Concussion / TBI Update

Hi, it's Dr. A. And if you're listening to this anywhere near live in 2021, we have a new newsletter that's out, and it's about traumatic brain injury, concussion, et cetera. And so, as usual with these updates on the newsletters, I don't go into the depth that I do in the newsletter because that's, of course, written out, there's references and all that business. So if you're interested, I'll put a link in the description below to the newsletter so you have fast access to it. You also, if you ever get lost, can just go to dranow.com, and there's a newsletter tab there as well. But the concussion TBI newsletter, there's just a few things. I built it around a review that was done around traumatic brain injury, which is divided up into a number of things, but TBI, concussion, and then MTBI, mild traumatic brain injury. Mm-hmm. which, if depending on, you know, how it hits you and how many you've had, can be anything but mild. But there is that division. The bottom line of the research review was there's a lot of science known about traumatic brain injury, but not a lot of pharmacologic interventions, so drug interventions that are terribly useful except for symptomatic care. While that's true, and the authors, of course, of that paper, which I'll also give you a link or at least reference to if you want to read it, the authors of the paper, you know, get into that and they get into all the detail about what is and isn't available in the drug kingdom. But what I wanted to point out was having worked with— well, having had a lot of traumatic brain injury myself, but also having worked with them clinically, there are a number of things that are helpful that are now starting to get their way into the research, but we've known about clinically for a long time. And so those things include hyperbaric oxygen therapy. If you can get to hyperbaric oxygen therapy soon after a TBI, you can greatly decrease the signs and symptoms of the TBI. Now, hyperbaric is where you go into a chamber. You may have seen these sort of things. A lot of athletes use these, etc. And you're put under pressure and then given oxygen, uh, once you're down at depth or at pressure, and it helps to hyperperfuse, uh, the, the bloodstream and then the cells with oxygen, which creates a couple of types of healing response at the very least. So hyperbaric is one very, very useful thing. Another thing that we've noticed clinically is the support of glutathione in your body. Now, glutathione is one of your primary antioxidants. Mm-hmm. And it is a in a triplet with vitamin C, glutathione, and vitamin E. But glutathione is the most complicated of them because it requires some synthesis in your body, and it also requires a lot of cofactors to make it work, mostly minerals and B vitamins, and also vitamin C, of course. So glutathione support is one. Now a lot of people nowadays will use liposomal. Glutathione orally, which does absorb and can be very useful. We used a lot clinically of intravenous glutathione, and then we'd give the cofactors separately in the intravenous bag, but you can certainly do these things orally as well. I'll get into that in the newsletter. There's also an acute damage— acute brain recovery supplement that was actually invented by a doctor who used to be a a college football player and had a lot of— still has a lot of contacts in the world of sports. And I have no financial connection to this. It is a proprietary product, but I've used it a lot myself and also with patients. It's called Cover-3, Cover-3 for head issues. It's in a little gel that tastes good and take a packet once or twice a day, especially in the acute injury phase. There's also a lot of other things that scientifically make a lot of sense that we use together. One are fats that are the good kind of fats for your brain. So we think of good fats, a lot of times you think of, like, omega-3 fats from, say, fish oil, things of that nature. Those certainly fit in there. There's also phospholipids, so, like, phosphatidylcholine, And that is often used. It's very calming because it incorporates itself into the fatty membranes, the cell membranes. Your brain uses a lot of it. Your brain uses it for membrane stability, but also it uses it as a choline donor, which goes to acetylcholine, which among many, many things helps you with memory and some of the things that get damaged in the traumatic brain injury space. The other things that I bring up in there, there's of course a longer list than we'll go through in the video, and again, if you want it, I'll put the link in the description below. But there are also a lot of other support nutrients, and as I say, if you can do some of these nutritional supports and hyperbaric oxygen, it can be terribly helpful. Now you might say, well, what if I'm long past my injury? Well, what we notice with people who are long past injury is it's a lot like other things healing. If you're fresh to the injury, the interventions usually affect you more quickly. If you are remote to the injury, it is still helpful to do these things. It just takes longer because it's like an old injury anywhere else. And so whereas with, you know, nutrient support and hyperbaric, we You might get like 20 treatments and get a lot of benefit with somebody with a fresh injury. You know, it might take 20 to 40 or more with an older injury. They've shown this with NFL football players who have retired and long since needed treatment and then treated later, and that the number of treatments tended to, tended to be more in those cases. But when it comes to some of the brain injury issues around Memory, cognition, people get a lot of tinnitus, ringing in the ears, a lot of mental-emotional changes, all sorts of other headaches, all sorts of things. This combination of hyperbaric oxygen and supporting the fatty acids and supporting your, your redox, your antioxidant status, can be extremely helpful with people. So I just wanted to bring that up. Again, if you want the references and you want some more info on all this, you can go to the description box. There'll be a link to the newsletter, and the newsletter, of course, being a print or an electronic print thing, will have all that stuff in it. Well, thank you very much. If you like this, like, share, subscribe, notifications, all those good things, and I appreciate your time. Thank you.