The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Brighter Days Ahead: Leaving Depression Behind Through Innovative New Treatments by Theodore A. Henderson

Episode Date: September 10, 2023

Brighter Days Ahead: Leaving Depression Behind Through Innovative New Treatments by Theodore A. Henderson Neuro-luminance.com Depression is not what you think it is. Yes, it is a downward spiral of misery, self-doubt, angst, and apathy, but the cause is not a personality failing or a lack of serotonin. Have medications designed to change serotonin or dopamine levels in your brain helped you? Depression does, indeed, result from changes in your brain, but the nature of these transformations will shock and surprise you. This life-changing book will help you see depression in a new light…leading you to powerfully effective treatments. Psychiatrist, brain scientist, and inventor, Dr. Theodore Henderson paints a real-world picture of depression with moving stories and full color illustrations that makes the science underlying this common mental health condition come to life. Drawing upon almost two decades of intensive personalized treatment of hundreds of patients, Dr. Henderson deftly combines brain science with evocative case histories to explains exactly how the brain changes as a result of depression and how less well-known contemporary treatments for it work to reverse these changes. Gone are the chemical imbalance theories. Gone are the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps admonishments. Using the example of the powerful antidepressant effects of ketamine infusion therapy as a window into understanding not only what depression does to the brain, but how neuroplasticity can reverse it, often permanently, Dr. Henderson offers the reader even more information about this complex condition. He introduces other novel and powerful treatments for depression, as well as addressing childhood trauma, brain injury, inflammation, and the importance of mindfulness. In this deeply informed book, Dr. Henderson guides the reader to understanding the brain, depression, and effective solutions in a sometimes poignant, sometimes gritty, no-holds barred, real-world look at depression and recovery. About the Author Theodore A. Henderson MD, PhD is a descendent of Algonquin, French and English ancestors. He is president and founder of both The Synaptic Space and Dr. Theodore Henderson, Inc., clinical service firms. He is Co-Founder of Neuro-Luminance Inc, which is bringing revolutionary treatments to bear upon traumatic brain injury, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, post-COVID fatigue syndrome, and other brain disorders. He is also the co-founder of the Neuro-Laser Foundation, a non-profit research foundation. He holds two patents and three patents-pending. Dr. Henderson is president of the International Society of Applied Neuroimaging. He has published in neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, dementia, photobiomodulation, and traumatic brain injury. He has over 70 publications and has been cited in over 900 scientific papers. He is editor or guest editor for numerous journals, including Frontiers in Psychiatry, JAMA Psychiatry, and PLoSOne. The work of he and his colleagues on using SPECT brain scans to differentiate brain injury from PTSD was recently recognized as a “Top Science Story” by Discover Magazine for 2015. A philanthropist himself, Dr. Henderson is also a father of two, stepfather of two and grandfather of three.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. The Chris Voss Show family, the family that loves you and doesn't judge you. Today we have an amazing show for us today. You know, we're always talking about the intro, about brain bleeding and the show giving people brain bleeding. Well, we've been contacted enough by enough people's attorneys who've been suffering from brain bleeding because they've been educated so much and enlightened so much. And their brain has started to grow beyond the confines of their craniums. You can order a new one on Amazon,

by the way, there's an affiliate link in the Chris Foss show, a podcast, a blog. Um, and, uh, yeah,

we just didn't have that problem. I mean, we have guests that are so smart and, they've been educating our audience so well that they are experiencing brain bleed. So what we've finally done is we've brought on a great author and doctor

to help with your brain bleeding that the show has given you. And this is the settlement that we've arranged with all the attorneys. And we're going to be talking to him today about brains, depressiontsd treatments on how you can survive the chris faust show long term because we're just gonna keep doing this there's two to three new shows a weekday 15 a week uh and i don't know we did what 650

655 shows last year at the end of our fiscal August 30th, which is the end of renewal for the show. And we're planning to do close to probably a thousand next year. So there's more brain bleed coming. Clearly I'm suffering from it. I can't even speak. So you're definitely going to want to watch this show and order up this book because you're going to need all the help you can get.

You know what? You're going to be smarter than everybody. And when you're smarter, you have that Brad Pitt sexiness glow. And if you're a woman, you know, hopefully it's not the Brad Pitt sexiest glow. Maybe like, I don't know, think of Victoria's Secret or something or, you know, whoever. Barbie, you know, Barbie's big there. There you go. You got the Barbie glow.

