Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman

Understanding Brain Trauma & Concussions with Dr. Drew Thodeson

• Bruce Parkman • Season 1 • Episode 74

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In this episode of Broken Brains, Bruce Parkman speaks with Dr. Drew Thodeson, a pediatric neurologist specializing in concussions and brain trauma. Together, they explore the hidden dangers of repetitive head injuries, their long-term impact on mental health, and the connection to neurodegenerative disorders. Dr. Thodeson explains the challenges of diagnosing concussions, the complexities of post-concussive syndrome, and the promise—and limitations—of neuroplasticity. They also discuss the importance of nutrition, lifestyle, and alternative treatments in supporting brain health and the urgent need for greater awareness and research.

 

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SPEAKER_00:

Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman, sponsored by the Mac Parkman Foundation, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma from repetitive impacts from contact sports and repetitive blast exposure in our veteran population and what these issues are doing to the brains and mental health of our children, veterans, and athletes. Why is this so important? Because this is not trained. It's not trained to our nursing medical, psychological, suicidal prevention communities. And so you have to be informed. And on this show, we reach out to researchers and doctors and scientists and patients and players to bring you that 360-degree view of this, because this affects millions and millions of Americans across this country every day. So here on our guest today, another support, another great uh awesome guest for us right here is Dr. Drew Todesen, a pediatric neurologist, epith, epithal bar, epit. I'll give it, I'm gonna skip on that one, and neuroscientist. And I'm gonna go back that one because I never miss words. But Dr. Drew Todesen is a pediatric neurologist, epileptologist, and neuroleptologist. We've done great.

SPEAKER_01:

Epileptologist, epilepileptologist.

SPEAKER_00:

Ah, we're good, man. This is awesome. I love learning. Neurophysiologist and neuroscientist who's dedicated to improving outcomes for children and families affected by complex brain network disorders. Based in Omaha, Nebraska and licensed in Iowa and Texas, Dr. Thoterson combines clinical expertise with cutting-edge research to advance the understanding and treatment of conditions such as epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, neurodevelopmental disorders, and functional neurological disorders. Driven by a mission to bridge the gap between research and real-world patient care, Dr. Thoderson recently founded a privately owned neuroscience research company and a boutique neurology practice. These ventures allow him to focus more deeply on individualized care, translational neuroscience, and collaborative projects that push the boundaries of modern brain health. Through partnerships with hospitals, universities, and nonprofit organizations across the U.S., Dr. Todoson provides medical advocacy and consultation to ensure families have access to accurate information, innovative therapies, and compassionate support. His work reflects a lifelong commitment to advancing neuroscience while empowering patients and caregivers with knowledge, hope, and direction. All of this is so desperately needed by the folks that we are trying to help in this world. Dr. Todosing, welcome to the show, sir.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks, Bruce. Thank you for that great introduction. I appreciate you. I'm a big fan, longtime listener, first-time caller.

SPEAKER_00:

Ah, dude, man. All in, man. You win the prize. Hey Danny, what are we giving away today? All good, man. So what what put you on this journey, Drew? How'd you get there? How'd you get there?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, thanks for um having me on, first of all, Bruce. Um I um, you know, I'm a pediatric neurologist at heart. Uh after I got my medical degree, I went to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh. And uh it was right in 2009 that I started up there, and the Penguins had just won the cup. And um they had Yevgeny Malkin and Sidney Crosby, and they were gonna take the world by storm. And then the next year, Sidney Crosby had just a terrible concussive injury, and um it sparked fear in that town. And um we were seeing kids come in left and right after uh concussions and in the emergency department. I did a like a quality improvement study just to see where we were. Um and what we found was in that flood of concussive injury, all the docs, no matter how experienced or little experienced they had, they were confident in their diagnosis and treatment. Okay, whether they knew the science or not. We did we did a teaching intervention and their confidence didn't change, but their knowledge did now of the paradigm at that time, which turns out to be you know evolving. But it taught me real early on in this field that confidence is not competence, you know, and everyone was really super confident in treating concussions, whether they knew what they were doing or not. And um that experience really changed how I thought about these invisible brain injuries and and how easily we can assume and understand that uh we know what we're doing just because they look simple.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And and so where was their confidence misleading them? I mean, you know, we know that does the confidence come from like we have a CDC checklist that says, all right, here's your return to play, and you know, if things get banged up, I mean, yeah, you can call it a concussion. Um and and did though did that confidence sounds like they might not have been digging deeper into some of these concussive issues, maybe the subconcussive exposure, how long the kids have been playing, whatever.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. I mean, A, you don't have time in the emergency department. You're you're trying to put out fires and stuff, especially when you're learning. And uh our targeted audience were first and second year medical doctors, right? They're they they are green, man. Um but um and and right at that time, right in 2009, 2010, uh CDC had put out uh heads up uh this concussion um uh protocol, which you know has gone through different iterations, you know, changes since there has evolved as the science has evolved. Um uh but but people were confident in sort of seeing it, diagnosing it, and not even knowing that, which is pretty basic, you know. Um so uh it just struck me that you know just because you do four years in medicine and uh medical school and you did you did uh undergrad, that doesn't mean you you you know what's happening in in these in these complex brain injuries.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. And so where did that where did that take you from there? Uh was that just the start of your own personal journey into understanding this better?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, um man, I gotta tell you, residency is um you know, residency training is a is a grind. And uh I did um I did uh five years in Pittsburgh and kind of did um uh went away from concussion a little bit because it got owned. Okay. That's the other thing about disorders or diseases, they start to get owned by certain subsets of doctors. And and and in Pittsburgh, it was owned by the neuropsychologists and the physical medicine and rehabilitation doctors. So I kind of gravitated away from it and got into epilepsy, did some training in Dallas, and while I was there, I actually saw patients who had seizures, but there was no electrical signature. And that's functional neurological disorder. And and one of the uh predispositions of functional neurological disorder is repetitive concussions or subconcussive injuries, right? And um I started trying to study that a little bit more, and some of the concussion specialists in Omaha, this is a decade later, right, uh started referring to children with prolonged post-concussive symptoms, headaches, dizziness, fatigue. Some of them had seizures, brain fog, and many of them um had MTBI concussion, but some of them had overlap that were that were it was confusing to me. And it looked a lot like F and D. And and the overlap is really striking, Bruce. And some experts, I I don't know, uh, but some people there's an argument, it's a minority uh opinion that post-concussive syndrome may actually be a form of F and D. My idea is these are both brain network disorders that overlap. And what I do know is that sometimes what starts as concussion, it leaves a scar you can't see. And it's not in the tissue, but it's in the brain circuitry somehow. And that circuitry changes perception and prediction of the brain. And uh that idea that brain injury and brain function blur uh led me to ask just basic questions. Well, how do we measure these invisible changes?

SPEAKER_00:

So when, all right, and and before we even get into that, explain to our audience how contact sports, you know, without post-concussive trauma or post-concussive syndrome, which, you know, number one, is not done by 90% of the parents whose kids have uh concussions, right? Two weeks, you're cleared, returned to play, right? Nobody mentions, you know, our son had three, nobody ever mentioned, hey, do can we come back in 30 days and can we can continue asking questions to determine if this brain injury has healed up? Never happened. And I'm sure that contributed heavily to the continued degradation of our son's brain because he just kept playing, right? And there was no wristbite, right, uh, for the brain. So explain to the parents out there how it it whether it's just one concussion um or you know a series of concussions, why is post what is post-concussive syndrome and why is it so important to pay attention to that?

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, that's a great um, that's a great question, Bruce. Um let me back up a little bit. W what some of the stuff we know about concussive injury and what happens to the brain is is when we concuss mice and rats. And a hundred percent of the rats or mice are better, their brains are sort of back to normal at four weeks. But for people, after one, sixty percent don't have symptoms, right? You can't cut up a someone's brain at a week, right? You can do different things to rats, and whether or not that's ethical, I'm not gonna say, but it's been done. Um but at one week, symptoms are gone at 60%. At two weeks, it's about 80%, and at three weeks is 90%, and then there's a really long tail, okay? But that's if you're just asking, are you dizzy? Do you have headaches? But if you dig deeper, it's that number who have that long tail, that post-concussive syndrome, where you have symptoms beyond four to six weeks, is probably closer to a quarter of people or thirty percent of people. Really? And and we don't and we don't dig. We don't dig deep enough, you know. Uh I was on a plane with a woman uh last week. I was doing a lot of traveling, and she had um, she was a she's the be nice, nicest lady, and uh we were talking about just life, and and then she said, Well, after 30 minutes in or whatever, she said, Well, what do you do? I said, Well, I'm neurologist and I'm doing this stuff. And she's like, Oh my gosh, I was in a T-bone car accident uh three years ago. And she was um she was banged up, man. The you know, uh TBI, all sorts of stuff, other injuries too. And she still has symptoms to this day that fluctuate. You know, she'll have a bad day and all the stuff will come back. She's got the ringing in the ears, the brain fog, some of this other stuff. I didn't go real deep, but man, she she never had anybody give her a great history or do that, do the due diligence to see what kind of symptoms she's having. And we're just scratching the surface of that um because we all have bad days, uh, but um when you have recurrent concussions, um multiple brain knocks, right, you're more likely to have the symptoms for longer. It takes longer to recover. Um not only if you have concussion multiple times, if you have other brain disorders, like autism, ADHD, um, epilepsy, migraine, you're more likely to have prolonged concussive symptoms. And these things are common, man. Like this so it's not surprising to me that the up to 30% of the population with that has concussion, even one, will have prolonged symptoms. And that's why Medicaid and Medicare and CMS change the uh changed uh MTBI to recognize it as a chronic condition. Because it is chronic in a lot of people. Um and most people you don't get one concussion, you have all these subconcussive forces that happen, especially people who are athletes, and who are athletes? No, 90% of them are kids. You know, Pee-Wee football. Um uh they they're having subconcussive injury from the moment they put the helmet on, man. So um, yeah, we're putting a lot of a lot of our uh our children who will end up being our adults, right, at at pretty big risk for for this chronic brain condition, which can manifest in pain, mental health problems, you name it. They're all brain circuit derived problems.

