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
Christi Myers on Ketamine Therapy, PTSD, and Healing Brain Trauma
In this transformative episode of Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman, host Bruce Parkman sits down with Christi Myers, founder of Flow Integrative and a leader in psychedelic-assisted therapy, to explore how ketamine therapy is revolutionizing mental health care for veterans and first responders suffering from repetitive brain trauma and PTSD.
Christi shares her personal journey from working in emergency medical services to pioneering psychedelic wellness, and the science behind how ketamine promotes neuroplasticity, emotional regulation, and trauma healing. The conversation dives deep into the physiological effects of trauma, including adrenal fatigue and catecholamine depletion, and explains how understanding brainwave states and consciousness can unlock new paths to recovery.
They also tackle the real-world challenges of accessing treatment—from insurance coverage limitations to the lack of standardized care protocols—and highlight the urgent need for better mental health education within clinical communities. Christi outlines her mission to train future providers and expand awareness around safe, ethical psychedelic therapy.
If you're a veteran, first responder, or someone interested in the future of trauma treatment, this episode is packed with insights and practical knowledge.
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Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman is sponsored by The Mac Parkman Foundation
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Repetitive Brain Trauma
02:45 The Journey into Ketamine Therapy
06:18 Transitioning from Pain Management to Mental Health
12:21 Building Protocols for Ketamine in the Workplace
17:27 Understanding Ketamine's Impact on Mental Health
22:01 Adrenal Fatigue and Its Symptoms
28:09 Catecholamines and Their Role in Stress
35:31 Neuroplasticity and Ketamine's Effects on the Brain
41:23 Understanding Brainwave States and Trauma Adaptation
44:39 The Role of Ketamine in Restoring Consciousness
46:28 Protocols and Practices in Ketamine Therapy
51:30 The Importance of Provider Presence in Therapy
55:10 Insurance and Accessibility of Ketamine Treatment
01:00:21 Evolving Consciousness Through Ketamine
01:07:20 Integrating Therapy with Ketamine Treatment
01:13:39 Christi Myers' Educational Initiatives
https://www.mpfact.com/headsmart-app/
Follow Christi on LinkedIn today!
LinkedIn: Christi Myers
Two Days. One Mission. Protecting Brains, Saving Lives. September 3rd and 4th in Tampa, Florida.
Save the date for our international event focused on protecting young athletes and
honoring our veterans through real solutions to brain trauma.
Brought to you by The Mac Parkman Foundation.
Join us for the 1st Annual Lazzaro Legacy Classic Golf Tournament — a day of community, competition, and impact. Every dollar raised helps fund skills training, mentorship, and athletic opportunities for underprivileged high school athletes striving to reach the next level.
Saturday, June 28th, 1:30 PM – 9:00 PM EDT
Produced by Security Halt Media
Hey folks, welcome to another episode of Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the Mack Parkman Foundation, the national voice in repetitive brain trauma, and what this mental health crisis is doing to our veterans, athletes and kids. Our podcast is all about those issues in the form of repetitive head impacts and repetitive blast exposure for our veterans, where our kids, our adult, our athletics, our athletes and veteran brains are being changed and damaged by the exposure to this long-term subconcussive trauma that is resulting in the largest preventable cause of mental illness in this country. And why is this important? Because this is not trained in any medical, nursing or psychological institute of training, so our entire medical population is unaware that this situation exists and these young kids and these veterans and these athletes go misdiagnosed, mistreated, and that is why we're having this is partially why we're having this huge problem with mental health in our in our athletic and sports communities and our veterans, veterans communities and only you, with education, can become informed and make right decisions to protect yourself and those that you love. So that's why we're here, Plus the fact that we get to work from the Mack Parkman Museum here in Anna Maria, Florida, and we get to work with amazing guests, researchers, scientists, authors that we bring in, and today is no exception. It's going to be an exciting show.
Speaker 1:I want to introduce Ms Christy Myers, who's an EMTP and an MS and the founder and CEO of Flow Integrative, a psychedelic wellness clinic in Encintas, California. With over 20 years as a paramedic and educator and we have to understand how much trauma these EMS people see in their careers, and I didn't understand it until I started attending some of these psychedelic experiences. She now leads the integration of ketamine-assisted therapy to treat trauma, depression, PTSD and anxiety, especially amongst first responders and veterans. A former emergency responder for agencies, including the Department of Defense in San Bernardino County, Ms Myers saw the deep impact of trauma firsthand. She holds degrees in emergency medical technology, public safety administration and organization leadership and is a certified integrative mental health professional. Under her leadership, Float Integrative has become a model clinic in the Nthea network, offering psychedelic therapy through innovative partnerships. Ms Myers is a passionate advocate for expanding access and breaking the stigma around psychedelic mental health care, and this is one of the issues that we need more than ever is when it comes to RBT and mental health treatments. Ms Myers, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you, bruce, I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Great, how did you get into this? I mean, obviously there's always a story between somebody's career and where they end up right now. So let's talk, man. What's uh? How'd you get?
Speaker 2:ketamine found me. So, yeah, at the time I was earning tenure as a professor and ketamine entered our drug box. So if you were to go right now across the nation, a large majority of fire departments and private ambulance companies carry ketamine as a primary treatment for pain. Excited delirium. Just depends on the county and your medical director and what we're using it for. And so, at the time, I was teaching anatomy, physiology, pharmacology and the theoretical side of medicine as it pertains to EMS.
Speaker 2:I lectured on ketamine three times a year to all different cohorts of individuals, which just allowed my knowledge base to deepen immensely, especially as I pertained it to the anatomy and physiology. And then simultaneously, right, we're encroaching on COVID. The mental health crisis was not necessarily being witnessed to the magnitude as what happened during those years with COVID. However, I was watching students with the compounding stressors. They were becoming suicidal. Some were actually taking action or we were self-sabotaging to the point with overconsumption of alcohol or sugar or fingering our phones.
Speaker 2:The time, the embodiment of what I was doing right, to truly allow people to become the most evolved version of themselves, but on their own timeline. And what I mean by that is I told them what they needed to accomplish in order to be successful. It was none of my business how they got there, as long as they stayed in integrity, allowing people to truly become the most evolved version of themselves, without my essentially rules of engagement, right. Here's the standard, here's the integrity. And if there's one thing, bruce, that we all know is you can't fake medicine, it gets exploited really quickly, right. And so if you cheat, you only cheat yourself, because, at the end of the day, you still have to take all the practical side of it, and it gets exploited really quickly if you don't know what the hell you're doing.
Speaker 2:And so it was just this amazing opportunity to watch students flourish to the greatest of their capacity and, at the same time, when COVID hit, well as it progresses. When COVID hit, it was very clear to me that I needed to start building this on a mission to help the help. If you see a problem, you do nothing about the problem. You are indeed the problem, and that was one of my mantras early on in the roles that I held. And so I set out, and it was nothing short of phenomenal of the way the universe just continuously kept unfolding with what I was creating as a co-creation to truly what I believe is evolve our consciousness and transcend suffering.
Speaker 1:Well, we're going to get to all those concepts here pretty quick, because there's a lot of you know. You know there's a lot of things that I would love people to understand when they start talking about themselves, their ego and where that is. You know how that part of them is prohibiting them from truly growing as as a human being. But first, when did you, how did you become aware of you know? You know ketamine. Of course, our medics in special forces carry it in their kits. We've had, you know, some cases where they have abused it or you know what they were dealing with, Right. So, but how did you transition from your knowledge and awareness of ketamine as a pain medicine to ketamine as a, you know, mental health treatment protocol? And the ability to you know change, you know for sure.