But whatever that, I don't know whatever that means. I never watched the movie. So anyway, as always, that's the setup for the guilt and shaming to sneak it by you. Refer to share to your family, friends, and relatives. Give us a five-star review on iTunes. We love you so much when you do that. It just makes me cry and weep at night when I read the reviews and go, they actually love me.

Oh, my God. Go to goodreads.com, Fort Chescarizfos, youtube.com, Fort Chescarizfos, linkedin.com, Fort ChesGrisVoss, and TikTok, GrisVoss1. We certainly appreciate it. He is the author of the latest book that came out May 18th, 2023. It's called Brighter Days Ahead, Leaving Depression Behind Through Innovative New Treatments. Dr. Theodore A. Henderson joins us on the show today. He's going to be talking

to us about his latest book and some of the insights that he has. He's an actual doctor, folks, a PhD. He is president and founder of NeuroLuminance Incorporated, which is bringing revolutionary treatments to bear upon traumatic brain injury, depression, Alzheimer's disease, post-COVID fatigue syndrome. I have that post-COVID. I'm sick of COVID. I never got it. And other brain disorders, which is pretty much everything else I have. He holds three patents and three patents pending.

He is a published neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, dementia, that's me, photobiomodulation, and traumatic brain injury. And he wrote this bio just to see if I passed English and biology. And I didn't. I flunked both. He has over 70 publications in his top research journals and has been cited in over 900 scientific papers. And I have been in none. Although, I don't know, they probably wrote some scientific papers going, look at this idiot. He's still alive.

His recent book, Brighter Days Ahead, is featured on Amazon. And he will help you rethink brain disorders, probably when you look around at your family at the Christmas table, like depression and brain injury, and introduce you to exciting new treatments which actually activate the brain's own healing process, which we probably all need to listen to the Chris Voss Show. Welcome to the show. Doctor, how are you? Great.

Thank you so much, Chris, for having me on. Thank you for coming on. And we need you to solve our class action lawsuits of people listening to the Chris Voss Show for all the brain bleeding that goes on. So give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. So the best place to look to understand what we're doing,

to see videos of patients talking about their treatment experiences and successes is Neuraluminance.com. I'm going to spell that N-E-U-R-O hyphen Luminance, L-U-M-I-N-A-N-C-E.com. There you go. There you go. And people can find out all about the stuff you do and how you do it and different treatments and services, success stories, et cetera, et cetera. So give us a 30,000 overview in your words about who you are, what you do,

and how you do it. 30,000 feet. Okay. So I'm an MD, PhD, so I'm way, way overeducated. I spent time as a bench researcher. I was literally in the lab figuring out how the brain works, looking at things like the chemicals, the growth factors that made the brain work, like BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor, that mind that comes back. I ended up going into radiology, lasted about a year before I was bored to death, switched over to psychiatry, trained in psychiatry, also child psychiatry, ended out in Denver, Colorado. And all this stuff sort of

comes together, you know, these pathways, they all, your life path kind of flows all together. So I ended up getting into functional neuroimaging. And so the radiology and the psychiatry all fit together in this functional neuroimaging using brain SPECT scans. And out of that, I kept seeing, you know, I kept seeing patients and it's like, okay, your specced scan shows you have a traumatic brain injury. Can't do anything for you. Have a nice day. Wow.

I hate that. I hate that. So literally a colleague and I developed. I do that around the Christmas table, by the way, if I can call that joke. Hold on. I go, I'm sorry. I can't do anything for you, but I'll see you next year at Christmas. There you go.

So a friend and colleague and I developed a treatment for traumatic brain injury. What we did is took science from Harvard and places like that that worked in mice, and we grew it up so it worked in humans because, let me tell you, human skulls are thicker than mice skulls, mine being thicker than most.

And I know some people that have brains the size of mice, so I've seen them on social media and Facebook, especially that Twitter X, whatever it's called this week. Bankruptcy next week. Big Congress politicians, there you go. Oh, we got a politician joke in there. There we go. We've all seen that.