SPEAKER_00:

And we're where of your studies or research indicated that, I mean, there's there's talk now about, you know, not just the mental health disorders that we I think we know now uh are the like red flag, the canary in the canoe coal mine when you have overexposure. Um but what about taking it uh through you know, there's some correlation now between other neurodegenerative disorders, uh uh Parkinson's ALS, um, you know, things of that nature. Uh, it sounds like epilepsy is part of that. I have several friends right now that I played rugby with back in the day that are suffering from, you know, just like that, you know, Parkinson's mostly, right? Tremors and stuff going on. I meet football players at our church. They got two of them there, one a D1 guy, one NFL guy, both of them, you know, and they come up to us and say, hey, do you think my shakes are could be attributed to, you know, my playing? And how long did you play? Well, I played in the NFL or I played D1. That's a lot of playing. Back when, you know, football had little tiny leather helmets and stuff, right? Or whatever, right? So what do you, you know, what are you seeing now? Um, you know, are you seeing correlation to even you know more severe conditions other than I mean, I mean, mental illness is severe, don't get me wrong. But other more, I don't know, like uh more pronounced disorders in and the space that you operate in.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's a good question, uh, Bruce. I you know, the historical context of this actually came out of Pittsburgh right around the time that I was there, you know, at a at a local a neighboring hospital out of Pittsburgh, they um they started looking at X NFL players' brains, right? And they found I can't remember the exact numbers, let's say there were 50 of them, right? And they found that 49 out of 50 had CTE, had had degenerative changes on autopsy, okay. And that one guy who didn't, he was a kicker. He was the only kicker in the group, okay. But I bet there's a percentage of kickers that have it too, because kickers used to be line linebackers, okay, used to be the quarterbacks, used to be wide receivers, okay. So their risk might be lower, but it ain't zero, okay. So this concept from there has come, oh, concussion can cause neurodegeneration, right? And we kind of already knew that because uh we have a um a figure in in public life in in America that represented that, you know, Muhammad Ali, uh Cassius Clay. He he took a lot of punches to the face, you know, he did the rope of dope, but he left his arms down, he took some he took some blows, man, and he developed um Parkinson's. And that is known in neurology even before CTE. So this concept that repetitive brain trauma causes a cascade that then can lead to neurodegenerative disorders is known. The question is how does that happen? And some people are really in this space are really interested in the neuroinflammatory markers, and I I believe that that plays a role, but I also believe that the brain is an unbelievable network, and it shares different pathways. Let me give you an example. There are 86 billion neurons in our brains, and those all connect to each other, making over one hundred trillion connections. Okay, we got a universe in our brain, man. To understand what how that universe creates this final point is something we're just scratching the surface of. And those correlations between mental health and neurodegeneration and all this stuff are really complex. My mother has atypical Parkinson's disease. There is this a neurodegenerative disorder, right? There's no treatment, there's no cure, there's a tremendous amount of other brain network dysfunction that goes along with it, including depression, anxiety, impulse control, headaches, pain. All these things are interrelated, Bruce. They they and in some people, like Muhammad Ali, it came out with the sheikhs and the inability to move. His his mood seemed okay. He was always in the in the you know, and in some people, it comes out as severe depression, homicidal, and suicidal. I mean, people are dying because of this stuff. And uh we can't get enough data soon enough uh so that we can really make real world changes.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, it is uh it is kind of a shame that you know Muhammad Ali, who was Such a force of nature. People could see him physically suffering. And yet, you know, and I'm sure that turned off quite a few parents from a boxing career for their kids. But yet we still box, right? Still a way out for some people, right? I guess, you know, and that's their that's you know their own. But you, you know, you mentioned earlier that this this correlation between repetitive head impacts and uh, you know, the you know, functional network disorders or um, you know, uh, you know, you know, you know, uh neurodegenerative disorders and or mental illness has been known. I mean, you mentioned Mike Webster was one of the stealers that was, you know, identified by Dr. Omalu back in the day. Uh, we've had the wife of another uh person that was on our show. And so it's known. Yet here we sit in 2025, you know, still talking about something that's been known since 2009 when you were in residency there. So, you know, quick question is why, in your opinion, are our our parents still unaware of this potentiality, of this connection between RHI and you know, neuro, you know, severe, you know, neurological disorders to include mental illness. Why do we still, including myself, okay, subject our kids? Why is the knowledge not there for us as parents? Yet, as you say, it's known, right? I mean, you're a neurologist. I mean, are your kids playing contact sports? Well, he's seven.

