When my great grandfather returned from the Spanish-American War, the battle followed him home, casting a long shadow over his daily life. Dr. Chris Frueh joins us to shed light on this very darkness that many veterans confront, known as Operator Syndrome—an affliction that intertwines mental and physical health, leaving a complex legacy of suffering. Through Dr. Frueh's compassionate lens, we navigate these challenges, illustrating the pressing need for holistic support systems for our nation's heroes, and the transformational power of treatment and understanding.
What would it look like if every citizen contributed to national service, bridging gaps and cultivating respect for the shared commitment to our country's welfare? We explore this radical idea, examining how mandatory national service could foster unity and appreciation for those in uniform. By examining global examples and the unique bond among service members, the discussion with Dr. Frueh unveils a provocative vision for a more cohesive society, grounded in the principles of service and sacrifice.
The journey towards healing is rife with hurdles for many veterans, especially those battling the silent aftermath of blast injuries and TBIs. This episode delves into these complex health concerns, from cognitive impairments to sleep disruptions and hormonal imbalances. We highlight the promising horizon of treatments like the stellate ganglion block therapy and the potential of wearable technology in improving sleep and overall well-being. By exploring cutting-edge fitness regimes and the invaluable resources being developed by SEAL Future's health board, we offer a beacon of hope for veterans striving toward recovery and health. Join us for this profound dialogue, featuring Dr. Chris Frueh, to gain a deeper appreciation of the resilience and the ongoing needs of our veterans.
Buy his book on Amazon by clicking here.
Contact Thad - VictoriousVeteranProject@Gmail.com
Thanks for listening!
When my great grandfather returned from the Spanish-American War, the battle followed him home, casting a long shadow over his daily life. Dr. Chris Frueh joins us to shed light on this very darkness that many veterans confront, known as Operator Syndrome—an affliction that intertwines mental and physical health, leaving a complex legacy of suffering. Through Dr. Frueh's compassionate lens, we navigate these challenges, illustrating the pressing need for holistic support systems for our nation's heroes, and the transformational power of treatment and understanding.
What would it look like if every citizen contributed to national service, bridging gaps and cultivating respect for the shared commitment to our country's welfare? We explore this radical idea, examining how mandatory national service could foster unity and appreciation for those in uniform. By examining global examples and the unique bond among service members, the discussion with Dr. Frueh unveils a provocative vision for a more cohesive society, grounded in the principles of service and sacrifice.
The journey towards healing is rife with hurdles for many veterans, especially those battling the silent aftermath of blast injuries and TBIs. This episode delves into these complex health concerns, from cognitive impairments to sleep disruptions and hormonal imbalances. We highlight the promising horizon of treatments like the stellate ganglion block therapy and the potential of wearable technology in improving sleep and overall well-being. By exploring cutting-edge fitness regimes and the invaluable resources being developed by SEAL Future's health board, we offer a beacon of hope for veterans striving toward recovery and health. Join us for this profound dialogue, featuring Dr. Chris Frueh, to gain a deeper appreciation of the resilience and the ongoing needs of our veterans.
Buy his book on Amazon by clicking here.
Contact Thad - VictoriousVeteranProject@Gmail.com
Thanks for listening!
You're going to look depressed, you're going to feel depressed, you're not sleeping, you're not able to concentrate, you have low motivation and that was a big thing for him. I just don't have the motivation I used to have. He'd stopped working out. Irritability is a huge problem. Physical muscle mass starts to change, working out becomes really hard and, of course, the effect on sexual functioning. So, whoa, that was unexpected. I didn't see that coming in my early naive state of working for the first time, working with operators. Once we got that identified and got that treated he was doing, you know, there was a huge change, a huge benefit for him Also started to realize. Another unexpected issue was a lot of the guys that I worked with. I started saying let's get sleep studies done. My name is.
Speaker 2:Thad David. I'm a former Marine recon scout sniper with two deployments to Iraq. As a civilian, I've now facilitated hundreds of personal and professional development trainings across the country, and it struck me recently that the same things that help civilians will also help veterans succeed in their new roles as well. Join me as we define civilian success principles to inspire veteran victories. Welcome to another episode. I'm here today with Dr Chris Free. He is the author of a book that actually launches today, called Operator Syndrome. How are you doing, Chris? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Thad. Of course I'm so excited. I know we had gotten contact about a month ago and just from our initial conversation I'm very excited to jump into several topics that you have going on. And before we even jump into Operator Syndrome and what that is, I'd love to just if you could just give a little background of what got you into helping veterans and to this topic of operator syndrome. Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure, and it's. Can I show my book, please do? Yeah. So that's the book. It's not too thick. You can read it on an airplane if you wanted to.
Speaker 1:My background is clinical psychology, so I have a PhD that I earned in 1992. And then I wanted to work with veterans. That's what I wanted to do when I went to graduate school, so my dissertation was with Vietnam veterans and my first year out of school was training, getting supervised for licensure, and then that turned into a long-term job at a VA hospital. So I was in Charleston, south Carolina, at the VA there and the Medical University of South Carolina from 91 to 2006. And so my time at the VA was the first half of that was completely full-time clinical, working in a PTSD clinic, and then the second half of it was part-time clinical and most time on research. I started to get NIH and VA-funded research projects. That took my time. When I left the VA in 2006, I moved to the University of Hawaii and I'm still here branch campus in Hilo on the Big Island and I like it here. But I also had a chance to do some work in Houston for about 12 years. So I was running research programs at Menninger Clinic, which is a private psych hospital affiliated with Baylor College of Medicine, and then I did that for about a decade, commuting. It was a part-time gig, and then I had the opportunity to set up a center for veterans, mental health and research research education at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.
Speaker 1:So that's my professional background, my childhood background maybe that's what you were asking about that kind of leads into why did I do all this other stuff? So as a child, my father was a Vietnam veteran. He was not a combatant, he was a physician in the Air Force. But I grew up with that. You know that, you know kind of the shadow of the Vietnam War hanging over, hanging over the country, hanging over my family. Also, one of my heroes as a child was my great grandfather, who was alive and he lived to be about 100. He died. I think I was about 14 when he passed away. He was also a veteran. He had fought at the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, so that's 1898. And so as a child, probably from about the age of 10, I would talk with him about the war, his experiences in the war and a pretty profound homecoming experience that I think shaped his life going forward and shaped a lot of my thinking about what we as a country do and don't do for our veterans Should.
Speaker 2:I tell that story. I was actually going to ask you if you weren't going to tell it. I'm very curious to know. I mean 1898, you said Yep, 1898. Well, what was that homecoming like?
Speaker 1:So it was a short war, spanish-american War. We were in Cuba for about three months. We brought 20,000 or 30,000 troops home, pretty much all at the same time In Cuba. They had been exposed to tropical diseases, they were in the jungle with the mosquitoes, and so they came home. They brought, they were, most of them were sick, they had malaria, dysentery, whatever, and they were malnourished. They hadn't been well fed.
