Concussion Remission and CTE – Part 2

“If football is your passion in life and you would rather play football for 20 years and have a shortened life span, that’s your choice.”

“Is a concussion going to lead to CTE? No, probably not in most cases. But if you have enough concussions over a certain amount of time, yes, then I think you can lead to CTE.”

“CTE can be caused by smaller hits to the head over time.”

“It makes common sense that children, whose brains are rapidly developing, should not be hitting their heads hundreds of times per season.”

“. . . it’s really the repetitive minor injuries, the ones that are asymptomatic that occur on almost every play of the game, the sub-concussive hits: that’s the big problem for football.”

Dr Ann McKee, Preeminent CTE expert

Dr. Ann McKee has as much experience with CTE as almost anyone on the planet. She is part of an enormous network of doctors and researchers who are working to explain CTE, keep data on it, work to diagnose it as early as possible, prevent it if possible, and raise awareness about its symptoms and path of brain destruction. But not to cure it, or even treat brain wounds early.

The Boston University CTE Center has a Mission to “conduct state-of-the-art research on CTE, including its neuropathology and pathogenesis, clinical presentation, genetics and other risk factors, biomarkers, methods of detection during life, and methods of prevention and treatment.” Dr McKee and the Center are affiliated with Boston Medical Center where the bulk of “treatments” for brain injury occur.

Those “treatments” include:

** Neurological care for concussion and traumatic brain injury (TBI)

** Psychiatric support for depression, anxiety, and behavioral changes

** Cognitive rehabilitation to address memory loss and executive function issues

** Sleep therapy for disturbances common in TBI and suspected CTE

** Physical therapy for balance and coordination problems

** Speech-language therapy for communication and cognitive deficits

** Medication management for mood, pain, and neurological symptoms

Notice, please, the lack of any mention about healing the wound to the brain as a way to get to the probable cause of the symptoms. Who would have thought?

Bishop Tutu said: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” His thoughts on “causes” helped explain the phenomenon at work here: the emphasis on “treatments” without root cause analysis grounded in science. The consortium in Boston has both ends of the CTE problem supposedly in hand. Banging your head may cause CTE; and we can alleviate the pain and suffering with palliatives while we look for pharmaceuticals and other yet-to-be-discovered remedies for this disease. Isn’t it terrible?

Well, it’s pretty clear that head banging is one of the culprits. And BLAST. And war. IEDs. Assaults. Accidents. Falls. Stroke. It’s daunting, all the ways that brain wounding begins.

But we hear crickets, silence, and cultural apathy about treatments that actually heal the brain wound NOW, today, using medicine in use worldwide. It’s as though American medicine has succumbed to the “alter-ignorant” world: folks who don’t know about alternatives, don’t want to know, know-but-ignore, or know and aggressively defend a system that has failed an essential test of medicine: “Primum non nocere.” First, do no harm. Sometimes, doing nothing is good medicine. But in the case of brain wounds, we know that doing nothing can lead to deadly consequences.

Medicine is an evolving field, rooted in custom, existing within a technological revolution that makes it difficult to keep up with advances in medical care. We forget the burdens placed on the profession. 300-400 physicians commit suicide every year. Based on recent reports and surveys, the number of doctors leaving medicine — an average of 47,400 every year — has surged over the past decade, driven largely by burnout, administrative overload, and shifting healthcare policies. In 2021 alone, over 70,000 physicians left medicine—more than 6% of the U.S. physician workforce. Burnout, lack of professional fulfillment, and administrative burdens (especially electronic health records) were major drivers. Surveys show that 1 in 3 physicians have considered leaving clinical practice, and 1 in 5 plan to do so within two years.

Specialization and the burdens of practice tend to dull lessons from medical school, about core values of medicine and practice:

1. Service to Humanity
2. Professional Competence and Integrity
3. Emotional Resilience and Empathy
4. Lifelong Learning and Adaptability
5. Motivation and Meaning
6. Challenges and Sacrifices

Doctors owe it to each patient to provide the best care, the best knowledge, a way forward, preferably with the hope of cure, or at least remission, of their disease or ailment. But lifelong learning seems to have eroded across all professions, motivation is harder, and going with the flow is easier. CAVEAT EMPTOR: the patient has to take charge of their healing.

Naturally, there is the immediate response that “patients come in with A.I. and internet knowledge and think they’re as smart as the doctor.” Well, in this case, if the doctor doesn’t know the research, the patient is on their own for advice better than “the body will heal itself.” Which stimulates another old adage: Physician, heal thyself.

There should be no excuse for doctors and medical staff in the military and professional and college and high school sports that they remain “alter-ignorant” about how to properly diagnose and heal brain wounds. Concussion and CTE are hardly back-water areas of medicine. Hundreds of articles every week keep the ravages of brain wounding in the headlines, whether from the latest mass shooting or another athlete in the Concussion Protocol or dead of CTE.

And the science and peer-reviewed research continues to pile up that Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy allows for the remission if not complete healing from brain wounds of all kinds. Here’s a huge time-saver for the reader and doctors wondering what the latest research shows. Read Dr Daphne Denham’s just-published research on acute Concussions. Lay it side-by-side with the movie CONCUSSION and Dr McKee’s latest research on CTE. See how the piece falls into place:

1. brain wounding is bad
2. it can lead to CTE
3. HBOT can “cure” concussion and possible CTE by healing the brain
4. TreatNOW

NOTE: Dr Paul Harch explains in this short video the scientific case for the use of HBOT for TBI/PTSD and its role in healing brain wounds and reversing and/or eliminating symptoms that could be precursors to CTE.

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The TreatNOW Mission is ending service member suicides. Along the way, we have learned that we can end suicidal ideation, help end symptoms of PTSD, get patients off most of their drugs, and heal brain wounds to end the effects of Concussion, BLAST injury, mild TBI, Persistent Post Concussive Syndrome, and polytrauma from AHI, Burn Pits, and COVID. No Veteran or civilian has ever been killed while undergoing HBOT treatment for TBI/PTSD. For a video Summary, see: https://www.youtube.com/@treatnowdotorg/videos  

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.