SPEAKER_01:

He uh, you know, I'm grateful he's not into football. But hey, I was in, you know, I was in team sports um my whole life. Um now I played basketball, I was a runner. Um, you know, uh, so I didn't I didn't play collision sports, uh, but I've had a con I've had concussions, Bruce. Um I I then went to to school. I didn't have like uh a big um manual labor job, I but there are there are people who machinists and stuff who are around rattling machines all the time. You think dad causes some problems? Maybe. Um, you know, that there's a lot of environmental factors that uh we don't know how to quantify or qualify in terms of their risk. And I think the reason that parents don't know is because they are confident that they know what it is. And they know, well, that's just a ding. That's just uh oh you you got you gotta shook up. Um, you know, walk it off, rub some dirt on it, you know, and you got a lot of that still going on in places where football is life, okay? And it is a way out, you know, and you see these guys um making millions of dollars, you know, and then not only that, but now now you got guys in college making millions of dollars. Um playing foot playing football. So it is a way the economy has incentivized this uh to an extent that it hasn't been incentivized before. Uh so I think we're seeing things get worse. Not only that, but we our our world has changed from you know 1970, right? Um and this goes into one of the the research uh initiatives that I have about LED lights. LED lights flicker and you can't see it. Okay, it comes turns on and off uh hundreds to thousands of times a second. And this invisible flicker of LED lights, your brain can feel, even though your eyes can't see it. And we found that people with concussion, recurrent traumatic brain injury, migraine, other brain network disorders, epilepsy, autism, are very sensitive to this flicker. And we're trying to get funding to vet a study to use functional imaging to see how just some of these basic things, these like light bulbs, how light bulbs affect our brain, how our how and how that might change how an injured brain um evolves over time. And so even when the even when these lights look steady, the injured brain can feel them flicker, and the flicker can make the brain work over time. Could that make could that make inflammation worse? I don't know. But by decoding how the the brain reacts maybe to this invisible flickering light, we might find new tools, not just for diagnosing injury, but maybe even promoting recovery.

SPEAKER_00:

And how would that uh do you think? Uh, you know, one of the parts that you know we always kind of hammer home is that a child's brain is developing. Okay. And, you know, our big problem with the CTE industry, it is an industry, is that uh, you know, you've been focused on these adults and professional players all these years and some high schoolers. Why has nobody ever published a study on, hey, can we take a break with these kids? It's got to be doing more harm. What is your research in terms of uh like epilepsy and other neurodegenerative disorders? Um, you know, does that indicate as well that, you know, a child's developing brain being exposed to subconcussive trauma is somehow, I mean, more, you know, uh risky or or you know, more impactful than a mature brain, say after the age of 25?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, it's gotta be, okay. They uh one thing I will say, Bruce, there's it's a double-edged sword, right? Or it's there's there's two there's two sides of this, in my opinion, and there's probably multiple that I haven't even thought about yet. But number one, a developing brain is incredibly resilient, okay. If a child has a stroke when they're less than a couple days old, um, that same stroke in a 30-year-old man will totally handicap the 30-year-old man, but the child who's one day old will develop around the stroke, and they will they have a much more uh capacity, greater capacity for neuroplasticity, right? This idea that you can reroute some of these trillions of connections to take over. They might have a little weakness um or something like that, but if it happened in a 30-year-old man, they'd be fully paralyzed on one side of the body or another, right? And so um, and and that child will grow up with different kinds of risks epilepsy, autism, intellectual problems, cognitive problems, susceptibility to concussions, maybe autism, these types of things. However, those are not written in written in stone. And so with the correct uh supports, which starts with a loving and patient family, a good medical team, um, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and good nutrition, good sleep habits, all these things, right? Supports that child has a way better chance than if I were to have a stroke right now. Okay. So that's that's neuroplasticity. That's the that's the miracle of the brain, okay? But you're right, it's developing. And what if you take a normal brain and then you start junking with it ever since they're 12 and they can put on a helmet? Okay. What does that do to normal development? And we we really don't know. And this arbitrary cutoff of, oh, once you're 18, you're a man or you're a woman. Well, female brains develop, connect, still continue to make these connections all the way up until 29, 30, and male brains a little bit later, 30, 31, 32. And so our brain is developing into our late 20s at least. And these are the people who you know are in war zones, who are in um uh athletics that are you know getting repetitive uh brain trauma. Um and we just don't have the tools right now to identify it. We're starting to get there. People are saying that DTI and some of these blood biomarkers are really good at at diagnosing uh concussion. I'm I'm coming from a uh electro neurophysiology standpoint, so I'm using EEG, brainwave studies, QEG, event-related potentials. But all these give you snapshots, right? And you have to piece them all together because it's like doing a 10,000-piece puzzle in Pittsblack Dark, and all you got is a little pen light. You know, good luck, man. It's hard, it's hard, it's really complex, but people are out there, and if enough people show up with their pen lights, maybe we could put some pieces together.

SPEAKER_00:

No, that makes perfect sense. And I and I want to go back to neuroplasticity because there are people out there that say, you know, uh, you know, contact sports can't hurt a child's brain because it can repair itself, which I call out, which is absolute crap. I mean, to your point, for a stroke, for an incident, yes, you know, the brain, in our opinion, can heal itself, but the repetitive and relentless exposure to RHI produces damage that no neuro no neuroplasticity cannot keep up with. And then you start throwing in long-term chronic neuroinflammation and all the other issues that that are taking place, man, and the brain gets overwhelmed. Is that is that your opinion as well, or do you have something different on it?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely, Bruce. No, you're you're right on track with that. I mean, it doesn't make any sense to say, oh, neuroplasticity is gonna save us. In fact, from the epilepsy standpoint, which is another brain network disorder, okay, just like concussion, okay. If you in in animal models, if you tickle their brain with electricity over and over and over and over again, actually the neuroplasticity gets messed up. Okay, and those same mice start growing neurons and connections that they sh would not grow if they didn't have electrical tickles. Okay. And so yeah, of course. If you uh replace electrical tickles with physical concussive force, you know, you think that could mess up the machinery that is supposed to be taking care of um uh of neuroplasticity? You bet, man. You bet.

SPEAKER_00:

Are you coming across anything in your research that indicates that there could be a tie between um, you know, epilepsy, autism, the the the the disorders that you specialize in, um uh any relation to subconcussive uh trauma and the long-term exposure these kids are taking?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's weak. Um but I think we, again, I think we don't know. Um you know, and so uh what they uh for TBI in general, the rates of epilepsy, if you have a severe TBI, which means you're in a car accident and you you're you're uh you had a skull fracture and you had to have neurosurgery, your risk of epilepsy lifelong becomes about 50%. Okay. And if you had a moderate TBI, which means uh and and clearly someone with severe TBI has brain imaging differences, okay, on conventional MRI scan. If you have a moderate TBI um where you you have a you have injury to the brain on MRI, but you didn't need neurosurgery, your rates of epilepsy are about 25-30 percent. And mild TBI is no different than the pop general population. They know. You know, because mild TBI, which I don't really like that term, I prefer concussion, but that form of traumatic brain injury is so variable and has so much to do with how many you've had, what are your other co-occurring brain symptoms, what are your other co-occurring uh body symptoms? Um and and it's so much more common, right? So you got 80% of the world, 80% of the TBIs are mild TBI um or concussive injuries. Um how can you differentiate that from someone who's had um repetitive injury that has never had a concussion, quote unquote? And it's just really it gets really hard because 60% of epilepsy is what we call idiopathic, which means we can't figure it out. We don't know why you have it. So is some of that related to repetitive brain trauma? I mean, I can't tell you that the research has fleshed that out, um, but it's worth looking at. And as brain science evolves, um we gotta we gotta ask some of those questions. Some of those questions, the answer might be no. Uh, but if you don't ask those questions, you you don't know you, you know, I I I call it the brain cannot understand what the eye is not willing to see.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I mean, you got the problem of, you know, these are great questions to ask. It's just that our researchers want to keep asking the same questions over and over in order to get funding. And so, and then we don't do anything with the knowledge, which kind of stinks. But so let's move on a little bit to like treatments, okay? I mean, we um, you know, treating the brain right now, uh, we really, as you said, we don't understand how to treat it. We mostly medicate it now. We give them all, you know, we give SSRIs, SNIs, we hand out candy like it's Halloween, opiates like it's Halloween. I just learned this yesterday. The VA was the largest opiate prescriber in the world. And because of all the attention it's gotten, it's dropped opiate prescriptions down to it's down, it's down the the uh 67% of what they used to prescribe, and they're still the largest opiate prescriber in the world. You know, so we don't treat the brain, we medicate it. So when we're talking about uh subcussive trauma, repetitive exposure, and I think I don't know, I'm trying to see how this moves, but when you deal with TBIs, a lot of these modalities that can help, whether it's you know, brain supplementation, nutrition programs, electronic therapies like photobiomagillation, neurofeedback, HBOT, yada yada, the psychedelics, which are out there just doing a lot of good for veterans. And then, you know, outpaced procedures. What are you seeing now? That are you seeing any change in how you're dealing with epilepsy and autism from a non-traditional, hey, let's just dope them up perspective? And what are the more promising procedures that you're seeing out there that could, you know, help you know, people that have brain damage?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, uh really good question. So this is the crux of brain health, okay. Is it mental health or is it neurological health? And I think those that difference, that separation has harmed people, okay? It is all brain health, bro. Thank you. Okay, and I know you know that because I've listened to some of your show a few times, and I know you preach that, and I do too. Um there are um certain neurological conditions that absolutely medications are needed, okay. Um man, SSRIs are not the evil ones, okay? They have saved people's lives, okay. However, when you use them indiscriminately to, oh, you have this checklist of symptoms, therefore you're depressed. This is what we use for depression, that is not the right way to do it. It has to be individualized, okay? And even if, let's take it to epilepsy for a second. Even if I prescribe you an anti-seizure medicine, it the first one works 50-50. Okay, so I gotta be ready for it not to work. Okay, and then I gotta pivot. And if I don't tell you that you gotta sleep eight hours, you gotta eat whole foods, cut out all the processed stuff, you gotta meditate, you gotta work on your your serenity, your uh well-being, you gotta, you gotta, yeah, it's neuro spirituality, man. You can develop neurospirituality um that can heal, that heals much more effectively than a medication. Now you you need the medicine too, but if you don't do these other three things, plus get some exercise, plus take care of other health conditions you may or may not have, hey, the medicine's only gonna get you so far.

SPEAKER_00:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

So one of the reasons people go to a doctor is they want a cure, okay? And a cure is very rarely seen in a pill. We can cure pneumonia, okay? We can cure some blood infections, we can cure UTI. However, you're an attractive patient, however, when you're talking about curing a subset of 86 billion neurons that make a hundred trillion. connections. Dude, it's not going to come in this little blue pill. Come on, man. You know what I mean? Come on. There's no way. And so and what the problem with that is the the way that medicine is structured is we don't have time. We don't have time to talk about this. You know, you you gotta get in and out. I gotta see my next patient in 30 minutes. I don't have time to tell you what kind of foods to eat, what kind of whatever to eat, what kind of and so you have to educate people in other ways, but the best way to educate someone is to sit down and spend time. Because a man told me once Bruce much wiser than me he said Drew do you know how to spell love? I said Yeah John I do. And he said T-I-M-E. And and it's so capitalistic this medicine business that we do that there's so doctors it's not that they don't want to it's that they can or they think they can.