Speaker 1:The logistics didn't work out very well for that war. In fact the logistics were. I don't know the full story on that, but the rough riders Teddy Roosevelt and the rough riders, their horses never even made it to Cuba, so they were on foot. These cowboys so-called cowboys were on foot because their horses didn't arrive, because their horses didn't arrive. So what the government did was they built a new camp, a base camp, up on the Montauk Point at the tip of Long Island, new York, as a staging area. So they basically, in a big rush, they threw this camp together and they put thousands of tents and kitchens and it just became a great big mud field. And so they brought the soldiers home and they disembarked here and they were basically put into this isolation camp to recover and get better, except that the isolation camp was just a disgrace. The food was terrible, mud was everywhere. It just was not a hygienic place for men who were very sick to be. And it was a national disgrace. The president of the United States went up to see it and view it so it came into the news. This camp was named Camp Wyckoff, who, I think Wyckoff, was the first KIA in the Spanish-American War in Cuba. So they named the camp after him.
Speaker 1:So my great-grandfather was very sick. He was not, you know, he didn't think he was going to survive. He was that sick and a woman named Mrs Bean came up from New York City with her carriage and her butler and she brought as many men as she could fit into her carriage, I guess it was five or six men, picked them up at the camp, took them to her home in New York City she was a wealthy woman Took them to her home and nursed them there for weeks, at risk to herself and her own family to have these men with these diseases in her house. And she nursed them back to health and then got them set up, gave them money so they could get home. My great grandfather was from Michigan. He was with the Michigan militia. So he had to get back to Michigan somehow, and so for the rest of his life he talked about her, he talked about the. He truly believed she'd saved his life and given him his life back by helping him get to get home.
Speaker 2:Did he ever get back? That's an incredible story. Did he ever get back in touch with Ms Bean?
Speaker 1:I don't think so and I don't know anything about her. It's probably something I should put more effort into learning about. What I also don't know was did Mrs Bean do this on her own, or was this part of a larger movement of civilians going up there? And I suspect there were other civilians going up there and bringing men home to care for? But I can't. I've not been able to find anything in the historical record, but I'm not confident. I know where to look. So if anybody out there is listening, I would be very curious to know was this a, was there sort of a movement to go up to Camp Wyckoff and bring those soldiers into private homes and care for them?
Speaker 1:This does kind of bleed into something that we'll get into in our conversations, which is America.
Speaker 1:Today we have a much more robust VA system, we have hospitals, we have better technology, we have better disease management and we have all that good stuff, but I think what we don't have is a civilian society that looks at and sees veterans and recognizes that they have needs, that many of them are injured, hurt, sick, I think, to your average American.
Speaker 1:I think 99% of us who are not veterans don't even know a veteran, have not even really thought about veterans, and when we do, it's thank you for your service and glad the VA is there to take care of you, except the VA can't do everything. And so I think part of what we are looking at right now for our nation's veterans is a very disinterested society. What's the word? I'm just not looking, not paying attention, not interested. Indifferent that's the word. I was struggling with An indifferent society and an indifferent society that assumes the VA is there to take care of all needs and of course, the VA can't. Even if the VA was a perfect organization which it's not and people don't even know about the ways in which it's not taking good care of veterans in some of the ways that it's not, so there's just very little awareness, I think, among most Americans about our veterans and about what they experience and struggle with coming home or coming out of the service and with that?
Speaker 2:I mean, what would be your thoughts inside of that? I mean, do you have a solution in there, or is that just an observation?
Speaker 1:Well, it's an observation, that's maybe a partial assessment of a problem. I think we have a solution. Solutions are complicated here because the solution requires a shift in all of society. And let's put this into the historical context. I mean, america has always had people that stepped forward to fight our enemies, or you know the identified threats If we go back, you know, to the King Philip Indian War, for example the citizens. There was no VA, but the citizens recognized hey, if we're going to ask our young men to go and fight and risk their lives, it's on us to take care of them when they come home. So it was an understood societal debt that was owed and of course we now pay that debt with our taxes. But we're not doing anything other than just allowing the government to pull out a little bit of money from our taxes to make the VA happen. Solutions Wow, how many hours do we have?
Speaker 2:This might be a different. I know we're going to talk about the VA and this might come up at that point in time, but I was just curious. I didn't know if you had anything. Just that was top of mind for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do.
Speaker 1:I have one thought that's top of mind and people would hate it, but I think it would solve many of our problems as a society and that would be a required national service.
Speaker 1:And I'm not a policymaker, I'm just, but I'm also not spitballing.
Speaker 1:This is something I've thought about a lot over the decades and I think if we had it, you know and I don't know, I won't speak to details too much but if every American at some point had to give two years of service before they were reached the age of I don't know 28 or 30, maybe you push that number lower and maybe that service could be, you know, maybe there would be options, maybe some people could choose to go into this military service, maybe some could go into law enforcement or firefighting, maybe there's, maybe there's other other kinds of service.
Speaker 1:But I think, I think, if we we got more into becoming more of a service minded country where we, we all understood what it meant to put on a uniform and do strenuous, rigorous, important but also dangerous work, I think that would help unite us more than we are united, but certainly it would also, I think, help develop that appreciation and awareness of the fact that there are men and women who suit up every day and step into the fight, step into the arena, so to speak, whether that's law enforcement, emt, firefighters Some of my work is with first responders but also, obviously, soldiers. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2:I think that would be a phenomenal, phenomenal thing. I was talking to somebody. He was in town. I think that would be a phenomenal, phenomenal thing. I was talking to somebody, we were, he was in town. He's a fairly big personality and he's more of a mentalist and he was on stage and I was just talking to him. He was from Israel and he's actually getting ready to fly back to Israel and it was right, it was his flight happened. He was flying out on a Friday night and that night was when they got attacked. So I talked to him like six hours prior oh wow, like man, what do you?
Speaker 2:What are your thoughts about having to serve? You know, for them, I think it's three men must do three years, women must be two years. I think that every, every citizen must serve in the military. And he said it's fantastic, they absolutely love it. And so I don't have any personal, obviously, aside from my own service. It sounds like it would be a good thing, but just talking to other countries that do it, it seems to be a very unifying thing that everybody does their time. They love that, they did their time, and then they know that even the you know the big, like Gal Gadot, who's a huge movie star here Now. She served her military time as well, and it's so. It doesn't limit them from doing what they want to do. But to your point, it gives some good appreciation, and so I love it and I think it's a great idea.
Speaker 1:And since October just a followup on that, since the atrocity attacks of October 7th I started doing a little bit of work and consultation with a group of psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health experts, and we're a small I would say a small international group a couple of folks from Australia, a couple from Britain I'm the lone American and a couple of folks from Australia, a couple from Britain I'm the lone American and then a handful of docs from Israel and I've worked with other doctors from Israel and even published some research on their insurance programs for post-terrorism.
Speaker 1:So what's really interesting is I'm a civilian, I've never put on a uniform, I've never served in the armed forces, but the Israeli docs have. So when we're having conversations about treatments, working now with some of the folks not working but talking with some of the folks that run their hyperbaric oxygen therapy treatment and research programs what's really cool is you realize these doctors, they've been there, They've had the training, they've been on missions. One of the psychiatrists was a former special operations soldier, and I'm not even sure if the word former is appropriate, because I think they maintain some ongoing connection to. Even after they've done their three years they continue to do things. So, yeah, it's a completely different thing and, man, we live in a country that is so divided right now in America. Service would, I think, bring us together in that way too, maybe, and have some benefits.