Speaker 2:Well, when I started lecturing farm right. So if you look at my background, I've been boots on the ground for 20 years and, as I was evolving, involving in education, I just finished my master's degree and I stepped into pharmacology and I was like what you know what I mean?
Speaker 1:like I didn't go.
Speaker 2:I didn't want to go here I mean you can, but those teachers get exploited so quickly, right? I mean you know who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't, and so I, I would. I mean, I was just as much back in medic school as the, as the students, so that I could stand in that classroom and deliver information competently. Plus, too, it's in my nature to understand what the hell it is I'm doing. Otherwise, what the hell am I doing it for? And so, the more I lectured on the farm, you got to look at the off-label usage, and this is one of the biggest conversations around ketamine. Right, I would venture to say 75% and that's me even being conservative medications are being used off-label. And if you look at the history of ketamine, it actually replaced a PCP in the operating room. And so the the gift in my capacities with lecturing, right.
Speaker 2:I would take the intro to EMS. We're not very old as a profession. I mean shit less than maybe 60 years ago we used to transport people in hearses, and if your Glasgow coma scale was less than eight, we took your ass to the morgue. You mean, people woke up in a morgue because they were simply unconscious, but our assessment didn't allow for us to even know that that's what was happening, because we, we were so rudimentary. That's what we kind of forget as a nightmare scenario.
Speaker 2:I think we can do better. That's what the whole Glasgow scale right, like the Glasgow coma scale. If you were less than eight, you were deemed dead and so you got put into a hurt. I mean we're very early in all of this, especially medicine, right? I mean it's not very old as a profession, and what most aren't acknowledging is that we're all practicing.
Speaker 1:Practicing. I like that yeah.
Speaker 2:Medicine, right, and most doctors are not talking shit, right, but they're feeling to be honest enough to be like hey man, I just started practicing.
Speaker 1:I might not know everything.
Speaker 2:I know little buddy, but once you see the same clinical presentations over and over again, you start to have the commonalities right. So I can see CHF from a mile away. Same with hypertension. I mean, you get so good at witnessing the commonalities, but they're just different clinical presentations because of the individual, not because of the disease processes, and now we're manifesting even more interesting dysregulations and disorders.
Speaker 2:But I would argue that it's because of the depth of the unconsciousness that we're in the body doesn't have the opportunity to stay in stasis or it's constantly fighting itself, which now we're in the body doesn't have the opportunity to stay in stasis, or it's constantly fighting itself, which now we're seeing this compounding and for sure.
Speaker 2:And so, with that being said, there was a lot of information that I was presenting concurrently while also bringing in the pharmacology. So we carry a multitude of medications frontline that we give emergently, and a large majority of those are off-label, and so if you go down the rabbit hole of off-label usage, you can see that all of these have different capacities. It's the dosing, and so for me, ketamine is conscious sedation, and when I worked in the emergency room we used it almost daily on pediatrics. It's one of the safest medications we have and it's recognized globally for that. Then you look at the OR applications, which is much higher than what we're doing sub-anesthetically. And then you look at the way that we're giving it in EMS and that is actually one of the least documented dosing structures and we're doing it daily, no questions asked, because somebody made a protocol.
Speaker 1:For pain.
Speaker 2:Well, it's cancer, it's sickle cell, it's pain. We have the capacity to significantly reduce PTSD in the field, but we're learning how to yield it and what's fascinating to me is there is not many psychological questions that go alongside of it. Oh yeah, and so this is where it's like okay, if not, who? If not me, then who? My gift of building protocols and lecturing and the capacities and the knowledge. It was like okay, christy, this is how we make an impact. And I just started building and what that transpired into was and you made mention I built out the first employer-driven benefit for ketamine in the workplace and my, so you're getting insurance is this?
Speaker 2:this is um I just went to network with triwest.
Speaker 1:It is a complete mess, dude, we gotta talk, man, that's that is. That is really critical information to get out and and uh, and I want our listeners to understand, um, if we could talk a little bit, um, and I know you're getting around to that, but you know you're talking about the farmer, even the pharmacological, the farmer college big word big word Wednesday.
Speaker 1:It is big word Wednesday, yeah, and use as well, but it's all about pain, it's all. It's not about mental illness. It's not about transcending and understanding and unloading trauma or resolving trauma. How did we get from ketamine the medicine that off-label whether it's use of sedation, anesthesia, off-label use that you saw it to where we're now seeing and I would say, the successful use. I have done ketamine for a long time and the successful use of ketamine in the mental health area. But it's still a fight and you're making strides, thanks man, yeah, and that's the truth of it.
Speaker 2:And I would be lying to you if I didn't tell you that my protocol hasn't evolved immensely from my first administrations, and that's where it's very transparent in my delivery. Okay, you're meeting the medicine and it's meeting you. But first I was the first person to drop in to see if what, and my first dose, bruce, I was running variables, right, I'm like a 0.4 mix per kg, a 0.4 mix per kg. And so there's this fine line, right, it's a sense of like, don't getting high on your own supply and you could potentially lose everything, versus like what the hell is it? I put myself through my protocol very intentionally to see if what I'm asking is obtainable, and this is the developmental process.
Speaker 2:And so back to come full circle, when you look at it from the limbic system.
Speaker 2:And now, this is when I was lecturing and tying all of the pharmacological side into anatomy and physiology. Because, let's get real, for a large majority of us, as we're learning, we data dump, and I'm no different, right, when I was going through medic school. There's so much information that you're learning, fram it, exam it, dump it onto the next right, and so when you start lecturing on it. That's a whole different story, and so the knowledge base that I was relearning was phenomenal, because now I'm a decade into actually practicing, so there's a whole nother level of comprehension as I'm delivering information. And if you look at the limbic system and this is where ketamine has nothing short of phenomenology because of its capacity to take us out of survival temporarily because of its capacity to take us out of survival temporarily, when you take survival offline now, you're allowing for the body to go into automaticity. You're allowing the heart and the breath to have coherency. Otherwise, when we're enmeshed in survival with hurry and worry and speed and aggression, our body is responding as if we're threatened and we're sitting still.
Speaker 1:And that's something that you know I'd like the audience to understand. About ketamine and Christy, please explain this. Is that, um, you know, the, the, the medicine, um, uh, you know, allows you? I mean, explain to the audience. You know I've been through, you know, many ketamine sessions, right?
Speaker 2:Everyone different.
Speaker 1:What's that?
Speaker 2:Was it IV or how'd you take it?
Speaker 1:I oh I like IV. I just feel that IV is the best. I've tried IM. I will not do the nasal stuff. The IM was okay but the IV, I think provides.
Speaker 1:And then I had to experiment with my own. I mean, I was talking to the guys how much you give me, and so I said I don't like this hour thing, I don't like coming out in 40 minutes. I want to get more out of this. So we went an hour and a half two hours. I was down for two days, couldn't even move, man, my brain was so tired.
Speaker 1:But I also want to dial into neuroplasticity and why I think ketamine is so important from a brain damage, not just a trauma perspective, but explain to the audience why ketamine is so effective when it comes to mental health, anxiety, depression. I mean, I am a six, I would say a success story. I was a basket case three and a half years ago and I just stumbled across, you know, ketamine with stelae ganglion blocks. It was a combination of therapies that was being used by special operations guys and first responders, but a lot of people and they say, you know, they don't. They're either afraid or they don't understand that this is safe, that you know where you're at and your experiences are positive, and even if they're negative, they're positive because of what you're going through is helping you evolve. Can you touch upon that?