I don't see you then. So you go through and you figure out some different ways to help these people and there's a myriad of different things that come from brain disorders depression uh concussion brain injury ptsd uh chronic fatigue syndrome i've known some people that have suffered from that post-covid fatigue that's a big. There's a lot of people that have suffered from long COVID, I guess. Alzheimer's disease, that's a big issue as we have a huge population of baby boomers and Gen Xers. Parkinson's disease as well. And ADHD. And it's kind of interesting

that I never thought of some of these as brain injuries. We talked in the green room about how one of my friends turned me on, unfortunately, that, you know, he suffered a brain injury from having a little too much vodka and falling. And then I started, you know, he started becoming very reclusive and withdrawn and, you know, he would have a hard time with people going out. And we used to go out and hang out, you know, have a coffee every now and then. Suddenly, you know, just became really, he he couldn't handle it and he was trying to explain it to me and i saw i started watching some videos and and looking at people you know that talk about this sort of thing and i was like wow this is a really when you damage the brain it can really

impact your your whole life for the rest of your life and i think we've had some others off authors on the show from car crashes and stuff that they had um so uh it's not just relegated to um getting drunk and falling down i suppose um tell us a little bit more as to as to some of the variant ways that maybe people have gotten brain injuries that they don't really understand you know maybe they're depressed and they don't really understand they don't connect like they maybe didn't have an event that they remember yeah like maybe somebody you know like most of my family not most of my family should be nice uh uh but you know some of those people you see around the thanksgiving table you're like you really got dropped on your head i know mama dropped you on your head uh as a child you know that's what i child. You know, that sort of thing.

Well, let's start with sort of what the symptoms of traumatic brain injury can be or post-concussive syndrome. Okay. You're five times more likely to get depressed after a traumatic brain injury or concussion. Anxiety goes up. Difficulty with too much sight and too much sound, too much light. You become sensitive to that stuff. So going out and hanging out with your buddy and drinking at a bar, it's way too noisy. It's way too overstimulating. And so they become socially withdrawn. And they have irritability, they have mood regulation problems, they have attention problems, memory problems,

headaches, all of that stuff is very common. And, you know, what we saw when we treated these patients with the infrared laser therapy was that all those symptoms went down. Suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, photosensitivity, headaches, all of that went down and they got better and they stayed better. I mean, we've been following these patients now for almost about 13 years now. So what are some of the different ways you treat them? Okay. I think the most effective thing that we can do for the brain is to turn on the brain's own ability to heal itself. And that's not a pill that you take every day and hope for the best. You have to turn on the brain's ability to repair itself. And that is a molecular pathway.

And it's driven by this chemical I mentioned earlier, BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And so what became clear in these metal studies was that infrared light therapy turns on BDNF. Really? So if we could get through the thick skull and scalp of the human and get into their brain, we could activate BDNF and therefore activate neuroplasticity. And that's exactly what happens. And that neuroplasticity, you know, obviously helps to repair brain injury. If the brain cells are dead, we're not bringing them back. I'm Dr. Henderson, not Dr. Frankenstein. But if...

Well, that doesn't give me hope for my Thanksgiving dinner. But if they're wounded, if they're limping along, if they're disconnected from the other neurons and they need new pathways, we can do that. Ah. So by brain dead, you mean they're completely catatonic? Well, I'm talking about just the neuron itself. The neuron is dead. Okay.

So you can have dead neurons and still be alive? Oh, absolutely. Okay. I've got plenty of them That explains my Thanksgiving dinner Thanksgiving's coming up It's on my mind, clearly Everyone's dreading it

No, just kidding We are sure That's why we have the Chris Fascio family So I have a secondary family that loves me And doesn't judge me Because I am the black sheep of the family But I'm the one who makes the most so i guess that's whatever i'm the golden child of the black sheep all at the same time um so one of the things i notice uh in in the book description is the word ketamine um it did i get that right where did you get that

is that one way you guys are treating it? And is this why everyone's a burning man? Well, you know, ketamine is such an interesting phenomenon. Let's put it that way. Ketamine is an antidepressant, and it works by turning on that same chemical, BDNF, by a different pathway. So ketamine turns on neuroplasticity, and that's what actually undoes depression. Because I'm going to say something controversial here. Don't fall out of your seat. Brace yourself, people.