Speaker 2:I love that loop around. I was not even thinking on that level of the tie-in, of how divided we are and how that would be a huge unifying connection because all veterans that's one thing that every veteran knows. I mean, we talk trash about each other all the time, different branches, yet at the end of the day we're here for each other. Yep, yeah, yeah. And it just made me think of. I'm not a very religious person, so I'm going to mention just Mormons. And you know, you see these individuals traveling around town and I was talking to a Mormon. He said now, if he sees somebody out, he'll actually go out of his way to go help them out. Just because he's like I've been there, he'll actually go out of his way to go help them out just because he's like I've been there and and it just it just made me think of that unification that when you, even when you're done with your time, you see people in the middle of it, there's just that reaching in to help, that yearning to go help somebody because you've been there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's a great idea and once a veteran, always a veteran. So it's a. It's a lifelong, life-changing experience and identity.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Well, thank you for sharing. I'm glad we went through that because I could definitely see where it got you very interested into supporting veterans and helping veterans, because it makes perfect sense. And so your book Operator Syndrome. What is Operator Syndrome?
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, well, I got to tell a little story on that just to kind of put this in context and try to help it make sense. So, as a VA clinician, I never really we didn't have patients that came from special operations, not in the 90s. And special operations in the 90s was very different from what it became after the global war on terror. I mean, we did have Green Berets, we did have SEALs, of course, and I know many that were active in the decades prior to the global war on terror, but I didn't have experience with them personally. My friend network in Houston I started to meet a lot of Navy SEALs, army SF, some Marine Raiders, and in conversations with people, one thing I heard over and over again and I'm just going to kind of pluck out one individual who comes to mind who is a good friend. His words to me were so his context he was a Navy SEAL. He'd been at DEVGRU, the Tier 1 unit, very accomplished. He had the medals. I did sit with him and go through his DD-214 and his entire folder of military records. So and have talked with many other people, so I'm 100% confident he was representing himself, you know, honestly and with integrity, his service. His complaint was I don't know what's wrong with me, but I'm not the same as I used to be and I don't understand it. I look in the mirror and I don't see the same face. And he even described you know I've put on a little weight, my jowls have kind of filled out. He wasn't sleeping very well, he was drinking too much, drinking a lot, but it was more than that. And so you know my 15 years at the VA treating and studying PTSD, that you know that's the first hypothesis. So in talking with him I came to realize he didn't have PTSD. He didn't have the fear, reactivity, he didn't have the avoidance of thoughts and cues and situations and sounds that maybe activate PTSD symptoms for many people who have PTSD. He just didn't have it. So then it's like, well, what does he have? And, yes, he seemed depressed. He didn't have any fear, any problem talking about his combat experiences or his training or the loss of many, many friends.
Speaker 1:We started. I just like I need to do some trial and error here. And that's what it became for me trying to help some friends. It was like let's get blood tests, let's look at hormones. That's something mental health care essentially never does, we never really think about hormones.
Speaker 1:I worked in the VA for 15 years and I don't ever remember anybody from my clinic our clinic being referred to get a hormone test and I regret that. I'm not sure how we would have done that or if that would have been easy to do when I was working in the VA, but anyway, he had low testosterone, very low testosterone. I don't remember his exact age at the time, let's call it 37 years old. He had done 17 years in the Navy. He was a very large man, is a very large man and he had the testosterone of an elderly man. So, wow, what does it mean to have low testosterone? You're going to look depressed, you're going to feel depressed, you're not sleeping, you're not able to concentrate, you have low motivation and that was a big thing for him. I just don't have the motivation I used to have. He'd stopped working out. Irritability is a huge problem. Physical muscle mass starts to change, working out becomes really hard and, of course, the effect on sexual functioning. So, whoa, that was unexpected. I didn't see that coming in my early naive state of working for the first time, working with operators. Once we got that identified and got that treated, he was doing. You know there was a huge change, a huge benefit for him, also started to realize very.
Speaker 1:Another unexpected issue was a lot of the guys that I worked with I started saying let's get sleep studies done, polysomnographies, that's where you spend the night in a sleep clinic and we measure brainwave activity, breathing, heart activity, body temperature, movements, eye movements, limb movements, eye movements, limb movements. And most of the guys I know and work with have sleep apnea, obstructive sleep apnea, which you think of I always think of as a disorder for middle-aged men especially who are a little overweight. It's something else with these guys so low testosterone, sleep apnea. So let me go back. You asked what is operator syndrome? I've kind of introduced you to kind of how I my first you know, kind of awakening or awareness that something is going on here. That's different from what I was expecting of operators from across all branches. I've worked with operators literally from every branch, including active duty, including Canadian SOF and including private defense contractors. I've done a lot of work with private defense contractors, not all of whom are operators, but many of them are or function as operators in war zones, and this pattern emerges just the same kind of pattern of injuries and functional impairments. I just started seeing it over and over and over again to the point where now I sit down with somebody and once I hear where they served and what they did, I have a pretty good idea of some of the problems they're likely to have. So let's do this and we can come back.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to rip through the list of injuries and illnesses and the point I want to make is they're all interconnected. They cause each other, they make each other worse. So traumatic brain injury is the first. I want to come back and key on that in just a moment. But traumatic brain injury, sleep disturbance, such as insomnia, obstructive sleep apnea, the hormonal dysregulation, which is typically low testosterone, but frequently other hormones as well Chronic pain in essentially every joint in the body, headaches, sometimes migraines that are pretty severe.
Speaker 1:Then we have the psychological stuff, the depression, the anxiety, some PTSD, anger. Anger is a big one. Hypervigilance is almost like a separate issue for a lot of guys. Hypervigilance is almost like a separate issue for a lot of guys, separate from PTSD. It's just a behavioral adaptation that they've learned and is deeply ingrained. It's a reflex, addiction and substance abuse, widespread impairments of perceptual systems. So hearing, vision and balance are all affected and impaired. Typically Then we get into cognitive impairments. You know, memory and concentration are impaired. Organizational ability just to stay on task with things over the course of a day or a week is difficult. All of this now bleeds into marriage and parenting and family, causing problems. All of this bleeds into marriage and parenting and family, causing problems. All of this bleeds into difficulty with intimacy, both physical, sexual intimacy, but also emotional intimacy. One thing I hear over and over again is guys describe a loss of empathy, loss of kind of an emotional numbing. They just don't hurt or respond to suffering the way most of us do.
Speaker 1:You have the toxic exposures, all those things that affect breathing, respiratory illnesses, cancer rates we're seeing high elevations of cancer rates in the soft community, the transition out of the military. Now we're going to take that operator with all these injuries and impairments and say good luck to you, go back to the civilian world after 10 years, 15 years, 20 years or more, get after it there and good luck. And there are programs that help with that. But, man, that's a challenge for every veteran, whether you serve two years, a four-year enlistment or. But, man, that's a challenge for every veteran, whether you serve two years, a four-year enlistment or a career. It's a challenge. I don't know how. I mean it would be a challenge for me if I had to suddenly do something very different from what I've done my whole professional life.
Speaker 1:And then the last kind of two things are the existential concerns. You know the guilt, the loss, the survivor's guilt, losing tribe, losing the purpose and mission in life, and you have all of that put together and we have a really we have a high rate of suicide in the SOF community. I don't know anybody personally who's died by suicide, but I hear of a death almost every week, a suicide death almost every week. And when I talk to guys, very commonly they will say, yeah, they've had five, six, eight friends die by suicide after they came home after their military service, after they finished their contracting work overseas. So suicides are a real problem and that's a concern for a lot of us, something that many people don't understand. And I want to go talk about TBI for a minute, if I could.