Speaker 2:For sure sharing. One thing I do want to help reframe is that when you said you were down for two days and I want to just help you with, uh, allowing you to witness this so, myself included, when I finished my professional career in helicopters doing hover step outs and you know what I mean like you're, you're full throttle, the military. We are very paramilitary right, and in that, think about the thresholds you're creating. So your adrenal glands are directly being impacted because of catecholamines, and so when you work with ketamine, your body then shows you from a new awareness just how tired you are, and so that two days you speak of is truly the magnitude of you resting and repairing, and it's to the depth that we've been exhausted that now the medicine's allowing us to see that level of fatigue for repairing. It's the adrenal glands. Man, think about how much we can.
Speaker 1:We don't have any, they're all drained.
Speaker 2:I've been intentionally repairing my adrenal glands and you don't realize the magnitude until you retire or you transition, because we're also taught to push through. I could be tired as shit 36 hours on the line and you're still doing the work. And now we're packing pre-workout in our cheeks because we don't want to even drink the water with it. Right, you're just letting it stabilize.
Speaker 1:So talk about, like a lot of our listeners are military first responders that are having issues and so how would they understand or know, like, what are the symptoms of adrenal gland fatigue? Right, that you know that they, you know they're all coming to this from different perspectives with limited knowledge. So you know, you know if they, you know, obviously, what you, you know, what you just discussed would be very important for them to understand.
Speaker 2:For sure. Well, I mean, on one end of the spectrum, we manifest impotency.
Speaker 1:Okay, big problem with our.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's a huge People are medically retiring for it.
Speaker 1:Oh, we've got doctors giving testosterone to 36-year-old men when they really need to be helping them. You know, know, let their natural system recovery, because that's just a tragic option right now, because now you're like a customer you stop producing it organically and now you are reliant on synthetic usage, and I mean to give awareness.
Speaker 2:Ketamine is in the same category as testosterone as far as its scheduling, and so another fascinating thing, bruce, and we can unpack that as well too, but why do we think that we can give ketamine but not receive it? And so if you look at a large majority of our profession, they're all on testosterone, completely normalized, and it's a, and that's when I give it out like peanuts now I mean, they just look for reasons to give it different, different topic, but same same, same right, and it's just kind of interesting to me the mindset around it.
Speaker 2:So, one uh, the fatigue. The other thing that we see is we're distracting ourselves immensely, right, and so, uh, most of us are addicted to overtime and continuously working, because where we experience the most adrenal deficiency is when we go home.
Speaker 1:You'll hear when you when you need it the most for sure.
Speaker 2:And now we're not showing up for our kids, we're not showing up for our wives. We have lack of engagement. We have all of these things right, and now we're just chasing the dragon with trying to feel something, which is for some extreme sports. Right now we're riding our mountain bike fast as shit down the biggest hill that we can find so we can feel something. Or we're going down the lustrous side and now we're having interesting experiences with oxytocin and lust. Or we're chemically addicted to our phone and pornography. Or we're over consuming caffeine and we're pushing through and we're short, fused and tempered, and so now we're unpredictable with the lashing out because our body truly is so tired and we're pushing through.
Speaker 2:And now you look at the compounding effect. So here comes endocrine collapse and we're normalizing diabetes. Right, you know, many people are just walking around with glucometers tacked into their tricep as if it's a standard thing. We're normalizing it and by the time the endocrine system collapses and we're experiencing that the adrenal glands have shit the bed a long time ago, and now we're also. We can't go into actual sleep, and so now sleep's compromised. Now here comes the medication route. So now I'm gonna hit you with some trazodone, I'm gonna hit you with some ambient I'm gonna hit you with. Or we're, uh, you know, over consuming melatonin, which that also is compromising our body's natural ability to regulate circadian rhythm.
Speaker 2:And then where we have this interesting capacity is it's like well, fuck it, then I'm going back to work. So now I'm seven days on, eight days on, nine days on, because that at least I have sustained. I'm not witnessing the magnitude of my fatigue by going into an environment that doesn't have the same type of stimulation. And you see that, especially in emergency medicine, you're on a call, right, and now you got to remember the thresholds we're creating.
Speaker 2:So if my worst call, which is one of the most notorious questions, asked, right, what's the worst thing that you've seen? It's fucked up to answer, but we all have it. So now that's my threshold. And so if I'm not on a call that is creating a physical response through adrenaline, it's lackluster. And so then we see, if I'm on an abdominal pain for three months, most likely it's going to piss me off. And so now I'm not showing up to render care, right, I'm showing up listening to the radio, wishing I was on a GSW, or stabbing or whatever's popping off on the radio, so you're not there for your patients popping off on the radio, so you're not there for your patients.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah. So now you're either dumping them in the and not saying like this isn't depicting EMS poorly, right, but this is what we're truly facing as a culture, right? And so now these calls that are lackluster, we're forgetting how we show up in public service because we're attaching a chemical feeling to the magnitude of the call we're experiencing. And so a majority of the calls are honestly. Let's get real. I would venture to say a large percentage of EMS calls don't necessarily need 911, but we're being used as frontline providers because of the magnitude of the ER backups and we have a huge systemic problem.
Speaker 2:You can't get into your PCP or your primary dog for three months. Shit's going on. You also don't want to drive to the hospital yourself or you're not Ubering. So I'm going to call 911 and I'm going to get right up to the hospital let's see what's going on. And you have two choices. When you're a medic, you can either educate them and be like hey, man, I'm gonna most likely take you to the emergency room because this is not an emergency and we're not primary care and we're educating in the field. But that's even. We're missing that component right now because of the burnout. We're just like fuck it get in, but that's even. We're missing that component right now because of the burnout.
Speaker 1:We're just like fuck it, get in. Yeah, you know I talk to people a lot and you're covering a lot of ground here, christy. That's really important. And I do want to get to another aspect of ketamine that I feel is important. But no, I mean, this is amazing because I tell police officers all the time, I just don't know how you do it and until I started leveraging psychedelics to improve my brain health and my mental health, I never really engaged with first responders. You know, I had some friends that were cops, you know, and I never really met EMS. And actually one of the facilitators at the ayahuasca ceremonies that I've been through is an EMS lady who has seen a lot and she is a very, I would say, universally connected, spiritual, just a monster, just a wonderful woman that has helped so many veterans. I go to these ceremonies to watch and I've done my share to the point where it's enormously. I've seen the benefits personally and as an observer.
Speaker 1:But police officers taking that like soldiers when we go, we're gone for six months and, yeah, we'd always prefer war to just a J-set or a training mission, because you know like you're talking about the edge. Hey, man, you know I'm not. I don't want to waste my time with that. Why should I train right now? Let's do the real thing Right. So and that's one of the reasons we have repetitive blast exposure problems in the military is because we don't just want to train, we want to train like it's war. So we throw a lot of bombs in there and we are messing our brains up unnecessarily Because, look, once you know how to shoot a gun. You know how to shoot a gun, all right. No, once you know how to make a breaching charge and put it on a door, okay, you know how to do it. Yeah, you got to practice it a couple times a year, but you don't have to do it every damn day.
Speaker 1:And so, but with our first responders to include, you know, ems, fire and police the fact that they have to go home every night or every two days, I mean I cannot. It's one of the reasons I stayed single my entire military career is I could not even contemplate being a dad and a husband. I was just having fun. You don't have to grow up in the military, in your world. You have to be an adult. You have to adult every day and deal with these high stress situations that end up impacting you as a person chemically. A whole nine yards, and it's just a lot, but the thing that I think you're exposing here is that so many of our first responders don't know how to ask for help, and they don't know, they don't understand why they're medicating. They just know that they're suffering or they think they're crazy, and they don't understand the physiological complexities that are resulting from their careers in the person who they are right now. Right, and that there is a chance for them to become somebody else.
