MEMORIAL DAY 2025
MEMORIAL DAY ORDER
Headquarters Grand Army of the Republic,
Washington, D.C., May 5, 1868.
GENERAL ORDERS No. 11
[Memorial Day] is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country . . . . What can aid more to assure this result than by cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead who made their breasts [and their brains] a barricade between our country and its foes? . . . . let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us as sacred charges upon the nation’s gratitude—the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.”
May 26, 2025
Arlington, VA
This Memorial day is accompanied by the steady rumble off Capitol Hill of Congressional committees interviewing Administration selectees for healthcare positions. HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr continues to explain MAHA, Make America Healthy Again. The MAHA Commission Report was released this week. “Make Our Children Healthy Again” is a call to action. It presents the stark reality of American children’s declining health, backed by compelling data about overmedication, reward for treatment rather than prevention, and long-term negative trends. More importantly, it seeks to unpack the potential dietary, behavioral, medical, and environmental drivers behind this crisis. By examining the root causes of deteriorating child health, this assessment establishes a clear, evidence- based foundation for the policy interventions, institutional reforms, and societal shifts needed to reverse course, including especially access to proven, innovative, cutting-edge treatments like hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT).
Dr. Casey Means will soon face questioning for the position of Surgeon General. Dr. Means’ history is instructive for its deviation from “traditional medicine” into integrative/functional “everything is related” medicine. She writes: “Exiting the separatist, reductionist framework of medicine to take on unifying cellular perspectives of health and disease felt like a sea change to me.”
Her book, Good Medicine, could be as true of the VAHealth system as she asserts for America’s healthcare industry:
“Every institution that impacts your health makes more money when you are sick and less when you are healthy — from hospitals to pharma to medical schools, and even insurance companies. This incentive has created a system that is demonstrably hurting patients.”
In its continuing involvement in shaping the future of brain wound healing protocols, TreatNOW participated in a teach-in near the White House in early May. The Healing Science Policy Institute is a new policy think tank devoted to the restructuring and redesign of America’s healthcare system. Over two days, innovative scientists, doctors, researchers, and citizens delivered TED-like talks on subjects like Ozone therapy; restructuring CMS; the pervasiveness and deadly results of inflammation; consciousness and the internal healing process; undo influences of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries; exploitation of physicians; and the use of HBOT to illuminate the possibilities for transforming protocols for TBI/PTSD/Concussion. More broadly, there is confusion in “mental health” models that ignore root cause analysis, substituting instead psychiatric and psychological diagnoses of symptoms instead of accurately diagnosing the physical damage to the brain caused by BLAST, toxins, inflammation, PTSD, violence, stress, Concussions, and directed energy weapons.
Memorial Day occasions reverie in some Veterans. Combat is unlike most human experience, where the threat of death is real, and survival is sweet and sometimes painful. Remembering lost comrades, some lost to combat, some to suicide, leads some to finally seek help where the VA and “the system” have failed. Casey Means knows how that system fails. Doctors like Paul Harch and Shai Efrati and Jim Wright and Lin Weaver, and Amir Hadanny, and Philip James all have contributed to an understanding of the life-changing nature of HBOT in transforming sickness into health through the power of oxygen under pressure. All know how “the system” conspires against change.
The Nobel Prize Committee recognized this “hidden” reality about the importance of oxygen. The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe, and Gregg L. Semenza for their discoveries of how cells sense and respond to oxygen levels. Their work revealed the molecular machinery that allows cells to adapt to varying oxygen levels, a fundamental process for life. This discovery has implications for understanding and treating diseases like anemia, cancer, and heart disease.
Thanks to the groundbreaking work of these Nobel Laureates, we know much more about how different oxygen levels regulate fundamental physiological processes. Our immune system and many other physiological functions are also fine-tuned by the O2-sensing machinery. That includes wound healing in the brain. Their discovery points toward a medical necessity: the need to teach doctors about the role of oxygen in healing nearly every disease we know.
For most Veterans who are suffering untreated brain wounds, Memorial day is like most others: survival, resilience, pain, frustration, coping. Most are unaware of the shifting tide in medicine that brings the day closer when oxygen under pressure is not only on-label and insured, but is ubiquitous in hospitals for the array of diseases for which medicine offers only palliation through pharmaceuticals.
It does not need to be this way. HBOT and other proven alternatives are healing brain wounds in those lucky enough to find their way to real treatment: TreatNOW, Americas Mighty Warriors, the 22 Project, Healing Arizona Veterans, the VFW, American Legion, DAV, AFSA all encourage the use of HBOT for brain wounds/TBI/PTSD. 12 states haven’t waited on the VA to evolve from resistance to recognition of current science. Those states recognize the proven safety and effectiveness — and cost savings. They have passed legislation and funding calling for the use of HBOT-for-TBI/PTSD. Over 160 HBOT clinics continue treating Veteran and civilian brain wounds safely and effectively.
CMS, the FDA, the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine Society, and especially the Veterans Administration need to put science before politics and recognize HBOT as a proven safe and effective intervention to heal brain wounds and lessen the chance of suicidal ideation.
We have to remember that Veterans deserve better than another helping of drugs and lifelong neglect. Memorial Day is not just about remembering the dead. It is a chance to reflect on how to make changes so the living get their lives back. MAHA has to include restoring the brain health of all Americans suffering from undiagnosed and untreated brain wounds. The science and the moral mandate is clear on this Memorial Day.
We don’t have to wait. If not us, who? If not now, when? TreatNOW.
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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 and Burn Pits. 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.