Speaker 1:People think of TBIs as concussions. You get hit on the head, maybe you're knocked unconscious, you've bruised your brain. You do that enough times, you're going to have long-term injuries to the brain, and that's true. People also don't think about the injuries caused by the toxic inhalations. You know, breathing toxic air, not breathing any air, the diving often leads. You know combat diving, whether that's seals or other branches, that often. You know that oxygen deprivation is a form of injury to the brain.
Speaker 1:And then the big one, the one that we don't really understand medically and is just now starting to get attention, are blast wave exposures. So most people don't understand what a blast exposure does. Every explosion sends out a ripple, a shock wave, an invisible wave. If you're close enough, if you're within the radius, that wave is going to go through you. It has a shearing effect. So it goes through the brain, through all the soft tissue in the body.
Speaker 1:In military special operations and this is true for conventional also, and I want to come back and acknowledge that what I'm talking about is operator syndrome. I don't just view it as only specifically people who meet the formal definition of operator. I know firefighters, I know many Marines who you know with a couple of pumps to Fallujah, for example, other soldiers in artillery units and such Anything that involves explosions is going to injure the brain. So if you have training with breaching demolitions, shoulder-fired rockets, even sniper rifles, not even sniper rifles, even handguns have a microblast. So it's a matter of what is your have a massive amount of blast exposures, not just from deployments but from the training itself. So before a SEAL even gets into their first platoon, 95% of them have TBI just from their training exposures. Conventional forces also are going to have some of these injuries. They just typically don't have the same magnitude, the same number of years, but also the intensity of blast after blast after blast. Being in a shoot house, training in for close quarters, you know CQB is going to, you know you're in a tight space, you're breathing, you're breathing all the heavy metals, you're handling the heavy metals and you're in a very tight, confined space with the gunshots and such. So it's really a profound dose of brain injury that we are talking about for this community.
Speaker 1:There's two other pieces that I think are causative, and that's just simply the high op tempo of training. Evolutions are constant and deployments. So train for a year and a half, do a six-month deployment. Come back to the us train. I mean there's different cadence tempos but the op tempo is high and on and on deployments.
Speaker 1:You know a lot of these, a lot of operators? They're just, they're running and gunning every night with kinetic missions. So now you have sleep disruption, not not enough sleep deprivation. Plus you have the circadian disruption of traveling back and forth to different places around the world, also a lot of night work, night training, night missions. So the sleep really gets jacked up and I think I'll take a breath here. That's, that's operator syndrome. I view it as a framework. It's not a diagnosis, it's a framework understanding that these are all of the domains that we need to be assessing and looking at, and I would say that's true. You know, that kind of that whole systems approach is true for all veterans, for all first responders, for all firefighters and law enforcement. We should be evaluating each of these domains.
Speaker 2:Well, one thing that and it made me think of it I want to ask you, because you said that there's not a ton of information on it right now, but with that almost like a shockwave, because I remember one of the things that we talked about oftentimes in sniper school was just how, when the body takes an impact from a bullet, the bullet goes through, but the secondary impact is the wave that it sends through the body and essentially it jars all the organs around it. So even the bullet going through, obviously that's one point of impact. But it talked about how much damage and obviously that's a big force, a big blunt hit. But what you're saying is, without the penetration of a bullet, being close to the explosion or any blast, anything like that, it's sending the same shockwave through or similar.
Speaker 1:Where is your head in relation to your rifle? Right on the rifle, right there, yeah, right there, yeah Right there. Shoulder-fired rocket If you're doing anything with Carl Gustavs, a lot of guys refer to those as their favorite sidearm, but that's right there. I've talked with guys that were instructors for shoulder-fired rockets and they're standing on a field with a student on either side of them and they're standing out there all day with these things going off and at the end of the day they are nauseous and woozy and they wobble home and they feel sick for days afterwards and then the next day they get up and do it again, perhaps days afterwards.
Speaker 2:And then the next day they get up and do it again. Perhaps I remember this one we were over in Iraq and we had just a ton, a huge cache of just old military Iraqi, just a bunch of explosive devices, just different things, and we brought them out into this field and strapped them with explosives and just slowly, and we have videos of these just massive mushroom clouds going up in the sky, and that's one in particular that just made me think of of the many times of just, but we didn't, we didn't even think of it. How did they discover? This was a thing and I know you said it's a very, fairly new thing that they're exploring, but I mean, how did we discover it and what? I know? You said it's a fairly new thing that they're exploring, but how did we discover it and what do we know about?
Speaker 1:it. You know, what do we know about it? Well, there was a. So at some point along the way, I just tuned into it, just from discussions these guys were describing to me. Yeah, this is how it felt afterwards I felt sick, I felt dizzy, I vomited or I felt nauseous. I was sick for five days after some very close explosions and events. I tuned into it probably a decade ago, just from talking with guys, just from hearing their descriptions.
Speaker 1:There's a famous paper that was published in 2016, so eight years ago now, years ago now by a pathologist, daniel Pearl, pathologist at Walter Reed, and this was his team. He's the last author in the paper, but that usually means the senior author, and he kind of followed a similar pattern of just kind of like hypothesis and tinkering around as Bennett Amalu did when he discovered the pattern of injuries from concussions. So Bennett Amalu was probably most many people don't know, but he was the subject of the movie Concussion. He was a pathologist who was bringing brains home and dissecting them, slicing them in his kitchen, staining the slides, and he identified these tau proteins that had built up in the brains of people who'd had a lot of concussions so boxers, football players, soccer players, et cetera, and he called that chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and that's what we refer to that as those are impact force injuries. What Daniel Pearl did was he followed a similar methodology, but the brains didn't show the same tau protein buildup. Instead, what they showed was and it took different approaches and different types of stains, but what they found, which they associated with the blast exposures, was a pattern of scarring in the glial cells of the brain. The glial cells are not the neurons, so they're not the messenger cells. Neurons send the messages. The glial cells, they're like the infrastructure for the neurons. They hold them in place, they insulate them, they clean, you know, they haul out the waste products from the neurons. So they're very important and they have a pattern of scarring caused by the shearing effects of blast exposures.
Speaker 1:That 2016 paper was essentially a series of case reports. Patient number one in his case report was a and I won't say names, but it was a retired Navy SEAL who'd been at the Tier 1 unit for many years, widely liked, widely respected, admired by his peers. I know many guys that looked up to him and served with him and looked up to him, and I know his wife, I know his widow. So about a year or two after he retired he shot himself. He died by suicide. He shot himself in the chest and his wife arranged for his brain to be sent up to Walter Reed, to the pathology lab up there. And she worked with you know, daniel Pearl worked with her and the others who formed this case series.
Speaker 1:So he very meticulously documented the levels of blast exposures. So that's the paper where we first really scientifically started to go okay, what we've suspected is real. These are physiological, serious injuries that are occurring in the brain that don't show up on an MRI. They don't show up easily on any of the testing that we can do while somebody's alive. But now we know there's really something there. Pearl and his team gave it a name. They named it Interface Astroglial Scarring scarring in the glial cells.
Speaker 2:That's absolutely fascinating that all of this stuff got connected. It's pretty amazing, but it seems like this invisible ghost that you couldn't like. There's no way to check my brain right now. Right, If I wanted to say what does my brain look like?