Speaker 2:Right, and it's catecholamines. And if you look at catecholamines, they're being produced endogenously from the adrenal Can you explain catecholamines, because that is a new one for me and probably most of the people on this call.
Speaker 2:So we are the drugs right, meaning we produce epinephrine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin as the most incredible drugs that have the capacities and a beautiful example of that is an orgasm, the magnitude of the drugs that we can create in connection and procreation and adrenal function. If we're exhausting those drugs now, this little guy is dopamine, that's the hits of reward. And so the more we saturate ourselves with synthesizing and not truly achieving, or in human connection and separation. And serotonin, which occurs in gut and as well like, if you look at it, it's a 90, 10 or 80, 20, depending on the text that you read.
Speaker 2:But those catecholamines can become exhausted and mismanaged based off of the circumstantials of our environment, especially as it pertains to shift work. Now they run dual purpose, so one, there's an environmental feeling and there is a contemplative or thinking. And so if I am sitting still thinking, ruminating, and so if I am sitting still thinking, ruminating, conjuring, I can create a catecholamine response which is through fear. And so now, if I am worried or hurried, or in speed or aggression, epinephrine is coursing through my veins and body, and it's body norepinephrine right, which is a vessel response. And so now I'm restricted. So now my breath is shallow, my heart is racing and I am surging, but I'm sitting still.
Speaker 1:Wasting all that energy.
Speaker 2:For sure. And so think about the exhaustive capacities in the body. Physiologically, that's how the adrenal glands shit the bed.
Speaker 1:I have been there a couple of times, just in business alone, not talking about the military, just life Right, and I think there's a lot of people resonating with that right now. But quick question as a soldier does an orgasm use catecholines or produce them? I mean because, soldiers, that's one of our sex, sex sex, you know.
Speaker 2:Well, sure. Well, that's how we confuse lust and love. When you're on the hunt, right, and you're essentially trying to satisfy an urge, your body is producing this pheromone connection to attract a mate, and early in adulthood we're surging, right. And so then we're just looking for a place to dump If we're in our primal behavior and not in a conscious state, which is why you see so many people now talking about semen retention and what that allows for for the energy that it creates, because we're not just simply discharging, which is why you'll see the different levels of consciousness as it pertains to where they're willing to put their business. It's primal. And so now, if I don't have essentially a moral compass or a level of integrity in my capacities, of my consciousness, I'm even willing to go find a glory hole.
Speaker 1:So if you're in a committed relationship that you know where you're not hunting or whatever, then you're fulfilling that primal need without you're saving your catecholines. I guess or for, or using them better, or whatever.
Speaker 2:For sure. Well, if you're practicing semen retention and that's even a variable right Cause, are we in a trauma bonded relationship? Are we in a conscious relationship? Or do I just have access to getting some nightly and I'm tolerating it, but I'm still fantasizing and ruminating and we're you know what I mean Like. So there's a, there's some stuff to unpack, wow yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is why adultery becomes one of the most sought after drugs. I mean, look at how much we're prevalent for it in EMS, right? Adultery is all over the place, because think about the lustrousness I mean I've, yes, the lustrousness behind it. Now, that feeling of chasing the potential of getting caught. This creates a whole nother thrill, and so now we're chasing that and it's usually catastrophic at the end, right? I mean, most of that comes down to the fact that I don't have the courage to tell you hey, I'm not interested anymore, because we initially confused lust with love.
Speaker 1:Yep, could you?
Speaker 2:imagine if you're honest and we're like, hey, man, I just want to get laid and I don't want to lie to you and tell you that I'm interested in you. I simply just want to have fun with you. That conversation is a whole, nother thing than this foe. I love you, but I also love your sister and her friends.
Speaker 1:I'll create it because of your decades of being a cop or a soldier, and what the impact is.
Speaker 2:Well, now we're chasing feelings, right, and so that has a different profession, because if we don't have connection right and this is where the wives and daughters and children need to be included, in the sense of if I don't have the capacity to tell you the shit that I just saw, now I'm creating even more disconnection.
Speaker 1:And so many men and women do not talk about their experiences For sure, for sure. I mean, yeah, and that's something that, because we just don't want to burden people with, I mean I can't imagine coming back from picking up an automobile accident, right, and you know whatever, you know you've seen as EMS and having to share that. But you're saying that if you do share it, it helps.
Speaker 2:you know, from an understanding perspective create the or keep the bonds that you created, for sure. So it's to what capacities? Otherwise we're compartmentalizing. I mean, there's a multiplicities of the consciousness that is being shared between the majority, but early on, a lot of times we're picking significant others based off of our unresolved trauma and that bonding which then we just keep perpetuating, which is where domestic violence comes online, and you have all of these other things that we could unpack and talk about in depth.
Speaker 1:Wow, that'd be a whole series of shows here to get into that stuff. But yeah, I mean. So one of the issues with ketamine and is, you know, from my perspective, as we talk about repetitive brain trauma, is it is I, I am of the opinion that ketamine actually makes the brain work like it makes it flex like a muscle, like it, because I am so tired afterwards, like, but I feel like good tired, like I just ran a marathon with my brain. And when we deal with repetitive brain trauma, we're dealing with sometimes significant physiological damage to the brain that has resulted in mental illness, not just from trauma or from, you know, patterns of our youth or generational, multi-generational patterns of alcoholism or whatever. We have an issue. We have a physiological issue as well and I am of the opinion that ketamine has, you know, in terms of neuroplasticity, you know rewiring allowing.
Speaker 1:There's a concept I learned the other day where you know it allows the brain, different parts of the brain that are usually restricted from talking to each other, to communicate, opening up new. You know new, you know the way you can put things together in a ketamine experience, with those aha moments goes. That's why I feel that way, or whatever is amazing. So can you, can we talk a little bit about how ketamine impacts the brain physiology? What's actually going on when you're having these experiences or these? You know these, you know you're going through these events. How's that impacting the brain physiologically? Because it is amazing.
Speaker 2:For sure, and this will tie in beautifully, bruce. In a sense, the limbic system is responsible for displaying information from the back of the brain forward right. We're perceiving our environment nanoseconds before we can think about it, and so when you temporarily take the limbic system offline which is the importance of IV and that is my expertise you take the limbic system offline sequentially, intentionally and dose specifically, which is really important to remember. This is not a go big or go home, and it definitely less is more.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:This fucking sledgehammer approach is not in the highest good right. And so when you take the limbic system offline now, you're giving neurologically the capacities for consciousness, new consciousness, to usher in. So we're disengaging the default mode network, we're temporarily taking survival offline. And so that's the reason why you're so exhausted is because of the magnitude of the things that you've experienced on earth in life thus far. The variability in that is to the individual. You take a 25-year-old in here and they're going to bounce back within two hours. It's not until we become further down the line.
Speaker 2:Anyways, now the pituitary gland has the opportunity to scan as a master gland. Now we're repatterning this VQ mismatch of being shallow in our breath. So now the vena cava, the aorta, the vagus nerve, the phrenic nerve, all that run through the diaphragm, have these capacities now to start actually communicating with the physical body. This is where r and r comes in. If we've been shallow and under duress and not breathing purposefully and intentionally, imagine the portal, backup pressure that's occurring in all capacities. And so now you're actually witnessing the magnitude of the fatigue in the body. At the same time you're experiencing the mirroring as we unpack the information that has been acquiesced or stored in the amygdala and the hippocampus. It's a developmental process.