SPEAKER_00:

I I know people that have are leaving the medical health profession because of the way they have to treat people. And you know I I know folks right now that can't get paid unless they prescribe you know and they're in the mental health industry like they have to prescribe a pill or they don't get paid. And it's like I say come on man. I mean and to your we're trying to fix a very complex ailment that's contained within a highly complex organ that will never be we will never be able to match the capacity brain. I don't care how many quantum computers you bring and bring on your AI, 90% of it which can't even do what it's supposed to do and you say we're going to replicate the brain no you can't replicate consciousness you cannot recruit conceptualization, emotion, all these the amazing things that we can do. But when they're impacted the last thing we need is a lifelong uh you know you know prophylaxis of pills and chasing well there's got to be there's gotta be on ramps there's tons of on ramps there's no off ramps bro what why didn't you build the off ramps okay so people are starting to look at that especially with like uh methamphetamines or ADHD and sepensos people are starting to look at off ramps but it's like people had to die to look for off ramps are you kidding me no look at look at our veteran population how many veterans are no longer here all of them which were given bags of pills and you know and I don't care what people say about the VA they're not an evil organization but they go by the book and the book is hey you got a problem here's a pill for that problem oh you got another problem here's a pill for that we got to change the book we got to rewrite the book because the book has harmed I mean it's not just veterans this is all throughout I mean we we prescribe 90 95% of the pills in the world for mental health are are taken right here in this country and we don't have brain health treatment centers we don't optimize brain health we'll teach you how to you know no optimize your carbohydrate intake and and your and your HVR and and all this other crazy stuff about your health but we never focus on on on what's good up here and I think you know getting the word out that you know hey contact sports especially with developing brains is not a good idea I think we gotta we gotta get that uh we gotta get that moving um so we're at what works what works okay what I mean let's talk about what works um what works is eating whole foods okay uh and not not doing a bunch of high fructose corn syrup okay get away from the pro ultra processed stuff eat eat three squares have some snacks get your omega 3 fatty acids in there stop stop cutting out all fat that fat is good for the brain man eat your proteins you know don't buy into that 1970s food pyramid that put corn on the bottom so the corn subsidiaries I'm sad serious man you know I used to eat baby food because of that thing man I was a weightlifter man all them carbs I need them carbs yeah no father fat's not good I just read about like these protein powders they're putting lead in them you know eat whole foods man eat whole foods get your brain right don't skimp on the fat don't go all low fat you know if you want to go low anything go a little low carb get your proteins get your fats and uh get your eight hours of sleep do your best to get your eight hours of sleep ideally not medicated um but that means you gotta do routine that means you gotta pause you gotta meditate you gotta pray you gotta ask for help okay you gotta stop stiff up a lipinus and you gotta ask for help from the universe and the universe will help you now there are some really interesting neurotherapeutics that I'm interested in neurofeedback certainly can retrain your brain guided meditation certainly can retrain your brain I'm very interested in two technologies the first one is called trans cranial magnetic stimulation uh using magnets to retrain uh to sort of uh work on um uh uh monitoring or changing connections and the other one that I'm really interested in is HBOT um but they gotta be protocoled man all this there's too much oh yeah if I do it you'll get better no no no no you gotta give your protocol out you gotta subject it you gotta subject it to scientific thought you can't be the only one who can do it right that that that ain't right. No I mean if you look at it I've heard you call for that protocols and and there's basic I mean we can all agree like I in the neuro I mean in H bot I know one guy that does it this way and then I went to a clinic and they said no you got to do it our way it's not effective. I'm like well all I know is that every veteran that's been in a chamber said this has changed my life so it doesn't sound like you're you know there's that much variance in effectiveness if you know we're trying to keep people on earth you know and uh and then TMS you got ETMS you got M E R T you got all these different combinations of TMS QEEG which you mentioned earlier and we got all but all of it's out of pocket and that's the other big pain of this is that um you know none of them we're we're trying to push to get them covered under you know MTBI is still TBI you got concussion billing codes you know brain treatment for some reason we could build the damage and we could bill the the drugs but we can't build a treatment plan that is more important than anything you know if you ask me I mean uh I think it's coming Bruce I think it's coming um I think we there's but people need it now you know and I I feel your frustration with the cost um uh the the healthcare industry is um there's there's so much money in it that it's gotten uh criminal almost um you know it's it's like twenty there's twenty-five percent of the gross domestic product of the most um wealthy nation in the world ever with the most billionaires ever and that's healthcare and we can't and we can't get you HBOT right we can't and and and you know what the killer is my wife found this out there is an HBOT machine in every hospital because of wound care yet yeah you can't bill it for brain health yet every hospital has TBI patients coming right in that emergency room there's a lot of indication that HBOT therapy right after a major TBI is so beneficial for the brain but you can't bill it and so we have an entire you know medical healthcare system that's not properly incentivized to produce produce dramatic changes in and and and in patient uh healing but it's all about making money I mean if we if we you know the the if we just took the modalities that we just talked about into our jails and and made them available to the American population we would not only reduce the amount of pharmaceuticals that is out there, we would reduce every ill out there at a fraction of the cost of what it would take. So for a veteran that's on just one you know the average of 10 prescription drugs a year, that's close to$30,000 a year that we're spending on that veteran just to have pills. And then we start talking about they're not employable or they're suffering still from their medicated. They don't even want to be here anymore and we're not giving them job training and we're not and this is just veterans. Everybody needs this right we're just talking about the guys the girls that get a lot of attention because they served our country right but then you start talking you know years of that you know 30 years later you know most veterans retire in their 30s bam their 60s that's a million dollars worth of drugs that if we could apply 40 to$50,000 to every veteran for whatever they want HBOT neurofield neurofeedback psychedelic treatments if they want them brain optimization you talk about whole foods about eating the fats making the brain healthy exercising which all veterans know how to do not a run you know most of them and then you know we got you know some outpatient we could spend an out we could spend most 40 to 50 grand these guys are mortgaging their house their cars I see parents with kids that they get us they give us calls that have been around football for years. Now they're in jail. They're doing drugs doing all this stuff and now they've been Timmy's been playing since he was six. Well let's get him these treatments because do we want to spend$40,000 and have somebody paying taxes for 30 years and helping this country or do you want somebody that's on a lifetime of drugs? That's what pharma wants that's what healthcare wants and that is just wrong.