Speaker 1:I mean we can test for a lot of the cascade effects. We can look for those. So I could ask you questions about your cognitive functioning, about headaches, low testosterone and sleep apnea are probably injuries caused by TBI, at least in part. The TBI is going to affect speech you might have slurred words. It's certainly going to affect things like balance and equilibrium. A lot of guys have vertigo-like symptoms, other things.
Speaker 1:I mean we know that a TBI affects sleep, it impairs sleep. It's harder to sleep with a TBI, which really sucks, because sleep is the best thing to heal a TBI. So you get this catch-22, which can be a vicious cycle, and what we're trying to do now from a treatment perspective is switch that cycle around. If I can help you sleep better, that's going to be good for your brain and, by the way. So I've just spouted off here a whole lot of bad news, but I want to make the point. There's good news. We have treatments, we can find ways to treat everything on this list, and so I have seen people operators radically recover and heal and turn their turn their, improve their functioning and their, their, and reduce, reduce the suffering.
Speaker 2:What would be the and I would imagine every patient would be very different in the treatment diagnosis. What are some common treatments that you've seen used? Just I'm imagining people. I'm curious to know.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, the first thing I tell everybody and this is perhaps relevant to you as well get your hormones checked. That's a low-hanging fruit. That's just a simple blood draw lab test, and then you have a conversation at that point about what the data show and what to do about it. Another low-hanging fruit is a sleep study. Every veteran should get a sleep study. Every veteran should get a sleep study at some point, and then maybe even periodically. So those are two assessments.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it just made me think of and feel silly to ask, but I want to ask you know my Garmin fitness? Watch right here how accurate are those as far as? Because it gives me a sleep score every night. Are they pretty accurate? Not accurate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, that's that's. I'm glad you asked that. That's a, that's a. That's a good question and it's a really cool topic. I would encourage everybody to wear a fitness wearable OK, not to track your workouts per se, but to track your sleep. They're pretty reliable. They're all pretty reliable and you can get insights that I think are really meaningful. I went through a process about four years ago where I think I wore five or six wearables all at the same time for a month.
Speaker 2:I totally nerded out, I think.
Speaker 1:I wore five or six wearables all at the same time for a month. I totally nerded out. I had the Apple Watch, the Oura Ring, the Whoop, fitbit, suunto, I think I had a Garmin that's the one I probably missed and so I played with all of them and eventually settled on the Whoop. I don't know that any of them are any better than the others. The Whoop seemed to be the best at that time. Also, what I like about the Whoop is it doesn't have a display, it's just a strap. You have to actually pick up your phone and look at the app so it doesn't bother you all day long.
Speaker 2:It's notifying you of everything that's happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it doesn't matter and for a while I was wearing it and really tracking my sleep and I noticed some abnormalities. I went and got my own sleep study based on what I was seeing, and it was like wow, so I learned some really important things about my sleep. What I encourage people to track is how many hours of sleep are you getting? How many times are you waking up in the night? How many times are you waking up in the night?
Speaker 1:Because that constant waking up is characteristic of periodic limb movement disorder, it's characteristic of sleep apnea and probably some other things, and we know it really messes up the quality of your sleep. And then you want to see how much time in REM and slow wave are you getting, and you also can get these great insights into what helps you sleep better and what sleep does for you. Sleep is everything. Sleep is one of the most important things to get right in life. We know so much more about sleep now than we used to know, including that there's a very important system, the lymphatic system, in our brain, that when we're in certain levels of sleep, our brain is being cleaned or cleaning out the toxins in sleep, and if we don't sleep, those toxins don't get carried out.
Speaker 2:What is the optimal baseline? I know you said how many times you're waking up, what is your room sleep, but just if we were to throw out a number, how many hours should someone be getting every night of sleep? I?
Speaker 1:don't think there's an exact formula that works for all of us, but I think seven to eight hours of sleep a night is probably a typical need. Some people need more, some people need less. For combining the REM and the slow wave sleep, I think two and a half to three hours a night is probably good. You probably want to try to be reaching that. You also can get insights into things that harm your sleep. So I don't know about the Garmin, but some of the wearables. You get a little journal each day to complete so you can log how much alcohol you had, what your exercise was, what time you ate your last meal, what time you ate your first meal of the day. You can program other things. You can customize this to set up you know anything you want to track and then you start to get insights. After about three months you start to get insights of hey, this, this behavior is enhancing your sleep or this behavior is impairing your sleep. So it can assist with sleep hygiene.
Speaker 2:Well, and I have some questions about that too, because I did some training that I want, and. But I want to circle back just before we even go into that, because I can also hear people. One common thing that I hear just with people in general, even non-veterans just there seems to be almost this proud Uh well, I, I only need three hours of sleep every night and I'm good I got. Just that's all I need. Um, what thoughts do you have for anybody thinking that I only need X number of sleeps and I function?
Speaker 1:you know, three, four hours of sleep and I'm functioning, yeah, Uh, the old Warren Zevon song I'll sleep when I'm dead is something that you hear. Um, and that's a mentality we have. Like, yeah, as you say, we're almost proud. I work a hundred hours a week and I only sleep three out three hours a night. Um, there are people that that works for.
Speaker 1:My grandmother only needed about two or three hours of sleep at night. She would stay up and read after everybody else went to bed and then she would get up at four in the morning and have breakfast ready and fresh bread baked and everything in the morning. When you came down, that's all she needed. That's very, very rare. Most of us need the seven or eight hours of sleep. I thought I was good with five or six hours.
Speaker 1:I went through a long period of my adult life Before I moved to Hawaii. I was typically sleeping five or six hours and I worked long hours. When I moved to Hawaii, five or six hours and I worked, you know, long hours. When I moved to Hawaii, something weird happened. I got here and realized that I arrived here the day like the end of July, thinking August 1st was my you know, was my employment date. So I check into the university on August 1st and, I'm told, come back in two weeks.
Speaker 1:There's really nothing going on until classes start or orientation starts in a couple of weeks. So suddenly I had two weeks on my hand with nothing to do, no to-do list, maybe a few emails a day, maybe a few projects I was working on from papers and such, but not much, and with nothing to wake me up, no pressing needs. I was sleeping 12 hours a day for those two weeks. It shocked me. I'd just go to bed and have no reason to get up. The next morning, and it was 12 hours later, I'd wake up and gradually, over the course of those two weeks it just naturally came down to about eight or nine, and then a few weeks after that, once I got working again, it came down to the probably a healthy seven or eight hours of sleep.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:So my body was like ah, a chance to catch up, and that's probably what it was doing.
Speaker 2:So what would be the indicators then? Because you mentioned your grandmother, who obviously got by with very little sleep and you obviously had this timeframe that you got to sleep and your body did. But what would be the indicators for somebody that, let's say, that somebody is sleeping four hours a night, feeling like they're good? Yeah, but there might be some indicators that are happening daily, whether frustrations, irritability, anything like that, that somebody could look for, that that might be a reason to get more sleep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, my grandmother had the time to sleep. She just couldn't sleep more than that. So that's one indicator. Another is how do you feel? How are you functioning during the day? A lot of times people go on vacation and they notice they sleep quite a bit more. That's probably a clue that you're behind, that you're not getting enough sleep. I never really took vacations like that very often, so I never got that lesson until 2006.