Speaker 2:The question I get asked often is how many sessions do I need? And it's like well, how much trauma is stored and how much have you processed and how much have you suppressed? Because the other thing professionally is that people are like well, I know what's in there, I don't want to see it. You're like well, it's still in there. That's the unconsciousness that's running you and I'm not sure if I can present this, but I just put this together as a presentation and I would love to show you what I mean by the unconsciousness and the magnitude of what we're unpacking. And this example that I would like to show is from a medically retired firefighter, paramedic who has complex PTSD and TBI, to show you what it is, as the individual, of what we're unpacking. And I would love for us to be able to and I say us as a profession, to be able to show more of. Why aren't we doing EEGs before we work with the medicine? Or for some of us, we are right. Let me see if I can pull this up here.
Speaker 1:This will be a first Case of beer, denny. Every time we do something in Special Forces. For the first time it's a case of beers.
Speaker 2:Let's see if it'll let me. So making me open my system settings. Perfect, let's do this and let's see, put in my little password I just put. Yeah, it's going to make me quit and open. Anyways, what this shows, and it's nothing short of phenomenal, right, I did a lot of work with HRV and pulling up the current brainwave states and what I was witnessing is the magnitude of the unconsciousness as it pertains to delta brainwave states. A large majority of us are walking around earth right now completely unconscious or 80%, 70%, a large percentage of our capacity.
Speaker 1:And explain, explain consciousness, because this is a concept that's pretty new to me. From you know dealing with my ego and and finding my path to you know from you know from a spiritual growth perspective. So explain to the audience. You know cause, you know from you know from a spiritual growth perspective, so explain to the audience. You know cause. You know you're not walking around unconscious, but you know from this perspective you kind of are.
Speaker 2:Neurologically, we're asleep, and so a great example is where we, as professions, we talk about alpha as being a type of man. Alpha is a type of brainwave state, is a type of brainwave state. You either have it as a dominant brainwave or you don't, which then we see beta and we can be in different forms of beta. High beta is more of a chaos thinking, which gets misinterpreted as ADHD. And then we have delta, which delta is only supposed to be prevalent when we're sleeping, and so, as an adaptation response, when we're in these stressful situations, the brain will literally put itself into a delta for trauma adaptation. And so now we're not using the prefrontal cortex for conscious thinking, right, and so, if you look developmentally, we're taking information from the environment, we're running it through the limbic system, but first we're playing it through all the scenarios that we've ever acquiesced as a human, through the amygdala, through the hippocamp, and now we're sequencing it to create our reality through the prefrontal cortex, and the prefrontal cortex doesn't even come online fully until we're 25.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and that's another problem and this is a good point, and we bring this up in the book that I had to write after I lost my son is that the prefrontal cortex doesn't start developing until 14. It takes 80% of the exposure from contact sports and when we have a damaged prefrontal cortex, which is the CEO of the brain, we now have a damaged adult, and this is why you know ketamine from a restorative capacity, and I'm still talking about the physiological impacts of that that I'd like to dive into a little bit more. I think is also helpful as well as resolving the trauma that we have from our careers, our childhood, our delta brainwave states up to 30 to 40, even 50%.
Speaker 2:And now you see this emergence of alpha, beta, theta and even gamma were coming online. So that's what I'm when I say that we're becoming aware, that we're aware. If I'm unconscious, sure, I have memorization. That's muscle memory. I don't put my shoes on, I can drive the same damn way to work. It doesn't mean that I'm consciously thinking. That's muscle memory. I know, I put my shoes on, I can drive the same damn way to work. It doesn't mean that I'm consciously thinking Good job. And so, which is to the point, we've all driven somewhere and we're like fuck, I don't even remember that drive Because you memorized it a long time ago and the body's just rehearsing it. You were simply along for the ride.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how many times have you hit those red lines, your body? You just you wake up and you're like how did I stop the car? You know what I mean? It's it is, it's completely automatic.
Speaker 2:We do it in conversation, like look how much we even do it to our kids. We just like uh-huh, we're not thinking. We're thinking, but not listening.
Speaker 1:We're not listening.
Speaker 2:We're not engaging, we're not engaging. Kids know that. That's why they just stop talking. And now we're hurting them because we're teaching them about unlovability and, at the end of the day, that's what all of this is resolving. And so there's a bunch to unpack there, right, this is what my mission is, and to truly educate. Now that after this, right, I left as a tenured professor of emergency medicine, I built some phenomenology with ketamine infusion therapy. I've had so much opportunity to serve so many different cohorts of men and women, and now I'm coming full back into education and the training along the methodology and the importance of how to work with this, specifically because of the legalities. Right, this is something that right now, you're back boots on the ground, there is no downtime and it is legal. And so there are.
Speaker 1:It is legal, and that's a big and it's available. I mean you can. I think it's very expensive given the cost of the truck itself, but you know, once we start talking insurance coverage, then you know that that, you know that's the coverage availability. You know cost or real concepts here that I'd like to download to. But so when you?
Speaker 1:So one of my issues with ketamine is I don't want anybody in the room. I hate that. It drives me nuts. I prefer to be in a dark room with my blinders on. But you know that's me, and I have not gone to ketamine treatments because they want somebody in the room, cause I deal with things that are very personal in nature and I just don't want to share them. I want to work on my own stuff. I own this, whether it's my past or me. But for you, your protocols and this is, I think, something else Every time I call a ketamine clinic, they all have a different approach, whether it's the amount of medicine I get, the amount of time I'm in the chair, the preparation, this and that. And I think, for your point, standardization and protocols that can be accepted across the industry are exactly what's needed. So talk to us a little bit about you know what, you know how you run a ketamine.
Speaker 1:You know, you know ketamine session.
Speaker 2:For sure. And Bruce, to your point, some of that of what you make mention is a trauma response of hyper independence and not to deduce or just make you aware, right, the consciousness of the provider. So, like for myself, I anchor in, I'm expanding my consciousness to the greatest of my capacities and allowing a container for you to maximize your benefit, right, and so that's the, when you have a provider in the room, what you're probably experiencing and if the providers have a lot of unresolved trauma, you're picking up on that shit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know, I don't want their energy in my room when I'm dealing with my own stuff. Right, I don't need that. I went through an ayahuasca experience with 12 veterans in an enclosed environment and almost lost my mind. No, because I do believe in this energy stuff and I don't need your energy I need.
Speaker 2:so yeah, 100%, just like for me personally, who holds my space? Because for me, to be in that room, you're 100% tracking. Practitioners are off-gassing, same as patients are off-gassing. It's a secondary and tertiary exposure that we are being exposed to as energy fasciculates from the physical body that's being released. That was once harbored and misinterpreted as anxiety.
Speaker 1:And you bring up a good point because you're in a completely open and receptive state. When you are in this world and you're in that zone, I mean you know, you are open up to other people and you just you know. It's just that. And and the memories that I've recovered, oh my god, of my boy. I mean I've been laughing and crying and I I can't wait. It's been about eight months, I gotta. I just feel this urge to go back and do it again. I got to make arrangements Kind of a pain where I'm at, which gets to the point of accessibility, but all right. So your protocols are IV and then you have a dosage rate that you feel is that based on weight or Well, it's based on individuals.