Depression has nothing, nothing to do with serotonin. Nothing. All these years we've been, it's it's chemical imbalance you don't have enough serotonin let's give you a little bit more serotonin here we'll give you a Prozac and boost your serotonin levels that's true they do that huh you know and so you take Prozac little-known secret Prozac increases your serotonin levels within hours hours huh so why does it take six weeks for prozac to help depression if you're lucky because i'm not a brain surgeon okay well because in fact prozac very very weakly very poorly turns on that

neuroplasticity turns on that bdnf so it takes longer then yes ket, turns on that BDNF. So it takes longer then? Yes. Ketamine turns on big time, big time. Really? And that's what makes ketamine such a great antidepressant. Now, it's not 100%. In my hands, it's 72%. Yeah. Our Silicon Valley audience right now all has hard-ons. Well, but the national average for uh response

to treatment with ketamine uh across all the ketamine clinics is like 50 percent um and you know there's a problem with the way that Docs are giving not just Docs but these clinics are giving ketamine um the protocol is you come in and you get ketamine three times a week for two weeks for six treatments. And then supposedly you're better. Well, where did that number come from? It came from a study done by a guy named Sharoma. And he did six infusions in two weeks and said, gee, look at our results.

Well, I called Sharoma up and said, okay, what's the secret? Why did you pick six infusions in two weeks? What's the molecular pathway that you were taking advantage of? You, what's the secret? Why did you pick six infusions in two weeks? What's the molecular pathway that you were taking advantage of? You know what the answer was? I don't know. It sounded good. That was a science. Wow.

That's some deep science there. Sounds like the people I know who are on steroids who take Special K. They have their own version of science. There you go there you go what we're doing is we do we give patients ketamine once a week that's it at most and and our average number of infusions that they get is 4.3 not six not six plus boosters 4.3 and they're better and they go about their life thanks a lot doc so this is what

i talk about quite a bit in the book is this idea of that we have to turn on neuroplasticity and we have to rethink depression not as not as oh chemical imbalance or i don't have enough serotonin or i don't have enough dopamine it's really about degenerative changes in the brain that we are reversing. Now, you asked about, you know, I talked about laser and then I talked about ketamine. What happens if you put the two together? Now you got synergy. And this is where, you know, it gets really exciting. Really tough depression cases, really tough traumatic brain injury cases.

We put the two together and we're turning on neuroplasticity by two different mechanisms. That's amazing. Really? Now, I had someone's – we've had a company – I won't show the logo here, but we had a company send us this. We're actually reviewing this. And this is an infrared light pad that you can use for your muscles,

and it does normal red red light and it does infrared light and it was kind of interesting I've been using it for about 48 hours and I haven't put it on my head or my brain I'm not I was kind of questioning if it was even safe because I do have tinnitus in my right ear really bad and I'm like what if what if that can help my tendonitis in my right ear? Because it seems to be blood flow related or blood pressure related. Anytime my blood pressure is really high, it screams.

Anytime it's really low. It used to be really bad when I was hungover from vodka. And so I don't know. I was looking at it. So these things, if you combine them, you probably have a different delivery system. Of course, you're using lasers. Yeah. so yeah when but you know when people think laser they think star trek yeah star wars yeah i think that thing where the death star you know blows up you know we're

talking about a handheld device that you know we're applying you know directly onto the skin you know and you know applying to the head the forehead and temples and depending you know, and applying to the head, the forehead and temples. And depending, you know, we had to get the hair out of the way. I've got way too much hair to be a good candidate. Do you have to shave people's head? No, no, no. But hair does slow down the infrared light. Now, here's the thing about what you just showed me.

This is a big controversy in the field. And this is sort of what I stuck my foot into. I'm a bit of a rabble rouser, a bit of a maverick. And so when I started looking at this infrared light therapy scientifically and said, okay, we've got to grow this from mouse to human. What they're doing with the mouse is using exactly what you just showed me, these little half-watt LEDs, and saying, okay, we can get through, you know, a mouse scalp and skull, which is about the thickness of, oh, about 10 sheets of paper. You can shine a half-watt LED through that. But, you know, this is 90 sheets of paper.

Oh, is it? It's a thick. I know some people on social media and politicians that have thicker ones. Exactly. So to get through all of this, you need to have more power. So we literally went into the research lab, figured out how much you had to have to get through human scalp and skull and deliver the appropriate level of energy to the brain itself. Now, here's an interesting thing. There was a study done. They put one of

these LEDs on somebody's forehead and said, look at this, their alpha wave activities go up on their EEG. And they said, you know, we're directly treating the brain. I said, well, that's impossible because a half watt LED only gets 0.8 millimeters into the skin. I mean, barely into the skin. I mean, it's great for growing hair. You want to grow hair back? Yeah, you stick that thing on your head, you'll grow hair. So what we did is we took the laser and we applied it to the forearm and showed that the alpha wave activities in the brain went up.