Speaker 1:The other piece is a lot of the research on sleep has been done so in the last decade. I mean, we know more about sleep than we knew 10 years ago. We know much more about, while we're sleeping, our body's healing itself. It's making sense of the day that just happened. Our brain is consolidating memories and thoughts, and it's even problem solving creativity that are happening. Plus, we're recovering. We're healing If we're sick. That's where a lot of our healing takes place but also our circadian rhythms. What we need to remember is sleep is part of a 24-hour cycle. While we're sleeping, our metabolism is regulating itself. Our hormones are going through an important balancing act at that point. Testosterone is. A lot of our testosterone is produced while we're asleep, right?
Speaker 1:So if you're not sleeping, yeah, if you're not sleeping, your brain's not being taken care of. You're going to put on weight because you're metabolic Functioning is impaired. I mean literally, weight gain is an outcome of sleep deprivation. Weight gain and all the metabolic problems that go with that are are are common side effects of sleep deprivation as our hormonal disruptions.
Speaker 2:So I love how I mean those things are clearly linked. And those were the first two that you mentioned earlier. The low hanging fruit go get your hormones checked, just do hanging fruit, Go get your hormones checked, Just do that. And then get your sleep checked, which is obviously what got us down this. And I love how it comes right back to the hormonal Just getting that checked out, because that's a, that's a big thing.
Speaker 1:And a problem, a problem with modern health care in the West, certainly in the US, is that we divide all these things into fragments. We fragment these things, we don't put them together. So what I would say is sleep is critically important for your brain, for your endocrine system, your hormones, for your psychological functioning. So now we've learned that turning the phone off doesn't turn the signals coming into the computer. Sorry, that's all. Sleep is so important. What I tell folks prioritize your sleep, do everything it takes to get your sleep dialed in, and other things will start to fall in line. You will feel better, there will be improvements. There will be improvements, there will be functional improvements.
Speaker 1:In fact, I believe this so strongly that the first draft of the Operator Syndrome paper was, you know, in a very rough form, was like a three-page document that I started writing as I was learning and I would add things to it as I went and I used it as an educational tool. I would give it to the guys and the gals I was consulting to as a hey, I want you to read this and we're going to talk our way through it, and the title of it was the Operator's Sleep Manual. It wasn't a PTSD, it wasn't a TBI thing, it was I want to help you sleep better because there's stigma around some things. There's no stigma around good sleep. So everybody I talked to was like, yeah, I would love to sleep better, help me with that, and boom.
Speaker 1:And so getting each of these things addressed, each of the different domains of operator syndrome addressed, is important. If you prioritize your sleep, you're addressing the other things, all the other things. And good sleep also means good sleep hygiene. You got to have the right habits. If you're going to bed and you've got a TV on, you've got lights on. If you're laying in bed looking at your phone for an hour before you try to close your eyes, you're sabotaging your sleep with that. So sleep habits are really important too.
Speaker 2:That's one thing that I read this book. It was a long, long time ago, long, long time ago. I think it was like Eat, sleep, sex, something like that, but it had this huge thing of no TV in the bedroom, and I've always what's that?
Speaker 1:Your bed is for those two things right, yep, and that's it.
Speaker 2:That's one hard, fast thing. I'm not going to have a TV in the bedroom, it's just I don't want it. It's if I'm going to, if I need to watch TV, I can go to the living room. Yeah, um, it was the thing I was going to ask you about too, and I know we went down this. But I've been fascinated with it because my watch never allowed me to get. I never allowed me and never tracked me. I were always low 80s you know the scale of one to 100 and even on a good night's sleep where I wake up feeling good, I was like man.
Speaker 1:What does 90s feel?
Speaker 2:like, and I was training for this big race and just for two months I cut out most meat, all booze, all sweets and for the first time I was hitting 98 sleep scores, 97 sleep scores, I mean it was. It was insane to just cut those things out.
Speaker 2:Obviously, the heavy workouts were still there, but then the moment I reintroduced all that stuff, it was just right back to mid eighties, which feeling fine, but that was definitely a link for me that I found, and I think everybody's different. I encourage everybody to do their own, you know, try it, see what, see what something might be doing to impact your sleep, but it was fascinating for me, yeah, yeah. So what is? And as we do this, I love the this introduction of operator syndrome and just deep dive into it. And I know you mentioned that it's different from PTSD, but a lot of these things seem similar. So what would be the different definition of somebody listening saying this is PTSD, this is operator syndrome?
Speaker 1:Well, I would say PTSD falls under the umbrella, can fall under the umbrella of operator syndrome. Okay, core feature. I mean, what is PTSD? There's a whole conversation right there. I'll give a simple thought on it and we can always come back. Ptsd is anxiety plus depression, plus some very specific fear reactivity symptoms or fear reactivity reactions and avoidance along with that, and so it's very much a psychological, psychiatric disorder. It doesn't mean you have chronic pain. It doesn't mean you have sleep apnea. It doesn't mean you have hormonal disruptions. It doesn't mean you have TBI. So all of these physiological things are there and they're separate and different from psychiatric disorder. I do believe psychiatric disorders are also physiological injuries at the cellular level, at the molecular level I think we've. So you want to get into treatment? We could talk about treatment.
Speaker 2:Of operator syndrome.
Speaker 1:Of operator syndrome, yeah, but I know we're going to Of operator, syndrome Of operator syndrome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I know we're going to.
Speaker 1:Let's start with PTSD and psychiatric disorders. We treat with counseling, psychotherapy and psychiatric medications. Typically, those are the traditional treatments. That's what most people, most veterans, are going to get from a VA, from the VA with this, but there's so many other things that we can and should be doing.
Speaker 2:So let me pause, and you were about to you were going to say something Well, no, I have a ton of questions for you. I was actually going to see if we could just do a whole nother content piece on PTSD, and that's where I was distinguishing between them, because I I have a ton of thoughts and questions that I want to really, really dive into, because I have some own personal thoughts that I would love your expertise on, because I don't have the 25 years plus experience in this realm that you do. So I'd love to unpack some of that as well, and it's just a totally separate episode, if you're okay with that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely, definitely a chapter two or a chapter chapter three to our conversation.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, well, I'm excited to dive into it. This has been just fascinating to hear about operator syndrome and I love what you've, what you've put together with it.
Speaker 1:So. So in modern medicine we are fragmented. Your endocrinologist is probably never going to have a conversation with your psychotherapist, your neurologist for your headaches and your TBI is probably never going to be talking with your social worker or your psychiatrist. We just don't have enough integration in our system. Part of my perspective here is you need to think about operator syndrome. These things all go together. These symptoms, operator syndrome, these things all go together. These symptoms, these impairments, they all go together. They all affect one another. Problems in one area make problems in other areas worse and we should be thinking about treating them kind of all at once. So I say to you get your hormones checked, get a sleep study, sure, get a consult with behavioral medicine. Maybe talk to a psychologist. Psychotherapy and psychiatric medications are worth considering, but it doesn't stop there. There's other things. So, and I'm assuming we're now getting the sleep apnea and the hormones treated with whatever medical treatments those require, but let's get a stellate ganglion block therapy. That's one of the first things I'm going to recommend.
Speaker 1:Stellate ganglion block therapy is a treatment I recommend pretty much to everybody with anxiety and PTSD and insomnia, pretty much to everybody with anxiety and PTSD and insomnia. What it is. It's a very safe, very effective treatment. We've been neurologists have been using it for about 100 years now, since the 1920s, to treat certain types of headaches cluster headaches. The treatment involves targeting the central, the sympathetic nervous system. That's what the stellate ganglion block is and we've used this treatment since the 1920s. About a decade ago a couple of neurologists working at Fort Bragg noticed that when they treated soldiers' headaches, their anxiety symptoms, ptsd symptoms, got better and they started sleeping better. They started being more present with their family because they were more relaxed.