Speaker 2:So I take into consideration and this is what I'm advocating for right the protocols that we created, that to be the foundation for a large majority of practitioners for them to build upon, because otherwise there is a lot of psychosis that's happening in the field because they're giving doses that are egregious and they're developmental right To go low and slow allows you to start to experience the magnitude of your dysregulation. If you rip the bottom out of someone, what I refer to it as is like ghostbusters when they open the trap. You can't just make somebody blatantly aware of everything that they've ever compartmentalized. They will go into a cascading which then gets misunderstood as a psychotic break and next thing you know you're on a slew of things, bingo that's been coming up a lot with bufo conversations to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2:Oh yes, we're not supposed to blast off to the Godhead, for fuck's sake. We are supposed to develop mentally right. Dmt lays dormant in all of us, Every single dmt lays dormant in.
Speaker 1:All of us, every single one of us, are schedule one period, the end. I am the drug.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you said that earlier and so we're waking up a latent system. You wouldn't go into a hibernating bear and fucking hit him upside the head. You may want to just gently nudge that guy and be like, hey, hey, it's wake up time. Big difference, man, big difference right, and you yeah.
Speaker 2:And so now we're in. Still, this is where spiritual ego can come in and the different complexities of the provider. If they haven't been doing the work themselves, haven't been doing the work themselves and earlier of what you said because I do want to tie back into that If providers are in the room and they're typing away on their computer or finger in their phone or on Instagram, they're opening up other dimensions. That is going to put you into urgency. If providers are going to be in the room, they need to anchor in and hold space period, the end, which is going to also show them the magnitude of their dysregulation, because I can guarantee how much they're going to look to finger their phone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I talked to ketamine clinics. I just I did one, I did it once and I'm like, dude, I could, I could hear you, I could feel you. This is not right and I had my tunes on. You wouldn't believe how many ketamine clinics I called.
Speaker 2:They have you show up. They don't even tell you to bring music or bring headphones to do it. They put these people through this experience without.
Speaker 1:Oh, some of them are having to watch.
Speaker 2:YouTube videos. Can you imagine. This?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and this is what I want people to understand too is this is work. If you do this, you care about yourself. This is not fun, right? This is not a recreation. You hear about ketamine, vitamin K and all that stuff. No, this is work, and the work that you do on you is flat-out stuff that you need to just get done. You know you're coming to ketamine either because of this podcast, or you might have heard of somebody, or you've been through trauma. You just realize it exists there. But this is spiritual growth. You absolutely should be proud of yourself for considering this as one of your options. Do your research and stuff. Talk to Christy, because this is a path to resolving we have. You have no idea. You know what I mean. I had no idea how much crap I've been carrying around my entire life and once you unload it, a human being. My wife calls me Bruce 3.0 now because I have dumped so much crap.
Speaker 1:You know my employees are like who are you boss? Like in the last year, I've just, you know, I'm like, hey, man, I ain't going to let the stuff bother me, it's God's, you know, it's God's will. Everything's going to happen. I can't control it. So why am I going to sit here and freak out? And I think that you're offering, you know, an amazing, you know, opportunity for people to learn. And, dude, I could talk to you like for hours on this stuff, because it's something that is so important to me and we don't know about it enough, about it. So let's get to another point, because you're coming up close on an hour, what you're saying, that you are absolutely you're on with TriWest right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the work I did with insurance is imperative, but what I am going to really and I really want to unpack this with insurance I would love to hop on another call and really speak to this. I built the first employer driven benefit a hundred percent covered of a hundred percent. The psychographics and demographics that I served are nothing short of phenomenal, because it gave access to people who wouldn't have ordinarily paid for it themselves. Then I went and I put the practice into all of the blues. I'm in over 900 PPOs.
Speaker 2:I just became a vendor for the US Olympics, I accomplished TriWest and you know, what I learned Is that if you're looking for this medicine, you're looking for this medicine. The accessibility shouldn't come down to a copay, because then you're not committing and if you think about it, you're investing in yourself. To pay $3,500 for cash pay for you to truly evolve your consciousness significantly. That is a blip financially versus what I witnessed with the different mechanisms of entry versus PPO, hmo, medimedi. All of these different iterations is nothing short of interesting, because some of them want you to fail a whole bunch of other treatments and now you become treatment resistant. And so now what we're doing is helping you unpack all the harm that you did from failing all of these other modalities.
Speaker 1:All these SSRIs and SM benzos and all these things.
Speaker 2:I'm going to put you on Klonopin. I'm going to put you on Seroquel. I'm going to put you on Trazodone. You're probably not going to be able to use your penis and you're really going to have some dysregulation. So I'm also going to do this. And now you become a long-term customer of ketamine. Oh yeah, Even Kaiser will allow you to have infinite amounts of ketamine sessions after you fail three to five to ten years of other treatments.
Speaker 1:And that's currently the case. I mean, how do you get prescribed? Well, one thing I will push back a little bit on the investment. It's just that we deal with people all the time Out here in Florida. It's $500 a session, Okay, and you know, we know the minimum six that just get started or you can talk about that. That's what I've heard, that's what I keep hearing. The six to start, you know, over two weeks, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:All misconstrued For sure.
Speaker 1:Okay, over two weeks stuff like that, I'll miss the seconds for sure.
Speaker 2:Okay, talk about that, please. The benefit of ketamine is never going to. The insights are never going to leave you. This is where free will comes in, and so first one must sit with the medicine in order to see if it's something they want to embark in. Never should we have a standardized. You must sit with this medicine six times every other day. The Journal of American Medicine was the first protocol that came out that a lot of providers are attached to, and that was for major depressive disorder. They all had the same BMI, body mass index, and they had all the same DSM.
Speaker 2:This is not a one size fits all model, and so for people that are curious in this space same thing of how we're dysregulating people with Bufo One must ask themselves am I ready to acknowledge that I'm the common denominator in all of my story? And if you can't answer yes to that, to truly witnessing yourself from a higher state of awareness, and start unpacking your unconsciousness, which the depth of that is the variable, then you are not ready for psychedelics. And, bruce, if you would have asked me five years ago, there is no way that I would have said that. I would have said it's for everyone Untrue. I would have said it's for everyone Untrue If you are not ready to embark on a hero's journey of witnessing yourself as an opportunity every day to evolve who you are, to become a more conscious version of yourself, rather than rehearsing, reciting this old program and narrative that was stamped into us amniotically.
Speaker 1:And that's a big statement for a lot of you out there, and I'm, and I'm you know you're talking to a guy here that I am not the person I used to be Right and um, and this, this, unfortunately, this journey was started with the loss of my son and I'm trying to reconcile that, which is hard, but, at the same time, what Christy's talking about is truly important, because a lot of the mental illness that we suffer from as first responders, law enforcement, is induced by our career and it can be resolved. But you have to, you have to, you have to do. When she talks about growth number one, you're going to have to deal with what's been done to you. You're going to have to deal with what you've done to others, which is man once you get to that stage, dude.
Speaker 1:That is a journey and that is the hardest part. And then you have to learn to forgive and love yourself. If you, if these are the goals that you want, which, along the way, you're going to be dumping your mental illness, bro, I mean you're, as you dump sludge from your background and your life and your childhood, you only become better and lighter and psychologically cleaner and more loving and more kind. And yeah, this is Bruce Parkman, it's the same guy Pac-Man. Yeah, I'm talking this. Okay, and this is evolution, and Christy's protocol could be part of that. Now, christy, how would you evaluate somebody to recommend? You just said, and that might be your guidance, right. It's like, hey, look if you're not, and that might be your guidance, right. So hey look if you're not ready to do this.