Oh, really? When we treated the forearm. So it's reacting to the sensation or something? It's indirect. It's an indirect phenomenon. Now, we have no idea how it works. I mean, I did do the logical study, which is you cut off the blood flow from the arm.

And guess what? I slowed down the increase in alpha wave activity. But as soon as i released the cuff then the alpha wave activity jumped up oh so it's probably blood-borne not exclusively and so all these little they're selling these things you know there's things you can shove up your nose and little pads you can put on your head and all that stuff that's cocaine wait you're talking about something else right yeah it's a little light probe. Oh, it's a medical.

Sorry, I got confused. I don't know what any of that is. Well, the thought is if you stick it up your nose, you're closer to the brain. But still, if it's a half watt, it's not going to go very far. So all this stuff is really doing indirect photobiomodulation. Now, what happens with indirect photobiomodulation is you get a little bit better as long as you keep doing it.

The moment you stop doing it, it all regresses back. Really? Wow. Study after study, same result. Our patients, we treat them, they get better. Hasta la vista, doc. Okay, so yours is a better way to make it work long term and stuff.

Yes. And so this is pretty interesting because we've had people on the show, military folks that have suffered from PTSD, people from childhood trauma, people that's on the show too much to get the brain bleed. And everything else. You know, that's the biggest thing we're trying to set up with the attorneys right now by having you on the show too much you get the brain bleed uh and everything else uh you know that's that's the biggest thing we're trying to set up with the attorneys right now by having you on the show um so how do people work with you i mean clearly they can't just uh water down to their local um i don't know the guy in the alleyway who sells in the ketamine and i don't know how do people get it from burning man maybe we shouldn't ask. There you go.

But, you know, how do they work with you and your treatments and stuff? Well, you know, we're located in Denver, Colorado. And the website has, you know, an invitation for a free consultation. Anybody can come, you know, get an appointment with me for a free 15-minute telephone consultation. We figure out if there's something that I can help them with. If it's getting ketamine, sometimes I just say, hey, look, I know the guy in San Diego who does a great job with ketamine. Just go there. Or in Washington, D.C. or New York. Because some of us are getting it, how ketamine should be used, you know, based on, in part, my work and other people's work.

But as far as the infrared light therapy, to get that multi-watt infrared laser therapy, you got to come to Denver. You know, it's not something I can do via telemedicine. It doesn't quite work to shine it through the computer. We could just think really hard. So, you know, and folks do that. You know, we've been doing this now for 10 years, a little over 10 years.

People, you know, fly in, they get six, eight treatments, they go home for a month, and then they come back and do six, eight treatments more. And here's the cool thing. The infrared light is turning on neuroplasticity, Chris. And that keeps churning. Even after the light's turned off, it keeps churning. So people come out, they get six, eight treatments, they go home, they come back and they say, Doc, I'm doing even better than when I finished the last treatment. I got better being at home. Because neuroplasticity is churning along.

And it's slow. It's slow. A neuron, an axon, a little fiber of a neuron, grows a millimeter a day. That's it. So you're not going to rebuild circuits like that. Oh, I'm not going to be able to get people smarter by Christmas is what you're telling me. Maybe by Christmas, yeah. I've got to wait until Christmas and Thanksgiving and dinner next year to get these people to not make me mental at the end of the year.

Okay, all right. Note to self. But I've been to Denver. Denver alone, being a mile high, will give you brain bleed and lack of oxygen. So there you go. Then you know how the hell they can get up there. There you go. In fact, most of my brain bleed and brain damage is from being in Denver's Lodo,

what they call Lower Downtown, and being on the patio bars there for many a weekend. And I think there's half a liver up there too as well. I'm still asking one of the bars to send back. If they find it, it might be in a loss in floor bin. So there we go. I mean, this is pretty interesting. And do they have to keep – they have to obviously do a number of sessions. Does the sessions may vary depending upon the damage they have, I suppose?

Well, I mean, that makes sense, right? It's going to be very individualized. So, you know, we talk to people about, okay, think about 30 treatments. And we do like two, three treatments a week. So you can do the math. But 30 is not a hard number. So we do a baseline testing. And after 10 treatments, we check again.

And after 20 treatments, we check again. And after 20 treatments, we check again. One of my really favorite patients came out here with post-COVID fatigue. He's a dentist in Florida, and he got COVID. And then he developed brain fog and the fatigue and a tremor, right? You don't want a dentist with a tremor. Okay, open wide, you know, a bad situation. So he came out. Roundabout, and interestingly, this guy had ADHD and he had been on ADHD meds since he was a kid. He came out, he was going to get 20 treatments. And roundabout treatment 14, he pulls me aside and said, Doc, this is weird.

