Change Your Brain Every Day - Can Hyperbaric Oxygen Heal My Brain?

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

When Dr. Daniel Amen was working on the largest ever NFL study on the brains of active and retired players, one of the biggest takeaways was how the subjects’ brains reacted to hyperbaric oxygen treatment. In short, they got much better. In this first episode of a series on healing with oxygen, the Amens discuss the benefits of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and Tana shares her recent first-hand account of how it helped her recover from a surgery.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Hey, everybody. We're going to talk about healing with oxygen, that oxygen is so important. But before we do, we have reviews.

And this is from Glenda. I love your and Dr. Amon's podcasts and the education you provide us. I'm so thankful for all that you do to engage the public in wellness, eating clean, and taking the right supplements. So that's from Glenda. Thank you so much. So why are we going to talk about healing with oxygen? Because it's important. You mean, why are you looking at me like that? So I posted a picture on Facebook and on Instagram of me in the oxygen chamber, and it got way more like interest than I would have thought. It was like one of my highest uh engaging pictures so it was

really interesting but another video that got posted got like 25 million views yes and that's why you need oxygen it's so stupid we're gonna talk about so stupid so i like to keep my my community just involved in what i'm doing had no no idea that it would go viral it's so stupid so i like to keep my my community just involved in what i'm doing had no no idea that it would go viral it's so stupid so share well since you brought it up now i have to because it's so stupid um so i take you all know because you've been following us that i love self-defense classes and i take these silly class i mean i take survival classes and all sorts of stuff and so i took one class on counter custody and kidnapping, and they taught you how to get out of handcuffs and zip ties and all this stuff. And I didn't post the whole video because they

didn't want me to. I only posted the part where I was actually like at the end of getting out of the zip ties. And so I posted that part of it because they said I could. So maybe they liked that you were tied up. so i posted getting out of the zip ties and it went viral which is so dumb it was the dumbest thing um and you just thought it was hilarious and so i just thought i was posting like keeping my few thousand women involved in my life and it like went crazy so it was so stupid but that is not what we're talking about today. We are talking about hyperbaric oxygen. Oh, hyperbaric oxygen. Yes.

That's awesome. And one of the reasons you're interested, again, going back to your scan, is it was sleepy. And one of the reasons I got interested in hyperbaric oxygen 20 years ago was that Mike Usler from UCLA, he's a nuclear medicine doctor, he would show me these before and after spec scans showing significant increases in blood flow in people who underwent hyperbaric oxygen training. Well, when I was in the hospital working as a nurse, I worked in a trauma unit.

We used to use hyperbaric oxygen for people who had wounds that wouldn't heal. So for necrotizing fasciitis, which is a flesh-eating bacteria. So for certain infections. Why did you scare me? You just scared me. So certain infections. Also, one time I had an elderly lady that she was like in her late 80s. She got attacked by a pit bull and this pit bull degloved her whole arm and it wouldn't heal. It was really sad. And so we put her on hyperbaric oxygen to help stimulate the healing process. And so I had never heard of it for what you do until I met you. And I was like, oh, you use it for brain health?

Oh, that's so interesting. I had seen it for healing, for bacterial infections and healing and stuff like that so i thought it was so interesting so now i'm doing it and i posted this picture of me inside the chamber um because i'm trying to stimulate blood flow and wake things up after you know anesthesia um and so and a head injury um and so i got a lot of interest so i thought we would share with our community why we do it here, what it does, why it's good. So we do it in all eight of our clinics because we often see low blood flow on the SPECT scans we do.

So SPECT is a study of blood flow and activity in the brain. And I always am thinking in my head, first do no harm, use the least toxic, most effective treatment. And hyperbaric oxygen is one. And just as you said, it's approved by Medicare for 14 wound healing indications like diabetic ulcers, but it's not approved for brain indications. And so people don't think that if you have a stroke, well, that's in fact a wound. If you have a head injury, that's a wound. If you have lower overall blood flow from general anesthesia, well, that's sort of like a wound. And so there's been a

sort of fight in the insurance industry. Should you cover it? Should you not? I don't really like political fights, so I stay out of them. I published a study on soldiers who had blast injuries and also emotional trauma. And after 40 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen, after the first session, we saw improvement. But after 40 sessions, we saw persistent improvement. We published it in the Journal of Neurotrauma, and they had improved cognitive scores, improved emotional scores. I was just so excited. Because clinically, we've seen that for a long time, that our patients who have traumatic brain injury, who have strokes, who have some sort of toxic exposure, that hyperbaric oxygen is one of those treatments that can make a significant difference. Yeah. So you touched on some of them. Some of the things that could cause

decreased blood flow to the brain, head injury, infection, right? Toxin. Toxin. Any form of heart disease, heart arrhythmia. So anesthesia, heart disease. So when you go under anesthesia, especially for bypass surgery, they bypass your heart. So that can, and the anesthesia itself can decrease blood pressure. Well, in the end of mental illness, I actually have a story. It's a bit similar to yours, but it was worse in that my assistant, Karen,

had no idea that she had an aortic aneurysm. But they found it in her family. And so everybody got screened. And Karen had a large aortic aneurysm. And she had a five-hour heart surgery to replace it, to repair it. And afterward, she just wasn't the same. That she was sadder. She was more disorganized. She wasn't getting things done. And I had her prior scan. And her prior scan, she had a big, fat brain, which helped her be happier and better at work. And then after the general anesthesia she had a damaged brain i mean it's just really clear you could see the damage really globally um and repairing it and hyperbaric

oxygen is just so helpful to do that um months, her brain was again, much healthier. And so you are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. We say that all the time, but this is one way to do it that can be really helpful. And the surgery that I went through was not heart surgery, but it was four, four and a half hours. What was something like that close to four hours. And, um, and I just didn't feel right. So, um, between that and the head injury from the car accident, I think it just, you started to see it. So I'm hoping I have that same, it helps me the same way. That's the hope.

So, and early on when I was doing the big NFL study, uh, which we started 10 years ago, is that we would use the supplements in Brain and Body Power Max, and 80% of our players showed improvement, but clearly not everybody. And so I then added hyperbaric oxygen as an adjunctive treatment and saw significant improvements. And Joe Namath, the famous quarterback from the New York Jets, he was really struggling about 10 years ago. And then it was in Jupiter, Florida, went and got a spec scan. And it was not good.

And he did 40 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen, and it was better. And so he did 40 more. And then his scan was even better still. And then he did 40 more. So he did a total of 120 sessions. And I don't know, he's 77 or something like that. His brain was normal. Wow.

And obviously, he got hit in something like that. His brain was normal. And so, and obviously he got hit in the head thousands of times. And it's just so exciting to think you are not stuck with the brain you have. Now, when we come back, we'll talk more about some of the indications for hyperbaric oxygen. And I want to talk about hard chamber. And I want to talk about why it works. What is it doing? Besides increasing blood flow, let's talk about what it's actually doing. Yes, ma'am.

So if you learned anything, maybe oxygen is really important to your brain. Your brain is 2% of your body's weight, but uses 20% of the oxygen in your body. If you learn- Or maybe you've had a surgery and you didn't realize, maybe you haven't felt right and people have said, oh no, you're fine, but you don't feel fine. And now you know maybe there's a reason. So whatever you've learned, post it on any of your social media sites, hashtag brain warriors way podcast, leave a question for us, leave a review. We'll get to as many as we can, um, of the questions, but whenever you leave a question or review, we'll enter you into a raffle for one of Tana's Brain Warriors Way cookbooks. Stay with us.

If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from BrainMD, you can use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.