Speaker 1:But we have people that are suffering and they need physiological help and there is I honestly believe there is physiological stressors going on in that brain. That's improving that brain, it's rewiring that brain, it's doing something in there that helps with over. You know, there's a lot of scarring, there's a lot of demyelination, dysmyelination. We got blood-brain barrier penetration. We got huge amounts of neuroinflammation that need to be addressed right, and I do believe that ketamine can help. Once we get rid of the cause of that damage, which is repetitive blast exposure, we calm down and live our lives without all that trauma. Now we've got to fix this, because without fixing this we're still going to have mental illness and suicide. We have to fix the brain. We have to promote brain health. What does ketamine do in that regard?
Speaker 2:So and this ties back to what we started initially conversating on when you pull that limbic system out of the equation temporarily, you have expansiveness of new consciousness. It's being ushered in and in that ushering it has this capacity to create new ways of thinking. Being doing for up to 10 days, thinking being doing for up to 10 days, and so now you're actually creating. It's similar to collateral circulation. Once you hit a certain age, the heart will actually start creating new circulatory pathways around places that we've compromised it from our food and lack of exercise. It's no different. In the brain, we only use 5% of our consciousness. The real question becomes why don't you want to embark on evolving your consciousness, which, as a byproduct, reduces your suffering?
Speaker 2:And so there's a lot of things to unpack there, because we've been influenced by religiosity from different smear campaigns on the war on drugs. And what was your belief system ever? An ego will let you die, and so for a majority that ego man. Yeah, that's a whole nother show on ego dude, that'd be great bruce, if I would have met you five years ago, who knows if you would have been like you're fucking crazy.
Speaker 1:I would not have talked to you I?
Speaker 1:would not have talked to you, I would have blown you off. I would absolutely had nothing to do with you. Because, number one, I didn't know I was suffering physiological and mentally. I thought I was okay, I hadn't lost my son yet I was a successful businessman. Yada, yada, yada, yada, no, no, and only through you know.
Speaker 1:Once I got in my hole, it's amazing how the universe, or what I call God, started introducing me to doors, and I am a firm believer. When God puts a door in front of you, you have two options you can open that puppy and go through it, or you can walk away and never know and spend the rest of your life wondering what was on the other side of that door. Man, you know, and you'll never know, until you open that puppy and I've been opening doors ever since and those doors have led me on this journey that I can help others through me. You know, talking to people like you, where I'm going to spend the rest of my life serving others instead of myself and helping people understand that there are things out there that can, that can help you with your broken brain, with your broken life. You know, with your broken past, and that you can overcome these things.
Speaker 1:Become a better person, you know. Drop this mental illness, get off these goddamn drugs and get back to yourself. Get back to your family, you know, and get back to everybody else. You want to get back to your Lord, get back whatever's important to your life, go back and get and find happiness, and you are a huge part of this man. Back to this insurance piece. If you're a TRICARE guy, I'm a TRICARE guy Until I'm 66, I found out I have to go to Medicaid. After that, three more years I'm on the other side of the company on the country, so not a big help there. If you think that you would like to approach you and get approved for ketamine, right One is it's the methodology for a large majority.
Speaker 2:Well, I can't so clear that for some of the ketamine clinics they are not above board.
Speaker 1:True yeah.
Speaker 2:And if that's the case, of course you're a hundred percent not going to get insurance coverage. You can't, you've never divulged it. That's what you're doing. Period the end.
Speaker 2:And then so the reason the cost is so expensive, and this is gonna ripple right, but I'm gonna say it a ketamine infusion costs 18 dollars but I heard here's what is happening you're paying for the burn rate, the provider, the malpractice insurance, if they have any, and you're also paying for whoever's in the room and what they think they're worth, and yada, yada, yada. And that's not deducing, and so what my mission is? And now I've been in practice for five years. I have fluctuated price all over the place and I'll tell you right now even if I were to charge, I, I would have to charge $1,600 a session to turn a profit. How in the fuck? No, no, no, I'm not arguing.
Speaker 1:I think the cost is as a businessman, the cost is absolutely related to the cost associated with the business. That without scale.
Speaker 2:For sure, yeah, you know. So this is where I, and this is the grassroots right. What I am proposing is that we implement this medicine as a standard of care into primary care, Because those guys are already in network with insurance. All I need to do is come in and do an overlay. So my mission has evolved right Outside of the years I've spent serving and facilitating and honoring all the different types of consciousness, my mission is now this right One I can overlay everything that I have learned into an existing medical practice and turn on insurance like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you just you're given iv I mean it's you gotta gotta have a machine you gotta have oh yeah, the equipment's nothing. A blood pressure monitor, your blood pressure cuff? It's not.
Speaker 2:There's not a big investment oh, and I've also built out all the protocols for facilitating to be trauma informed, for the nurses to hold the space and also them understand that ketamine's a mirror and that you're gonna to be triggered deeply right. If you haven't done the work as a provider, ketamine is going to eradicate itself out of a lot of practices because of the uncomfortability it causes from the provider patient dynamics. You're going to manifest the people that you need to see in order for you to heal in a different capacity. This is mirroring, right. I can tell you so many different stories of that. And unless the provider, I mean at the end of the day, bruce doctors are the number one for suicide.
Speaker 1:Wow, and that's because they're picking up all that.
Speaker 2:Silently suffering. And plus, too, look at how much we have to. If you want to turn a profit, you have to become a machine. Basically, You're a machine, You're a robot and I could you know.
Speaker 2:it's just there's a lot there. Anyways, my mission is to overlay everything that I have built and learned and the workflows, the methodology and the foundational side of the dosing to doctors who can hear the message, who are conscious and want to open it up and can actually start delivering it, not only as a new additional means for treating those who can become treatment resistant. Instead of pulling people out of the river, why aren't we going up there and figuring out why they're falling in?
Speaker 1:Amen.
Speaker 2:Why are we waiting until people become treatment resistant or egregiously attached to pharmacological multiple medications rather than helping them evolve their consciousness? And now, if we can allow them to hear new messages with new cognitive capacities? Now they can actually be proactive rather than reactive with things that we're trying to share with them as clinicians. Otherwise it falls on deaf ears.
Speaker 1:Another point that you said what is your position on the integration of therapy with ketamine? I don't believe in this assisted guided thing. I mean, I think you got to go where the medicine takes you, but what is your position on therapy and what should people look for when they, if you propose it, what, what type of therapist would you recommend, whether it's EMDR or anything like that, that they, that they might work with to get up to, to integrate, because without the work, a lot of it, you know he doesn't.
Speaker 2:It's developmental for sure, and so I'll give you some quick examples. If you call me Bruce and you're like, hey, I've done EMDR, I've done talk therapy, I've exhausted it, I don't resonate with the therapist, I've maxed that dimension out. I've also been on SSRIs. I've come off of it. I've done this work, I do breath work, I do yoga.
Speaker 1:I'm ready. Every veteran I know yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're just like let's fucking do this versus somebody who's their throat is still cracking because they don't have the capacities to talk about profound sexual trauma, profound early childhood trauma, whatever it is that they've been storing and suppressing. Those people need to start unpacking or they're the ones that are predisposed for a potential psychotic break because they haven't even learned how to unpack or tell their story without profound emotional charge. But what we can also show is that if you're retelling your trauma story, you're deepening your network to your trauma story and you're embellishing it as much as 50% because you're now telling a story from this current age about something that happened 30, 40 years ago.
Speaker 2:You can hear the depth, or at least for me personally if somebody calls me and they're like I'm this way because and they start telling a trauma story of firsthand, secondhand and tertiary victimization and they're not acknowledging that they're just re-victimizing themselves because they become addicted to suffering.
