK. I continue to study nutrition and alternative healing, as I have for over 50 years, with a focus on brain healing since 1997, and periodically we come up with new effective treatments. 
First understand, the emotions and behaviors described in this article are very common. Do not dismiss them, nor blame them on the one suffering any more than you would blame a paraplegic for being unable to move the affected parts of their body. It is a physical injury with physical damage that plays out through pain and behaviors, and it is most definitely not simply a mental problem. It can be a very complex situation when the patient is violent and there are young children in the house, especially with limited financial resources, so families must stay safe! Still, try and remember the patient is unable or barely able to control an angry, injured brain, and don’t add blame to the problem. Families not living with the patient can be a problem as well if they don’t understand the realties of brain injury. They should all read the article below. 
Pharmaceuticals are a mixed bag. They can help, but they can also create more problems. Use with great caution. My husband still uses some pharmaceuticals periodically, for specific purposes, but some he was given over the decades were nightmares. In addition, he has had to go through withdrawal or tapering so many times, he’s become an expert. The term tapering, btw, refers to drugs that won’t kill you if you stop taking them cold, but they will create awful symptoms, and you do have to go through what is essentially withdrawal. If you’re concerned about the need to withdraw from any medication, ask the doctor the question “Is this drug addictive or is it one I will have to taper off of or can I stop taking it cold?”


Short form, the positive treatments my husband and I strongly recommend are listed below. They may or may not return the TBI survivor to being the person they were before, but they’ll make big differences in pain levels, ability to control emotions, ability to walk (I’ve had to spot my husband when he walked a number of times over the years), improved memory, ability to participate in normal life, and much more. As one stroke victim told us about one of these treatments, mentioned immediately below, instead of being left with a life sentence, the treatments gave him his life back. 


A tool AMA uses for 15 conditions, brain injuries NOT included, is hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). It produces nearly miraculous results for brain healing, and not just from concussions, but from strokes and cerebral palsy, for instance. Anyone who has observed the difference before and after treatment will agree. My husband has experienced the miracles himself (more than a few times!!), and we have witnessed miracles in other people with the 2 other conditions mentioned. The treatment involves preferably breathing 100% oxygen while in a chamber that will raise the atmospheric pressure around the person, forcing oxygen into tissues and creating noticeable healing at least after 2 weeks of regular treatments, sometimes sooner. The protocol of my husband’s first HBOT was being in a 100% oxygen environment at 1.5 ATA (atmospheric pressure measurement) for 1 hour at pressure, twice a day with a couple of hours in between, 5 days a week with 2 days off a week, for 4 weeks (this degree of treatment can only occur in a clinic with trained techs. Just breathing 100% oxygen while under pressure in a chamber produces about 95% the same results, and is how he now is getting his HBOT). That is essentially the maximum treatment for a period of time in order to avoid oxygen toxicity. That degree of intensity of treatment has not been possible since that first round of sessions, but we bought our own hyperbaric chamber, and buy oxygen regularly (with his neurologist’s full support) so he can get less intensive rounds as needed (and they are needed). My husband is alive today because of HBOT. That is the literal truth. HBOT is THE most important treatment to pursue. 


Hormone testing! There are 3 glands in the brain (hypothalamus, pituitary, and pineal) that are involved in hormone regulation. Those glands can be affected by a brain injury. My husband is taking 2 hormones on a regular basis, has been since 2006, and likely will for the rest of his life. 


Diet is also.a big player. A high carb diet is NOT your friend. Look into neurologist Dr. David Perlmutter’s book, Grain Brain (and he has written more books), or the GAPS diet or SCD diet (and there are others) for more detail on this. My former carb addict, pizza restaurant owner/operator for 4 decades husband has been on a low carb diet since 2010, with very significant positive results, and quick regression when the care load gets too high. Good diet also includes avoiding junk food, making sure there’s the proper balance of Omega-3s to Omega-6 fats in the diet, which generally means eating a lot of fatty fish, preferably small ones to avoid mercury, and/or taking supplements, and taking vitamin D supplements as well as spending some time in the sun with no sunscreen on in the early or late day. Probiotics are incredibly important for many health issues, and the best form is from foods, such as plain yogurt and kefir (no sugar!), water kefir (sort of like healthy soda, and very easy to make and flavor at home), kombucha, and fermented foods such as sauerkraut and various pickles (from the refrigerated section!).
Also remember the brain is 60% fat and you need good fats in your diet to help keep the brain healthy. Good fats are olive and avocado oils, butter from grassfed cattle (grassfed is very important! And yes, butter!), lard from pastured pigs, fats from the meat of grassfed (aka pastured) animals (and that also includes eggs!). And eat your greens! Your mama was right!


In the past, we have used amino acids for symptomatic relief. It’s been several years since we have used those, so my memory of which does what isn’t very clear. I know we did use branched chain amino acids to reduce cataplectic seizures, with the trade off of increased headache.


CBD oil! This is a relatively recent addition to our tool set. We were seeing an integrative medicine doctor, and my husband told him he was having trouble sleeping. The doctor recommended a specific CBD oil that he had researched and sold out of his office (Quicksilver Scientifics Colorado Hemp Oil – legal in all states). He said it was 85% bioavailable, unlike the more common 25% bioavailability of other products he found at the time. We’d tried CBD before with no results, but figured it was worth a try. My husband was having 4 or 5 pseudo seizures a week (pseudo only in that they were not epileptic in nature, but other creative ways the brain can affect one’s body). We got home that night, and my husband did his first sublingual dose that evening, doing 4 doses of 4 drops a day. Two weeks later, we realized he was going through a minor withdrawal from a medication he had been having to use to stop the seizures. The seizures had stopped completely from that first dose, meaning he’d had no medication for 2 weeks, and we were astonished! Due to a completely unrelated health issue that was the result of bites of some outdoor critter than led to 18 months of my husband having to take awful medications to get rid of what those bites had led to, my husband lost about 4 years of progress from the brain healing we’d gotten, and the seizures have returned to some extent. He has been making progress back to better brain health, but it was a very upsetting set back. Remember that even with healing, the injured brain is still more susceptible to other impacts, like very mild blows to the brain causing another concussion, being more sensitive to medications or light or noise or confusion, etc. Expect set backs, but you can work through them. 
There may be other CBD oil that is equally effective or perhaps even more so, but I’m not familiar with them, and what we have works. 


Even more recent is some new medication that may be very promising. These are the migraine pharmaceuticals, Aimovig, Ajovy, or Emgality (don’t be misled by the term migraine). My husband tried the Aimovig recently. It is delivered via a self-injector like Epi-Pens are. He got his first dose in his neurologist office, and it indeed, it slowly erased his massive headache down to a 4 on a 10 scale (unlike the 6 which is normal for him). This drug works by binding to the receptor sites in the brain that are the source of headache pain. The next day, my husband gave himself his vitamin D injection, and unfortunately it appears that the vitamin D binds to the same sites, so the headache reduction was immediately reversed. He just had his first injection of Ajovy (injected with a regular needle, something he can do himself), and so far, 4 days later, it does seem to be keeping the headache at bay. This works in a different manner than the Aimovig, and does not bind to brain receptor sites. We have no experience with the Emgality, at least  not yet. 


Later I can go into more detail about the diet, and if I can dredge up the memories, the amino acids, but I’ll be doing that on my blog. I’m will be posting both this article and what I’ve written on my blog. I’m still a caretaker to my husband, and I too am disabled (torn knee menisci), and we’re both 70 years old, so I am unfortunately very slow about posting new information. I’ll do it as I can.