My Vyvanse is making me jittery, so I stopped taking it. And I don't need it anymore. I can sit and read for hours. Quite literally, he's gone back home after 20 treatments, post-COVID fatigue gone, tremor gone, ADHD gone, anxiety gone. He stopped taking his Vyvanse. He stopped taking his Vyvanse. He stopped taking his Benzo at night. Symptom-free, working in a very busy dental clinic. I just talked to him last week.

It's a year and a half since he was treated. Doing fantastic. That is awesome. Because I've known some people with COVID brain frog. It's not fun. And long COVID and issues with it, it definitely makes a difference. It's great that you have these tools and things. Any other successful stories you want to tease out of helping people?

Yeah, so one of the areas, there's a sister nonprofit to NeuroLuminance called the NeuroLaser Foundation. Its website is tbi.care, so traumaticbraininjury.care. We're dedicated, that foundation is dedicated to providing care for veterans and first responders and also to do research. So we supplement, we subsidize the treatment costs for veterans and first responders. And veterans have a special place in my heart, a special place in my late partner's life, the co-founder of the foundation. And, you know, so one of the veterans that we took care of, he had suffered from PTSD for 49 years. Wow. Every time, and, you know, we're right by the Air Force Base. Every time the jets would fly over, he'd be in the basement crying.

Wow. And the helicopters, same thing. And just always struggling with you know do i want to keep living like this so struggled with feeling suicidal he came in he got six treatments and he tells this story uh and it's actually it's actually on the website you can see it he tells this story that after during the sixth treatment he saw the light not with his eyes but he saw it in his brain he saw it in his mind

he saw the light and all of a sudden this peacefulness came over him and since then jets helicopters everything nothing bothers him he's happy he's living life he's gardening he's painting he's doing great there you go Nothing bothers him. He's happy. He's living life. He's gardening. He's painting.

He's doing great. There you go. That is awesome. That was one of the questions I had queued up for you. Is there any, does the VA approve any of this stuff, or do you have to use the foundation to support it? Yeah. I know we could go on and on about the VA. Oh, the VA.

Yeah, you know, it's glacially slow to change. You know, my colleague and I have worked for years to try and get them to accept spec scans, functional brain scans. Oh, I don't know, a way to maybe look at the brain. Because we literally showed there's a difference between ptsd and tbi clinically you can't tell them apart and the va gets it wrong most of the time but with a spec scan they're they're diametrically opposed to each other we can clearly see the difference and and after all these years you know we published that back in 2015 we have not made any progress whatsoever with the VA so it's

a very slow slog with the VA we're still working with them we're still trying to get to the point where we can actually treat veterans through the VA system that might happen maybe somebody's watching the show they can put in a good word there you go there you go yeah we've had many people military folks on the show that suffer from ptsd i remember one time in in vegas i had i had flown a drone for um for the fireworks show and flew it around the show and then i put it up on youtube and i think the local was it called open door whatever the next door is some some website that all your neighbors are on. And I had a guy watch the video and see me do the filming with the drone.

And about two or three weeks later, he wrote me and he said, man, you aren't by chance the one flying the drone over by my house. I'm like, no, we just did that for the 4th of July. And he goes, dude, because somebody keeps flying a drone over my house and it keeps setting off my PTSD. And, you know, it sounds like the drones we had in Iraq. I'm like,

I'm sorry, bro. And, you know, we talked about it a little bit about what he's suffering with. And yeah, I mean, yeah,

if there's any way we can get help for those people. And so that website will be on the web, the, uh, the, uh, Chris Voschel podcast as well. Um,

any final thoughts? Let's do this. We've been doing this, uh, fun bit, podcast as well. Great. Any final thoughts? Let's do this. We've been doing this a fun little bit here. If you don't mind, we're going to put you up for the Chris Foss Show gulag gauntlet, as we like to call it, where you'll be forced to eat the gulag gauntlet. Gulash? Gulash?

Gulash? Gulash? Your choice. You eat it anyway. That's force-fed to you in the goulag. And so if you fail at the five questions, we do five questions to get to know you better and to get your thoughts because you are a brain surgeon.