Speaker 1:They have a hell of a lot more to unpack.
Speaker 2:And then the other part of my assessment is what's your relationship with pharmaceuticals? What's your relationship with alcohol? What's your relationship with porn? What's your relationship with pharmaceuticals? What's your relationship with alcohol? What's your relationship with porn? What's your relationship with cannabis? What kind of support system do you have and do you do anything for mindfulness?
Speaker 2:And if that's the case, that person is going to need a lot more guidance than somebody that essentially comes in as like look, I cold plunge every morning, I also do saunas, I run for my mental health. I'm doing this, but I know I got blind spots. That person is going to have a different developmental time than somebody else. And one thing that we're also not talking about is if we're using psychedelics and having a conversation where we're replaying our victimization, wouldn't that be indicative that we're deepening the network to our suffering? Because, as we're trying to create new neural pathways or retelling the victimization story and reinforcing suffering in new capacities, as we're trying to evolve or reduce it, this stuff isn't long-term. One of the most interesting conversations I had in the beginning was people are like, well, how are you getting recurring revenue? And I'm like, well, if you do it right, they're, they're done.
Speaker 1:They don't want to hear that I haven't had a treatment in eight months Cause I really don't feel the need. Every now and then I say you know what I should go back in? I feel the call, I feel the need, just like ayahuasca, every now, and then it's like you know what I got to go back. You know I got, I'm, I'm ready for that next step or whatever, right. And and that's where you, when you start talking about and this is why I want everybody to stand when we start talking about modalities that have a termination date. That's not a lifelong pharmaceutical project or a lifelong you know therapist. You don't need to talk there. You're paying $150 to hear what you already know. But do you need them forever? No, everybody's focused on this for-profit medical model which, hey, great, got to make money. No, we have to cure, we have to heal, and that should have an end date. If it doesn't have an end date, then whatever you're doing ain't fucking working. I'm sorry, sergeant Major, it ain't working. Okay, it ain't working, sorry, it ain't working, sorry. So that's why things like ketamine and the psychedelics, things like cold I got a cold plunge box right out here, right, and you have to take, like Chris talked about, investing yourself.
Speaker 1:But there are things and this is my big problem, christie is that first responders in the military did nothing wrong.
Speaker 1:They signed up for a career of public service and they went and did their jobs.
Speaker 1:That is why I am hell bound on this shit being covered by insurance, being paid for by the public, because we caused this.
Speaker 1:We require these amazing people like yourself to get out there and put it on the line every day and at the end of 20 years, they might be a basket case, but if you're a basket case and you know that, hey, this is going to hurt me, but I've got coverage and disability and I'm going to have 20 years of my hair on fire and jetting to scenes and jumping out of planes, but I am going to be taken care of. Okay, we will take those risks because we can minimize the brain trauma along the way with some of the things that we're working on. But if you think you know right now, that's my problem is, all of this is out of pocket. We have veterans mortgaging their houses to invest in themselves, right, and I'm sure this is going on in the first responder community right now and then the awareness that this stuff even exists, not to mention that you know what it can do for them or not, the coverage.
Speaker 2:So I mean that's a whole nother thing to unpack, but uh, and that's the overlaying into traditional medicine, and not to cut you off, right, If we can give this to PCPs doctors who want to start yielding the medicine and reduce the learning curve, because there's training programs all over the place for this right. Do you know that you're coming in for a copay? 10 bucks, 60 bucks?
Speaker 1:No, you're on it. You're on it, so let's talk about that. Do you have a training program for medical practitioners that want to go through this and assess people? Get them, maybe, send them to three or four therapy centers sessions that help them unpack before they give them, you know, the artillery shot or whatever? Okay, I got a daughter that she's been talking. She's a nurse practitioner, psychiatric medicine. She goes. She saw what it did for me. She goes. I think this can help my patients, but there's a whole, the her practitioner. She's not the owner, right, there's a whole, but that. So you have a. So look as we close, cause we always have to close. Unfortunately, this has been. This has been a mad, just a mad show. Let's talk about Christy Myers. Where are you at right now? What are you working on? How do people find you? Go ahead and thump your chest, man, tell us about you. You are doing some amazing things.
Speaker 2:Thank you. I'm evolving, and so this is divine in its timing. I am launching the first of its kind to go back into the educational side of becoming psychedelic. I've been in private practice for five years, working with ketamine for the last decade and truly evolving my consciousness, and have experienced many of my own deaths to be able to truly birth this next evolution of what it is I'm presenting. And so this is going to be live, and I'm opening it up to you as well, bruce. It's going to be the first of its kind a live seven-week course to how to find the right provider, the history of ketamine where it comes from, the different methodology, the dosing structures, the pharmacological implications, oscillating between dimensions, levels of consciousness all of it for the layman.
Speaker 1:Wow, I mean, that is astounding. And I think what I would like to, christy, is we're having the first or the second international conference on repetitive brain trauma in the world. We host this in Tampa. I would love to see if you'd like to come out and speak on this issue. I'll have Denny reach out to you and get that going. And how do people find you? How do they get ahold of you?
Speaker 2:For sure, you can find me directly on LinkedIn and message me that way. I'm still very much N of one.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, we're going to make you N of many. This is amazing stuff and we want to push this all over the place. Christy, I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show. This has been amazing and I and I really appreciate you getting up at six o'clock your time and come on, you know, and get ready for a wonderful day. But thank you for your knowledge, thank you for the awareness. This means so much to our community as we grow, and I really really well number one. God bless you and I thank you for your service to our communities, because that is so important and your service to others, and we really want to help you get this word out, because we do believe it should be one of the standards of care, it should be one of the go-to protocols for our community of you know, when it comes to mental health, because it does, it can do a lot, it can do a lot, but right now it's just not an option and that needs to change.
Speaker 2:So thank you so much for coming on the show and we really appreciate it, thank you, and I will send you over Becoming Psychedelic and this first cohort is going to be the early adopters and so it's really going to outline how to do, how to find the right provider and all the different things.
Speaker 1:We will push that out all over the place. And maybe we'll have you. We're going to do the army Navy game with fuel coming up. The fuel the band is going to be our opening act for this year, so we're really swinging for the fence on this one but, please let us know when that's out and we'll push it all over the place.
Speaker 2:I love it. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:No problem, folks. Christy Myers, man and that is another wonderful podcast and broken brains. I didn't have my book to show you, but all right, remember we got the summit on bro on repetitive brain trauma coming up September 3rd and 4th of this year. Big Mac for Mac Day, September 24th Don't forget that. That's coming up as well. We'll be attending the National Military Healthcare Conference here in August, pushing that work out. Don't forget.
Speaker 1:Go to our website, wwwmpfactorg. Get the free book. It's free so you can be informed. Our app free book it's free so you can be informed. Our app, head smart, is on the Google store, Apple store. Get it and please like us. What is that? Like us, subscribe to us and push us all over the place, because we are making roads out there and I'm new to this social media stuff.
Speaker 1:But and we want to thank our sponsor, the Mack Parkman foundation, the only national voice and repetitive brain trauma we're working with so many organizations to make this. As Christy said, this has to be a standard of care in terms of knowledge. We have to get people educated on this, because the issue of repetitive head impacts and repetitive blast exposure and the crisis of mental illness that it is producing has to be addressed. It has to be understood. So our hats off to the Mack Parkman Foundation for sponsoring this podcast and we thank you all for attending. Until the next show, take care of those brains. They're the only ones you got and God bless you all. Take care, Thank you.