Speaker 1:The treatment involves essentially it's a one-time outpatient procedure that just takes a few minutes. The stellate ganglion nerve runs centers, a collection of nerves that runs down our central nervous system, and they can access this at the neck. So they go in at the side of the neck into the spinal column. They inject just a little bit of medication into this nerve. It has pretty much an immediate and profound effect of reducing the physiological arousal of anxiety. So people feel calm and relaxed right away.
Speaker 1:It is safe. There's only one side effect typically, which is a little face drooping. That only lasts for three or four hours typically and then that goes away. The medication will eventually wear off, but that might be three, six, 12 months down the road. So it provides significant relief for a long period of time and during that time, during before the medication wears off you're relaxing, you're sleeping better. Hopefully, you're developing other habits, you're working on other treatments, other therapies. This is just a great way to get started on a healing and recovery, on a journey. You can go back and have it repeated, so it's not like just a one-time only thing. You can get it done every year. I just I recommend it pretty much to everybody. We're also. One more benefit to it is that we think this is a hypothesis that's being tested now in some clinical trials that it also stimulates neurogenerativity, that it helps your brain grow and develop new neurons, dendrites, connections and pathways. So it's good for the brain.
Speaker 2:And there's no side effects other than the droopy face for three to four hours, and then that goes away. That's about it.
Speaker 1:And like everything in medicine, it doesn't work for everybody, but 85% to 90% of people get an immediate and profound benefit from it.
Speaker 2:So if it I mean because anxiety that seems to be, I know it's a common term that gets thrown around If somebody, even not a veteran, with just general anxiety, is this something that would help them? Yes, absolutely. So where would somebody go to get something? Let's say that I wanted to go get this done, just to try it out.
Speaker 1:Well that's, it's actually an easy. It's an easy service to. It's an easy treatment to find, believe it or not. Okay, the catch is it's not provided by psychologists, social workers or psychiatrists. It's not provided by people who are traditionally thought of as mental health providers. So it may be a business disruptor. That's probably one of the reasons that many people don't even know about it. It's a treatment that's provided by neurologists and anesthesiologists. So you can go and you can just do a Google search for your hometown. You can look for pain clinics. Most pain clinics provide stellate ganglion block. You also can just Google, you know, put in a search engine stellate ganglion block treatment and you will find clinics. Usually, health insurance will cover it If you're paying out of pocket. It's probably somewhere from, probably in the in the neighborhood of 15, 12, $1,500. So it's not. It's not a super expensive medical treatment.
Speaker 2:Well, but it's that. I mean it seems like a wonder drug. I mean, if it's that good it's a very effective treatment.
Speaker 1:Yep, I don't know why we are not widely providing it to people with, you know, PTSD, anxiety and insomnia related to that. Does the VA provide?
Speaker 2:it.
Speaker 1:Some VAs do on a limited basis from what I've heard. Okay, and I didn't VA, so I don't know about any. You know policies but but typically I hear from guys they say no, our VA doesn't provide it. Some have been able to persuade their local VA to allow them to go get it in the community, a community clinic.
Speaker 2:Would there be a side effect? Because I don't know that I have anxiety or not. I don't know if I feel like I'm on the fence and I was like you know what. I'm just want to go see what happens. Would there be a side effect for me in the middle there?
Speaker 1:I'm not a fan of trying a treatment just for the heck of it Any treatment, but if you experience high levels of physiological arousal, which we often think of as anxiety, it could be. Irritability is another thing. Irritability and anxiety are tightly closely related for most, for many people, okay. So irritability is probably another symptom that's going to be helped by a stellate ganglion block.
Speaker 2:I think my kids probably want me to go yeah.
Speaker 1:I've recommended it frequently to couples who are having trouble and, you know, conflict and anxiety and irritability affecting their relationship, because oftentimes if one person in the house has anxiety, the other person is going to have anxiety. So instead of a couple's massage, I've recommended a couple's S SGB treatment for interesting Many, many of the couples I know.
Speaker 2:I'm going to. I'm excited to look into this. I think that's fascinating. It seems like really feels too good to be true, and I think you mentioned that.
Speaker 1:Business disruptor and I know that's a big thing. Anything that's going to take money away from somebody else tends to get, unfortunately, pushed aside. As an industry mental health industry we have our lane and most people stay in their lane. They provide therapy and they provide psychiatric medications. They don't provide SGB. We don't typically evaluate hormones. We have a good treatment in ketamine infusion therapy. That's another treatment I recommend, but it's not a frontline treatment because it's costly. So insurance companies will provide ketamine infusion therapy, but only after other treatments have been tried and failed, and those other treatments are psychiatric medications. If you have a depressive disorder and you've tried Prozac and you've tried Lexapro and those didn't help, now the insurance companies might approve for you to have ketamine infusion therapy, which is FDA approved as a treatment for depression. Also, side note, some of us think that stela ganglion and ketamine work well together, but there's a symbiotic relationship if you do them both in the same week or the same month. And some of us also think that ketamine has a healing effect on the brain, that it stimulates neurogenerativity.
Speaker 2:I've got both these written down. I'm excited to jump in and just explore them, because I have not heard of either one of these. Okay, it seemed pretty fascinating.
Speaker 1:And then we can talk about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, other psychedelic medications. You know, do some work with some of the groups that are doing ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT with. You know phenomenal results and outcomes, that disequilibrium that's common in TBI. There's vestibular therapy, which is literally a form of physical therapy for your vestibular system. It's not a medication treatment. You sit in a chair that moves and turns in different ways and it's reorienting the fine particles in your inner ear. That's another treatment that I refer people to with really good success. And on the pain side of things, the chronic pain in the joints, there are regenerative medicine clinics using fairly new treatments stem cells, exomes, peptides great effect in reducing joint pain. We also can change the way we work out.
Speaker 1:Weights, free weights, body weights, pull-ups, push-ups, squats all of these put a massive burden on your ligaments, your joints, ligaments and tendons because they work against your strength curve. What do you mean as a static weight? The weight doesn't change when you move it, but your strength curve does change. So think about a bench press or a chest press. You've got the bar close to your chest as you push out. That first part of the motion is the hardest part. That's where you're likely to need a spotter. That's where your joints are being overburdened as you push that bar away from your body. As you go through that range of motion, your strength is greater out here than it is when it's early in the motion. So repetitively over the years we're injuring our joints doing that.
Speaker 1:What I recommend is stop using at a certain point, at a certain age. We're training for a different mission. You're training to be a father and a grandfather and a husband and have a long life of mobility with your family. You're no longer training for a combat deployment like you were in the past. So it's a different mission, different training.
Speaker 1:What I recommend is using bands, variable resistance bands, the kind that come with a bar, a plate that you stand on that you thread it under. The bands are big, thick, flat rubber bands, essentially not the tubes. Flat rubber bands those you can get as much intensity as you would with free weights, except that they work with your strength curve when you're at the start of your motion, the point where the free weights put all that compression on your joints With bands. That's the easiest part of the motion because the band isn't stretched yet as you go out away from you know, further into that range of motion. As your strength curve goes up, so does the resistance. The farther you stretch the band, the greater the resistance, so it's matching your strength curve. I started doing this exclusively about two and a half years ago and gradually all of my joint pain disappeared. It just took about six months, but it just gradually disappeared.