So I might reformat some of these questions into a brain analogy. I don't know what the right word is. I flunked the English tune. So if you don't mind, we're going to put you through the gulag. We're going to ask you five questions. And if you get any of them wrong, you'll be thrown into the gulag and be forced to eat the gulag goulash. Or if you get them right, you will be allowed to return home to your family.

They'd appreciate that. They did. Somebody in your family, though, did send me a note saying, please make them fail. So I'm not sure. They might be one of those thanksgiving dinner people uh so here we go well uh thought-provoking questions uh so if you could uh answer which one you think is correct in your opinion and why uh and you know keep it short if you would we don't need a we don't need a uh we you don't need a debate but uh you can give us a science answer if you want i don't need a we don't need a uh we you don't need a debate but uh you can give us a

science answer if you want i don't know uh so here we go uh let's see what there's the first one that i had lined up for i thought it was pretty good all right who's smarter brain wise because you're a brain surgeon uh people who wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher or people who don't? I'm going to go with people who wash the dishes for purely personal reasons because I do. One of my first jobs was washing dishes at a restaurant. I can tell you dishwashers suck. There you go. There you go.

Well, the judges are conferring with the attorneys Actually in this one This one's very complex and detailed Controversial You may get hate on your Twitter feed Here later on today Should you put ketchup On a hot dog

Or do people have brain damage when they do that And it really should be mustard It should be both It should be both. It should be both. Plus relish and onions. This is definitely controversial. We may have to call some attorneys for this one and maybe some brain surgeons.

Should we have a National Pirate Day or not? And do we have to all wear eye patches for that? I don't know. I guess it's a follow-up. National Pirate Day. Never given that one much thought. Well, this is why we have these questions. You're the brain surgeon, damn it.

If you don't know the answer to this, then who does? Seat-tearing criminal day is one way to look at that. Or national fun character day. I don't know. Do we have a national Casper Ghost Day?

Oh, wow. You're expanding this controversy even more. I mean, let's try and stick within the guidelines. Alright, so do we have a final answer for you that we can lock in? I would have to say no at this point. Oh, wow. Alright, well,

you're hurting a lot of cosplay people that dress a pirate day i thought halloween was national pirate day well there you go there i thought uh anybody who goes the burning man draws up or ring a pirate um uh should we uh have a national nap day see your brain surgeon this might be actually a real thing i i kind of like that idea. I hadn't thought about that one either. I like the idea. Naps can be very valuable. Sometimes a power nap helps you

kind of allows that part of your brain that's wrestling with a problem to hand it over to the part of the brain that processes things in your sleep. And then you'll often wake up with the answer so power maps can be very valuable so yeah national nap day i'd mark me as a yes there you go and and that actually i think is already in the works legislative wise because

congress has become the national the largest uh geriatric uh rest home in the nation, or at least the most famous one or the richest one, one of those three. So there you go. There's lots of people that are probably already, if you've seen congressional hearings, there's a lot of people that are clearly napping through that. Excuse me. So there you go. Should, no, we're not going to do that one.

That's not funny enough. Should we have a mandatory retirement age so that we don't have to deal with the people in Congress? I don't know. I don't know. That's a semi-criminal. A mandatory retirement age for Congress? Anybody. Anybody.

For our brains. People that are brain-y. You know, I would have a hard time with that. I just spent the weekend at the Vail Jazz Festival, and there are guys who are in their 80s and their 70s and they are blowing the top off that tent. So to say, and for me, hey, look, if I had a mandatory retirement age, what would I do? That's true. It's like, I love what I do. I love my work. I love treating patients. I love getting people better. I mean, I've always said, you know, when are you going to retire? Well, I'm going to leave my

office feet first. Yeah. Well, you need to do pretty much most of my family at Thanksgiving dinner. So there's more work for you to do. So we need you there. In fact, we just might hold the family reunion out in Denver this year. I think that's the plan. Right now people are going, what's the family reunion, hon? We're going to Denver. So there you go. Awesome sauce.

And, and, uh, we've been told that you, uh, got all the questions right, except for the dishes. You do not wash the dishwasher before. Um, it's, that is, that is, uh, that is a heinous crime that should be regulated by local authorities. Anyway, but we will send you home to your family because they requested. Please, please, we'd like him back. It's the first time it's ever happened, though. So there you go. You will not be thrown in the Chris Foss show gulag.

And your final thoughts and pitch and dot coms as we go out, doctor, on what you do and how you do it. Yeah, you know, I think the final thought I want to leave is, you know, we've just come through this, you know, once in a century pandemic and, and we're still figuring out what the heck COVID is doing to the brain and the rest of the body. One of the things we know about post COVID fatigue is, you know, there are probably three things happening. Number one is inflammation that's persisting in the brain. And the infrared laser works great on that. Really? Our patients have seen that.