SPEAKER_01:

So I I absolutely agree with you 100% yeah I you know Bruce I love how you talk I don't know what the answer is you know I don't know if we we can know yet but uh what I do know is what you're talking about that idea of of this pill's gonna fix your brain that that's just not true no okay and and I know that okay and so we gotta keep asking the question we can't just keep making new SSRIs or or whatever it is. We gotta ask the question. And and that's the psychedelic thing right where it's like hey can we use ketamine can we use um uh mushrooms uh psilocybin um to do to do a drastic change and I don't know it's it's not good for people who have addiction but um they're they're even using it in addiction to and and people are having uh changes and um but it's not a one size fit all you know that's the issue we gotta stop thinking about it as mental health we gotta think about it as brain health and it's gotta be individualized there can be a base of what everyone needs good good nutrition good sleep good good fats you know stay away from the processed food neurospirituality meditate get a program and then you know maybe there's gonna be a subset of people where it's HBOT where it's uh where it's psychedelics where it's maybe even medicines because they got they got some serious suicidality and stuff but there's got to be awful there's a reason for drugs man don't get me wrong yeah we got to start asking tough questions all right as we close out Drew tell us how do people find you you know where um you know what you what do you have going on you know what does the future what the immediate future look like for Drew what are you focused on and uh you know how people can contact you with questions or uh to seek out your services well thanks Bruce so I'm I uh just started these businesses uh I've been in healthcare for 15 20 years but I I just started my uh two businesses MBBN it stands for Mind, Body Brain Neurology but it's just MBBN that's my neurological practice and then MBBN Research is my research practice I'm getting I'm working on websites and stuff. The easiest way to get in touch with me is either through LinkedIn Drew Thodison or MBBnresech.org um just threw out my first um article uh from the desk of Dr. Drew and it's all about MTBI and and how we've changed the definitions a little bit of what we talked about uh today and um I'll be throwing my research up there as it comes out and um yeah that's the best way to get a hold of me.

SPEAKER_00:

Cool beans man well Drew thank you so much for coming on the show you definitely you know have a you know from the you know from the world of epilepsy and autism coming in and letting us know you know it's still brain disorders and I love your comment it's not mental health it's brain health and we do know that by optimizing the brain I mean by optimizing my brain I have you know solved a a you know I've still got a long way to go I'm a flawed human being right but I'm still a servant of God and I I'm gonna keep working on it but um you know you're absolutely right and thank you for a a wonderful perspective on the issue of brain injury and how we can make things better and we hope to see you on the show again.

SPEAKER_01:

You bet, Bruce yeah one day at a time brother one day I'm working on it together man.

SPEAKER_00:

All right and folks thank you for another episode of Broken Brains we really appreciate your time here. Remember take go to our website download our book if this show comes out early December 13th Army Navy game Panasonic ripping energy drinks we have Horse Soldier Bourbon Fuel an actual rock concert 100% of the money's raised goes to veterans mental health and suicide prevention services. Don't forget about the app it's on the website Google and Apple like us subscribe us push us out to your friends we appreciate y'all's support because again we're the only voice in this country for repetitive brain trauma and you are now part of our network. We hope to see you soon you got children take care of those melons man they only got one of them. Take care may God bless you all and have a great day