The Brain Wound Awakening: Part I

October 24, 2025
McLean, Virginia

MAJ Ben Richards (USA, Ret) knows two big things from his experience in Baqubah, Iraq in 2006-7. It he was to succeed with his mission of forging political bonds with warring factions, he had to understand their culture, and he had to build trust.

In what became an ingenious tactic born of his Mormon missionary work among the Chinese community in Canada years earlier, CAPT Richards took off his battle rattle, disarmed, and sat down with leaders of opposing forces to work out agreements. This cooperation with local Sunni Muslim militias became part of the Sunni Awakening, for years after a growing success.

CAPT Richard’s daring insights were chronicled by Michael Gordon in the New York Times in 2007. The success of this and other tactics led to the introduction of female “cultural support teams” into the theater in 2009. They could go and learn where males could not.

The essence of the progression of the Awakening: know what you’re doing by knowing the environment in which you’re operating. To quote Sun Tzu: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

MAJ Richards became a war casualty. His saga with his brain wounds and journey back to a PhD and restoration of his family and his life are one story in hundreds of thousands. The difficulty is with what Nicholas Kristof called “how America is failing its soldiers and veterans, honoring them with lip service and ceremonies but breaking faith with them on all that matters most.”

Little has changed in the VA in the years since Ben found Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy. The “dialogue of the deaf” continues between suffering Veterans and representatives of the VA and DoD who cling to their inadequate standard of care. The longstanding protocols for dealing with “mental health” issues, to include both PTSD and TBI, remain known failures for complex, combat-wounded Veterans.

The VA’s own reporting admits as much. In a 2020 report, First-line Psychotherapies for Military-Related PTSD, findings for military and veteran populations with PTSD include:

• First‐line trauma‐focused therapies like cognitive processing therapy (CPT) and prolonged exposure therapy (PE) do not produce meaningful symptom reduction in a substantial fraction of combat patients [NOTE: the same holds true for another primary therapy, EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.]
• A large proportion remain persistently symptomatic, and many do not reach full remission.
• Trauma-focused therapies may not perform substantially better than non‐trauma‐focused or supportive interventions in these populations, which is somewhat unexpected given their “gold‐standard” status in many guidelines.
• Therefore, clinicians and policymakers should recognize the complexity of military‐related PTSD and consider flexible, perhaps stepped or combined treatment plans rather than assuming a single therapy will suffice for most.

These facts accompany the current damage being done to the VA through professional attrition. The VA has lost more than 6,000 clinicians since January: (nurses ~3,100; medical assistants ~1,300; doctors ~800; social workers ~500; psychologists ~150) as of August 2025. Another source states: in the first 9 months of FY 2025 the VA had 418 fewer registered nurses, 139 fewer medical officers/physicians, 107 fewer social workers, plus declines in other clinical occupations.

At the same time, the rate of severe reported staffing shortages is extremely high: ~79-94% of VA facilities report severe shortages for doctors and nurses, and many mental-health-related provider types are also highly impacted. These two facts together suggest that the VA’s ability to recruit and retain enough providers is under serious strain.

So here we are: ineffective treatments; shrinking professional staff; a continuing Veteran suicide epidemic; and over 877,000 TBI/PTSD Veterans in need of help.

Imagine for a moment that we treat the “Invisible Wounds of War” epidemic the way CAPT Richards confronted sectarian violence in Baqubah. How to quell the violence, understand the problem, and build trust among the factions, and unite for a common purpose?

Few who deal with individuals within the VA complain of mendacity or ill intent on the part of individuals. But the overall picture painted by thousands of Veterans who seek help outside that system paint a picture of a “deep state” culture in need of change. Consider some of the reporting: Wounding Warriors: How Bad Policy Is Making Veterans Sicker and Poorer; Mission Betrayed: How the VA Really Fails America’s Vets; Broken Promises; It Shouldn’t Be This Hard to Serve Your Country; Service Denied: Marginalized Veterans in the 20th and 21st Centuries; and the prize-winning reporting by Dave Philipps at the New York Times.

Experts who deal with seemingly intractable conflict — think government shutdown — come round to central principles in human relations. The quick messages are consistent: Effective negotiators unite empathy and principle. They expand the conversation and the possibilities. To create peace and make progress, it is imperative to uncover deeper human needs and uphold shared values.

In the next issue, we’re going to explore A.I. assisted answers to a fundamental question for Veterans suffering from Invisible Brain Wounds: Beginning with the best books on negotiations aimed at peaceful resolution of differences, can you help me construct a strategy to negotiate with the Veterans Administration about how to treat brain-wounded Veterans with alternate, scientifically-proven therapies?

We intend to explore realistic paths forward that can make the VA and DOD real heroes to the Veterans so in need of help for their brain wounds. The Awakening has to happen on both sides, those that resist, and those that need to understand that resistance. We need to find ways to sit with decision makers to construct the roadmap to success.

Congress is going to come back into session, and we need to be ready with positive and negotiated answers to questions that will reduce suicides and transform medical practice regarding brain wound healing.

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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.