Change Your Brain Every Day - So You’ve Had a Head Injury, What Can You Do?

Episode Date: March 27, 2019

Head injuries are the hidden causes of a multitude of psychiatric disorders. Whether you suffer from depression, anxiety, or even poor decision-making, it’s often an undiagnosed brain injury at the root of the problem. However, as Dr. Amen says, you CAN make your brain better. In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Amen and Tana discuss the first steps towards getting your brain back to a healing environment.

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. Welcome back. We're talking about traumatic brain injury and all the ways that can mess up your life and including decreasing empathy. And judgment. And what I've found that the scans do is they increase the empathy

of the people who are with them. And that's critical because if you think about, you know, it would be so easy to get, like you would say, to get really angry, um, and take it out on that person or leave that person. Or if you're talking about if it's a domestic partner, but even if it's your child. So, you know, I mean, even seeing one of my child who didn't have a brain injury, but it just helped me understand behavior so much more clearly.

And then seeing my mom, who did have a traumatic brain injury, really helped me understand why. It didn't help me understand my entire life, actually. But it really helped me understand why it didn't help me understand my entire life, actually, but it really helped me understand her. So in another study, people who suffered even a mild traumatic brain injury, which was defined as a head injury, which left them feeling dazed or confused were 60% more likely to have died in the study period than those who had no injury. Even of more concern, there was a 91% more likely to have been hospitalized for psychiatric problems, 55% more likely to have done less well in education, 52% more likely to have needed disability benefits. And it's estimated that there are about 2 million emergency room visits

for traumatic brain injury every year in the U.S. in addition to hundreds of thousands of unreported incidents of head trauma, including undiagnosed concussions as it relates to sports. Research shows undiagnosed brain injuries are a major cause of depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse. Homelessness, there's a study from Toronto. 58% of the homeless men in Toronto had a significant brain injury before they were homeless. 42% of the homeless women.

And females who have frontal lobe injuries, like cutting soccer balls, have significantly more disability than men who have frontal lobe injuries because the female brain, 90% of her IQ is in the front part of her brain. For men, it is more widely distributed. So when I'm hearing this, what I'm hearing besides how many lives are ruined, is this is a massive drain on society. So as far as our resources, this is treating brain injuries would be far more effective than treating the after effect, than treating the after effect than treating the consequences. So that's crazy. Do you have a review? I do.

You guys are awesome. Thank you. Love listening to all the content you put out. It has helped me so much. And with my ADD and life. Thank you. That is from Pat Quest. Thank you so much.

We love the reviews. Please keep sending them in because that way we know you're listening. We're not talking to cyberspace air. So some of the common symptoms of concussion, confusion, memory problems. we had that issue recently in our family where someone just sort of forgot their day difficulty with concentration difficulty with word finding mental and physical fatigue

sleep problems sensitivity to noise and light remember the Erlen syndrome we talked about moodiness, anger, outbursts, anxiety, social isolation, vision problems, balance problem. So I said 91% of people, it affects their frontal lobes. About half of them, they have less activity in their cerebellum. So they're likely to fall again. They're likely to fall again, increasing the risk of another concussion. So as I'm reading this, because we've dealt with several people in our own family who have had these symptoms and had head injuries,

so many people are told or somehow believe that it will be over within a month or two. And that's not always true. It depends on how severe it is. So there's actually a spec study by Jacobs, 1996. They looked at if your spec scan after a traumatic brain injury is normal, you have 100% chance that you're going to do fine. But if your spec scan right away is not normal, then it's,

it's actually not predictive. What's interesting is your scan at nine months, if it's still troubled at nine months, because the brain has a lot of healing mechanisms, if it's troubled at nine months, it predicts you're going to continue to have trouble unless you go and rehabilitate the trauma. So things like hyperbaric oxygen? So it's all the things we talk about in this podcast. Oh, I see.

You're going to, I see. It's the bright minds intervention that we talk about repeatedly. We're going to talk about interventions in the next podcast, correct? Well, we can do it anytime. Because the nurse in me is like wanting to jump in. Your beautiful brain wants to talk about it. But basically what I want you to think about are three things. If you've had a traumatic brain injury, brain envy, you got to care about it. It runs everything, right? Why I've been able to be

married to this incredible woman is my brain lets me know what I want, kind, caring, loving, supportive, passionate relationship. And I act like that because that's what I want. And, you know, it really does help because as somebody who didn't know this work before, when you start to see this work and you start to see, oh, okay, this is how certain foods affect my brain. This is how alcohol affects my brain. This is how anger affects my brain.

This is how, like you begin to see things through a different lens. Right. And so you begin to behave differently. Brain envy. You have to care about it. The second thing is you have to avoid anything that hurts them. And you just need to know the list. This is why you do not, let me repeat, you do not let your kids play tackle football.

But my kid wants to. You do not let them hit soccer balls. But they want to. With their head. Yes, I hear that. So I was at the Future of Medicine conference and a friend of mine who's a billionaire says, but my son wants to play. In fact, I went and hired an NFL coach for him to teach him how to play football. And I'm like, so let me get this straight. Because he wants to do a brain damaging sport. You're going to allow him. In fact, you're going to get him a great coach.

But what if he wanted to do cocaine? What if? Would you go find him the best drug dealer, the highest quality drug dealer you could? Because the level of damage is about the same. See, that's crazy. And I've scanned a thousand cocaine addicts. And I've scanned probably 20,000 people with traumatic brain

injury and the level of damage is about the same. So we have a friend who's a neurosurgeon who said the same thing, essentially his son, a neurosurgeon. He knows he actually agrees with all of this. He's like, yeah, but you got to let them do what they want. And I'm like, you, you, you, here's my philosophy. You give kids the most amount of control that is safe and reasonable at the age that they're at. And if they're not making good decisions, your job is to be their frontal lobes until they are. Right. But you don't just let them do whatever they want. And on the informed consent that parents have to sign, you have to take responsibility.

It does say death. But what it doesn't say is if you allow your children to play a contact sport where they are likely to get a concussion, that they're not going to be as successful.

That's not there. That their grades may go down. That their likelihood of getting divorced will go up, that they'll actually have four times the level of depression. That's from my NFL study as the general population. to protect their brains until theirs has developed. So I say this a lot around here at Amen Clinics. We need to be our patient's frontal lobes until we fix theirs. And as parents, you need to be your child's frontal lobes until theirs develops.

And it's not 18, it's more like 25. So having them, we've had this discussion recently about, you know, I'm actually a fan of kids staying close to home when they go to college, at least for the first couple of years, because their brain is nowhere near finished developing. And when I was 18, I went into the army. But it was sort of like the good mother, right? It was structured. And when you did the right things, they promoted you and gave you more money. And when you did the wrong things, they thumped you consistently, predictably, reliably. Yeah, they're pretty strict.

So brain envy, that's number one. Avoid anything that hurts it, including sugar. There's this fascinating study from UCLA where they gave mice head injuries, so they whacked them in the head, poor mice. And one group of mice, they gave them a really healthy diet. The other group of mice, they gave them the really healthy diet plus fructose. And three weeks later, the group with the really healthy diet could run a maze that they already knew how to run. The one that got the added sugar were still confused. Isn't that interesting? So the standard

American diet, sad, that is filled with sugar and foods that quickly turn to sugar is delaying your ability to recover from a traumatic brain injury. Brain envy, avoid anything that hurts it. Do things that help it stay with us. When we finish this week on traumatic brain injury, we're going to talk about our healing program that we do at Aventel X. 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 interested in coming to Amen Clinics. Use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.