It works great on the lungs, too. You know, if you treat the lungs, people suddenly can breathe better. Really? Kind of cool. Number two, COVID reactivates. Because of that cytokine storm it reactivates old infections like epstein-barr and on the east coast lyme disease and some of the tick-borne illnesses so you had to kind of look for that in long covid and the third thing and this literally just came out last week is they they figured out that COVID messes with the mitochondria.

Mitochondria are those little organelles in your cells that make energy. And mitochondria have their own DNA. They're like literally this separate creature that lives inside our cells. And some of that DNA creates proteins that send signals to our DNA and our cells to make things happen. And COVID messes up the mitochondria and makes those genes not produce the proteins correctly or enough. And so infrared light, the mechanism by which infrared light actually turns things on in the cell starts at the mitochondria. So again, infrared light, I think is going to be the key to really solving post-COVID fatigue syndrome,

long COVID, whatever you want to call it. There you go. And if you could figure out if your device would solve tinnitus, I'd love that. You know, there's some interesting studies going on that. I suffer from tinnitus myself. I get it.

Yeah. And vodka was the answer but it was also the problem yeah it was when i wake up hungover i would it would just be screaming and i'm like i'm either dehydrated or i don't know if it's side it's i think it's tied to blood flow a little bit maybe you know that's you know the ent'sTs half the time say that it's all psychogenic. Really? Because they do the study and show, oh, well, you say that your tinnitus is this loud, but when we try to bring a matching tone, it comes in, it's way down here.

So, in fact, it's all in your head. Oh, really? Yeah, it is, in fact, all in my head. I'll choke those people out and be like, it's all in your head. No, don't do that. Don't resort to violence, people. That's a joke. So there you go.

One of my veteran friends says, I need a red light walkthrough machine. So I think he needs a, I know he served in the military. Thanks for your service, Adam. So there you go. I'll send him links to your website. So thank you very much for coming in the military. Thanks for your service, Adam. So there you go. I'll send him links to your website. So thank you very much for coming on the show. I'm glad someone's making something in this because, like I said, not only do I need to get my family reunions fixed by making people smarter there.

Tell your friends to listen to the Chris Voss Show. That makes them smarter too. But this is really important work, especially for veterans, PTSD. Everyone's getting the new COVID. Everybody I know is getting that new COVID version that's running around right now. It's September 2023 for those of you watching 10

years from now. There's like a whole... We thought we were done with this thing three years out and now there's like a whole new strain that just... Everybody seems to be getting it, dude. It's just crazy like my facebook feed is just like got the new covid and i never have it so i i dodged the hell out of it and uh now i'm just going geez wow i had a good game going on uh undefeated so we'll see we'll see

what happens keep dodging so there you go uh from. From Peter McNally, thanks for the invite again. Chris Voss, absolutely brilliant. Well, it was my guest who was brilliant. It wasn't me. It didn't have anything to do with me. So thank the doctor. So, Doc, thank you very much for coming on the show. Give us the dot coms one more time as we round out the show.

Sure, sure. So NeuroLuminance.com, N-E-U-R-O hyphen L-U-M-I-N-A-N-C-E dot com. And then the foundation, which has some great videos. You can see me talking about science and the veteran talking about his experience and a young woman talking about her experience. And that's www.TBI, traumatic brain injury, dot care, dot C-A-R-E. There you go. There you go. And so pass the word around folks tell everybody about the work that uh our doctor does and he's not our doctor by the way i want to make sure i make that clear well the attorneys are going to have to pay my invoice

right that's true yeah yeah we're getting that class action lawsuit they're fighting for the brain brain bleed intro that we have in the show but But in the end, see, we can heal. And maybe we should just have red light therapies on the show for the brain bleed the show gives, and we can just have you in the corner holding a little thing and that's not going to work. Anyway, guys, thank you very much for coming

to the show, Doc. We really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. There you go. And thanks to my honours for tuning in. Be sure to share the show with your family, friends, and relatives. iTunes, five-star review, please. If you would, we'd love you very much. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. YouTube.com, Fortuness Chris Voss.

LinkedIn.com, Fortuness Chris Voss. I get brain bleed from the plugs. And Chris Voss1 on TikTok. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have a sound.