Speaker 2:Do you still do all the common same workouts that the average person listening would be doing? I mean, and just replacing, instead of doing a dumbbell curl, doing it with a band curl, so everything's done with a band. And that's what I mean same workout just with a band.
Speaker 1:I have a workout system I use that works every major muscle group in the body yeah, okay. Plus, they're more efficient because you can go to full failure without any risk of harm, without a spotter. So you can go to full failure and then you can continue doing partial reps until you can't move the bar anymore. So that's what I do, and then I just do one set per body part.
Speaker 2:Wow, I never thought about that's what I do, and then I just do one set per body part. Wow, I never thought about that. I don't know. I've been working out for 25 years and I've never, never considered that, never heard that. As far as the strength curve, and it makes perfect sense, like it, just it makes perfect sense. So, wow, I love that. Can you still bulk up? I mean, if somebody wanted to stay bulky, just that's the next question I have that comes to mind.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've bulked up. Okay, I'm now 60 and I've bulked up in the last three years since I've been doing this. Wow, I stopped doing pull-ups and push-ups and squats. I just stopped all that, switched 100% over to bands and, yeah, I did bulk up.
Speaker 2:I have bulked up. That's fascinating. I'm thinking about now my gym membership. Somebody's gym membership could just disappear. That's right.
Speaker 1:I'm not trying to advertise somebody else's business, but I use the. There's a guy named John Jaquish who is a PhD kinesiologist, who's done a lot of the research on this and he's kind of developed his own. Well, he has developed his own system and his own product, which is called X3. And that's what I use, and he's written a book so you can get the book. I think the book is titled something like lifting weights as a waste of time. Okay, and I do travel with my system. It fits in my carry on bag, so when I'm on the road it's with me. I do my workouts in the hotel room.
Speaker 2:Well, I find that's. I travel weekly for work and it's always like this rabbit out of a hat type of thing is what's the gym? What's the gym going to look like? Because I'll, they'll have this. I went to one just a couple weeks ago. They had this amazing gym in the picture and then I like 4 30 in the morning, I stroll into the gym, I open it up and it's just this empty room. Where is everything?
Speaker 1:the equipment used to be yeah yeah, this. This system has been amazing for me, and I've recommended it to other people who've used it with really good results.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it. I'm going to check this out. So one thing and as we start to wrap this up too, because we talked about sleep, but one thing that I've done and that I don't do it every night. I don't do it if I feel like I want to get a heavy sleep. They now have kind of like they have the pre-workout. You know, before you go work out you can take a pre-workout kind of get you all caffeinated and pumped up which.
Speaker 2:I've removed all of that. I don't use any of those anymore, but I do. They have basically a pre-sleep mix. Have you seen those? Anything like that?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Slumber is mountain ops and my buddy gave it to me once. He's like, take this, if you're awake in 30 minutes, I'll be impressed, and just talk about a deep night's sleep. What is in the product? This one has some melatonin and a few other things that I did not research it fully. So another reason why I'm asking you what thoughts you have about just taking anything like sleep aids, anything like that, yeah.
Speaker 1:Sleep aids are well. Sleep medications like Lunesta and Ambien are going to radically change you might sleep, but they're going to radically change the architecture of your sleep, okay, the time you spend in REM and slow-wave sleep. So while they may be okay to use on the short term, those are not good for your sleep long term Got it. And that's true of almost everything that would be a prescription medication for sleep. There are some antidepressants, like trazodone, that seem to be pretty good long-term sleep aids for people with really severe insomnia. Melatonin is helpful.
Speaker 1:When I was in the 90s, when I first started working in the VA, the most commonly prescribed sleep aid we used that our psychiatrists used was diphenhydramine, benadryl Okay, you can get it over the counter 50 milligrams, 25. I don't use that anymore. I used to use it when I traveled for the first few nights. It works for about half of us. It doesn't seem to work for everybody, but it seems to be pretty effective for half. Some people will sleep, but they wake up kind of groggy in the morning. If we're talking supplements, probably there are a number of supplements that are actually healthy for our sleep. I put magnesium at the top of that list.
Speaker 2:I know these supplement companies. It seems to be popping up this one in particular that I take up. I take it. I just need I know that I have to get at least six hours, like if at four and a half I'll wake up groggy, but at six or more and I'll wake up, just I feel like a champion and I'll take it every night. For I mean again, I don't like sleeping that deep when I with my kids are in the house, but if it's on the road and I'm feeling like I would need to make sure I get some sleep, um, for whatever reason, it's seems to work great, but I didn't know any experience with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, there's. There's a number of pretty good products out there that that use um use meaningful supplementation Compounds. Dr Kirk Parsley. He has a sleep formula that I know a lot of team guys, a lot of SEALs use. He's a former SEAL but also an MD, so I would mention his. Some people use Cortisol Calm, a product called Cortisol Calm. It had good effects with that. Just simply taking 200 milligrams of magnesium an hour or two before bedtime is helpful, and most of us have deficiencies of magnesium so we benefit from it anyway, but taking closer to bedtime can help us sleep. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm excited. I know we have another couple of conversations coming up and I'm really excited to dive into this. This has been a fascinating very, very fun conversation.
Speaker 2:As we do this. I know the big thing that I really want to make sure is just yes, thank you for holding up your book one more time. It is out today. If you're listening to this podcast, no-transcript, and that was just the word that I remembered, so it was a different context, but it just made me think of this thing I read recently that Edison was talking about with the light bulb and that people were referencing for him he's like man, this is it like we're, we're done inventing, and he's like we're not, we're just starting, like we're not even we haven't even started yet. And he back referenced the thinking that he's like I put together four different people's. You know level of thinking that got the light bulb and that's what gets us to the next step, and so it just made me think of all the work that you have done is what brought you to where you are now, and then that ability to find that. So it just thank you for all you've done for veterans and all you continue to do.
Speaker 1:Thank you and let me add to that. Let me just reinforce your point. I'm still learning and my learning curve has been really steep the last decade. I'm there. I have a lot of fellow travelers, so there's other doctors, there's other nurses, there's other neurologists and physiatrists and occupational therapists and nutritionists that I'm learning from and we're learning from each other. We're coming together. So one place you, anybody, can now go and I want to.
Speaker 1:Really this is something I wish I had said earlier the SEAL Future Foundation, which is a foundation only for SEALs. Their health program is built around the construct of operator syndrome. But we've put together an educational website that is just launching, like right now. It just went live I think it went live on March 22nd, so just a few days and anybody can go to that website. They can read about operator syndrome, they can read about the different treatments that are available, the different assessments that are available. All of this is in my book, but this website is a living document and it was put together by a multidisciplinary group of us. So we have 15 of us that have formed a health board of advisors for SEAL Future, and so we've written this educational material and over the next year or so. We're going to be adding short videos and other educational materials for it and we want it to be there for the entire veteran and responder communities, it's not just for SEALs. So what we're doing for the SEALs, we're putting up there to be educational for everybody.
Speaker 2:I just wrote that down. I'm going to jump on that just to go grab some of those resources right away, and I'm excited to get your book. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:I'm excited for our next conversation.
Speaker 2:I'm looking forward to it, Chris. Thank you.
Speaker 1:All right, thank you.