An Open Letter to Commandant of the US Coast Guard
Immediate Help for Surfmen Brain Wounds Is Available Today
“Taking care of your brain health is an operational necessity and a matter of readiness. . . . We need leaders at every level to ensure our people are aware of potential brain injury symptoms, get medical attention without hesitation or fear of stigma, and receive proper medical care.”
Admiral Kevin Lunday, Commandant of the Coast Guard
An Open Letter to Commandant of the US Coast Guard
Dave Philipps of the NYT has written often of the damage caused by traumatic brain injury in active duty SpecOps and combat veterans. His piece on surfmen brain injuries led to your rapid response, including this charge: “Taking care of your brain health is an operational necessity and a matter of readiness.” You committed to get them “proper medical care.”
The Coast Guard’s unfamiliarity with brain wounds mimics similar US Army Command gaps years ago in 2009. The Iraq War was producing thousands of what the Army classified as Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD) casualties. David Hovda, PhD, briefed LTGEN Peter Chiarelli, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, on findings at UCLA. Those findings provided compelling data on the prevalence of Traumatic Brain Injury afflicting combat Veterans. These were physical wounds, not malingering “mental health” complaints.
Military doctors in 2009 doubted that Blast injuries cause brain wounds. Hovda’s findings caused Chiarelli to be “gobsmacked” when he saw images of the physical damage caused by overpressure. That interchange was aired in a CBS 60 Minutes segment in May 2013.
What began as fundamental medical and Command misunderstanding of BLAST injuries has blossomed into a full-blown suicide epidemic as military medicine continues to wring their hands about brain wounds while treating them as incurable. Standards of care in the DoD and the VA only manage symptoms. They are at least a decade behind Israel and worldwide medicine in their understanding of brain wounds and how to heal those wounds with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy.
Foot-dragging and suspicious DoD/VA research findings continue to impede use of a healing modality that Israel has provided for over a decade to their Defense Forces and citizens. The US military has endured over 163,000 suicides since 9/11. Israel’s suicide rate is ten times lower than in the US. While military medicine fiddles, Veterans and active duty are perishing, misdiagnosed, uninformed, and untreated.
The resistance by medicine to this breakthrough technology is not unlike the decades-long resistance to simple handwashing to prevent germ infection. Semmelweis’s original evidence in 1847 was 20 years before Pasteur’s and Lister’s germ theory itself was established. It wasn’t until the 1880s–1890s that antiseptic/aseptic techniques, including routine handwashing, became standard in surgical practice — roughly 40–45 years after Semmelweis’s original evidence. Semmelweis himself died destitute in an asylum, shunned by the medical community that basically took four decades to open their eyes and accept scientific data. 20 years of proven research on HBOT should be enough time to move out on immediate treatment to end this suicide epidemic.
Admiral Lundy, you can short-circuit the delays from months of more data-collection and studies that bureaucracies require. We’re talking about what Special Operators have known for over a decade. Operator Syndrome is real, documented, widespread, and systemically untreated with current protocols. High-precision professions in the military that demand peak performance are under attack, even hundreds of miles from the kinetic battleground in Iran. A growing epidemic demands immediacy, not just more research into pharma and plant-based treatments that are years away. And they don’t cure brain wounds. We hope they pan out, but 17-22 service members succumb to suicide daily.
The War Horse and ABC News have reported that 653 US soldiers have been injured during the war with Iran. 18 service member deaths are reported. 170 of the wounded suffered concussions and head injuries as a result of Iranian attacks. The wounded include at least 64 senior military officers. Iran has unleashed between 2,000 and 3,000 attacks across the region. The US and Israel have orchestrated over 12,000 strikes in 2026 alone. Blast injuries are only going up, while the inherent risks to surfmen and SWCC won’t abate. We need to recognize that brain wounding is a part of the job, and we need to employ maintenance and healing interventions on a routine basis, not just after the damage becomes permanent.
We have to expand our conception of “Operator Syndrome.” Brain wounds will continue to mount, adding to the untreated lists of high-precision professionals degraded by blasts and brain insults of all types.
Luckily, a new breed of Functional Medicine professionals have crafted the diagnostic side of identifying the damage. Allo Performance is perfecting a protocol that draws from functional medicine, systems biology, and performance science. Their full picture protocol — hormones, gut integrity, toxin burden, metabolomics, cognition — allows them to build a care plan ranked by what’s actually limiting the patient. Root cause diagnositcs with biomarker analysis. Not a checklist; a system. A system that DoD and the VA should already have in place, but don’t.
Israeli researchers have perfected treatment protocols for both TBI and PTSD that flow directly from evidence-based and clinical experience for over a decade treating both the IDF and civilians. These Clinical Practice Guidelines are rooted in current science, decades of experience, and understanding of the Mechanisms of Action that lead to brain wounding.
Admiral, you’re going to get pushback when you seek ground truth about how to treat Operator Syndrome and BLAST brain wounds. The polytrauma that surfmen and SWCC and SEALs and Marauders and Delta and drone operators far from the battlefield experience is treatable. Curative interventions with Hyperbaric Oxygenation and some alternative interventions that work at reversing neurodegeneration and physiologic structural damage are available today across the nation. Sadly, DoD assets aren’t being used [though aircraft carriers deploy hyperbaric chambers for treating rapid decompression brain wounds.] The VA has no HBOT chambers in their inventory. Despite that hard-line resistance, over 12,500 Veterans, among them over 750 Special Operators, have found their way to restored quality of life through HBOT delivered safely and effectively, either at their own expense or through donations.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are being expended on Suicide Prevention strategies and drug research that don’t include the basics: heal the brain wound and the symptoms and drug dependencies recede or are eliminated entirely.
Hear it from a cast off, a West Point grad, now a PhD, restored to his life and family after a decade of decline. His story is repeated tens of thousands of times:
“I was very fortunate to get the very best care that was available in the US Army. … [but] the Army determined that I was medically unfit…. There was not an expectation that I would ever be employed again… fully disabled… I couldn’t hold a job….the official line was that I wouldn’t improve….the goal was to find a new normal….no improvement ….I have been through every type of treatment that is offered by DoD and the VA to help with TBI. I think I have tried every medication for headaches, every medication family group. I have even done Botox injections to my head to try to deal with headaches. I have been through [everything]… at that point I was introduced to HBOT…. I have seen an amazing improvement. Just orders of magnitude improvement beyond anything….just a huge difference….started working out. For the first time in years I’ve been able to read a book…. to have hope again….to have more of a future than to just be moving piles of dirt around in the back yard….” Major Ben Richards, USA, ret.
Sir, we are at your service to heal those who serve. Call us; we can immediately add to the number of Coast Guard wounded we are already treating and healing. TreatNOW.
Information provided by TreatNOW.org does not constitute a medical recommendation. It is intended for informational purposes only, and no claims, either real or implied, are being made.