Dear VA Secretary Collins
“Are we going to just accept these conditions? Or are we going to do something about it?” Barbara Rose Johns
19 December 2025.
Dear Secretary Collins. You probably recognize the statues above: George Washington, an early Freedom Fighter; and Barbara Rose Johns, the recent addition to statuary hall. She stood up as a teenager and said “No” to segregation, and helped usher in another advance in an American culture born of freedom from “the way things are done.” She refused to let the culture of segregation prevent her from equality spelled out by the actions of our first President. And she won. Cultures can shift.
We are appealing to you to change the culture at the VA from one of “brain wounds are a mental health issue” to one of: “brain wounds like TBI/PTSD/PCS/BLAST/Concussion must be treated like a wound and healed using modern, proven, scientifically validated alternative therapies.“
Sir, you were sworn in as the 12th Secretary of Veterans Affairs on Feb. 5, 2025. On March 31st, you sat for an interview with Shawn Ryan. Seven minutes in, you said this: ” So, here’s my thought to everybody. We’re not going to be your whipping post anymore. I’m going to tell you the truth and I’m going to give you the answers that we need to do and I’m going to take care of our veteran number one.” While you didn’t mention it then, you preside over the largest health care system in America — nearly 480,000 employees — whose #1 clinical priority is Suicide Prevention.
And yet, as you realize, with your budget of over $440 Billion and twenty years of experience, you cannot reverse the upward trend on Veteran Suicides, now close to your own estimates of 159,000 souls.
Former SEAL Ryan replied to you after your long discourse on the need to change the culture in the VA [currently bad]: “I got 100% [disability]. Yeah. I haven’t stepped into a VA in almost 10 years because my experience has been just atrocious. It was “here’s these pills. We can’t see you.” I mean . . . .I’m having doctors come to me. They don’t even know what a Navy SEAL is. . . . They don’t understand what combat is. My doctor shows up in a sweatsuit, barely even speaks any English. . . . my show, it started with all special ops combat veterans. And everybody has the same complaints and the same issues . . . .I am friends with the top war fighters on the planet. None of them have a good experience at the VA. None of them have anything positive to say about the VA. None of them trust the VA. And that’s why I quit going. I mean, I have more friends that have died of suicide and drug addiction and depression and PTS and everybody’s struggling with especially the special operations guys with the traumatic brain injuries and we just aren’t getting any answers at all from the VA. . . . it’s just created this distrust. . . . I get treated like [ __ ] when I go there. It’s like I’m faking an injury or something. And so I just got to the point where I just threw my hands up and I was like, man, [ __ ] this. I’m not doing it. I will personally pay for my own health care on the civilian side which is much much better than anything I’ve ever had in the VA.”
Daily news reveals your proposed plan for reorganizing the VA. Controversial? Sure. Necessary? Undoubtedly. Designed to actually get better care for brain wounds to Veterans? Silence. But your interviews and editorials keep coming back to all the progress being made and all the money you’re redirecting to Veteran care. You told Shawn: “We spent $588 million on preventive supposed suicide. We spend $2.3 billion in what we’ll call treatment of either the mental aspect, health aspect . . . . so $3 billion total roughly in suicide and our [suicide] numbers are not changing.”
At the risk of stating the obvious, stop throwing good money after bad. Redirect dollars to treatments. You can hire all the psychiatrists you can find and STILL not make a dent in the suicide numbers so long as you continue on the path you’ve been on for decades. Brain wounds are not primarily mental health problems. Brain wounds — TBI/PTSD/PCS/BLAST/Concussion — are wounds. They can be treated. The world outside the VA is treating them with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT), doing the job your VA cannot and will not do.
We have offered to help the VA become heroes to Shawn Ryan and the SpecOps community, as well as DoD, Veterans, and citizens more broadly. We have helped heal brain wounds in over 12,500 Veterans, over 33,000 citizens. We have active programs with the Wounded Warrior Battalion/East at Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg, and in 13 states with legislation to use HBOT for TBI/PTSD. And we’re doing it with donations and our pro bono efforts.
There is a culture in the VA — particularly among discredited researchers and psychiatrists — that HBOT does not work, is too expensive, risky, unproven, a distraction. Your website continues to advertise the top interventions that allegedly meet the test of “evidence-based medicine”: Psychopharmacology; Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT); Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR); Prolonged Exposure/Trauma-Focused Psychotherapy. Mr. Secretary, none of these interventions is on-label. They all lack scientific validation as being safe and effective for treating and healing brain wounds. HBOT has more scientific validation proving safety and efficacy than all the interventions used in the VA.
We can help immediately. We already are, living up to the challenge you set in your confirmation and continuing media appearances: the Veteran must come first. We offer you the information and infrastructure you need to shift course; not to abandon all the rice bowls and equities that resist change. Keep hiring more mental health professionals. Continue to dispense billions of dollars on drugs. Let the failed policies continue until they die of their own accord. But with the hundreds of millions of dollars you’ve already identified as available through reprogramming, make an investment in healing Veterans, not just palliating them. I’m sure you understand why Shawn let you know why he’s not going back to the VA. He and his battle buddies can get brain wound healing only outside the VA.
Mr Secretary, you know about “pay fors” and budget-neutral legislation. Bills in Congress now calling for using HBOT for TBI/PTSD [ S.3130; S.2737; S.862; H.R. 1336; H.R. 72] all lack funding. The CBO Report on HR 1336 points to $158 Million available to treat 1000 Veterans. We applaud the Report but can treat nearly double that number and in far less than three years using the 170+ TreatNOW Coalition clinics available. Pressing DoD chambers into service can accelerate the healing. The cost to treat is not cheap, but compare it to the current path your Department is on. As we spell out in our book, Brain Drain, we can treat the 877,450 estimated brain-wounded Veterans for less than one-half of one percent of the costs to NOT treat those same suffering Veterans.
You wrote in the Washington Post that “VA’s EHR modernization effort is well on its way to improving the lives of millions of veterans across the country.” An Electronic Health Record is designed to save time and money and to ease the burden on staff and patients. The VA’s current iteration may save time, but it can’t substitute good medicine for failed institutions that simply misconstrue the new science about brain wounds.
The GAO Report on December 12, 2025 summarized: “After three unsuccessful attempts over two decades, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) undertook a fourth effort in 2017—the Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program—to modernize its legacy health information system. GAO has previously reported on the challenges VA has experienced with this effort. In these reports, GAO made 18 recommendations to improve cost estimating, schedule, program management, user adoption and satisfaction, and operational testing. GAO deemed 12 of these as priority recommendations because of their criticality to successful future deployments. VA has not yet fully implemented 16 of the 18 recommendations.”
Originally estimated to cost ~$10Billion and be operational within 10 years (2028), the upgrade is now estimated to cost some where between $49.8 billion total lifecycle cost including long-term sustainment — far above the original [adjusted] ~$16 billion estimate. Delivery is expected by 2031. And, as I’m not sure you’re aware, the terrific reliability scores you report — “As of September, our EHR had a 96.68 percent incident-free rate over the prior 18 months” — are due to the oversight, accountability, and enforcement during that 2-year hiatus.
We applaud your vow to not accept failed policies and structures and performance. We are 100% behind focus on healing Veterans and making their lives not just better, but improving their Quality of Life and that of their families. We can do that together through adding brain wound healing to the dialogue and standard of care the VA can provide with help from the Community. And we don’t have to wait. We have already begun. Join us.
“Are we going to just accept these conditions? Or are we going to do something about it?”
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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.
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.