The Joe Rogan Experience - #574 - Dr. Mark Gordon, Matthew Gosney & Jason Hall

Episode Date: November 12, 2014

Dr. Mark Gordon is the Medical Director of Education at Access Medical Laboratory and is recognized as a top leader world wide in Interventional Endocrinology (Anti Aging Medicine). Matthew Gosney is a former Navy SEAL and current patient of Dr. Gordon's. Jason Hall is a screenwriter, his new movie "American Sniper" stars Bradley Cooper and is directed by Clint Eastwood releases this winter.

Joe Rogan Podcast by Night, All Day! Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience Train by Day, Joe Rogan Podcast by Night, All Day! Hey everybody, let me introduce you to everybody here because we've got a large group of humans. First of all, we have my good friend Dr. Mark Gordon, he's been on the podcast before. Brilliant endocrinologist slash all-around awesome dude. And his friend and patient, Matthew Gosney. And Matthew, and right here to my left, we have Jason Hall, who's a screenwriter for American Sniper. And we're going to get into a lot of things on this podcast, but

one of the big ones that we're going to talk about is Dr. Gordon. If you've listened to the previous podcast that he and I did, if you haven't, it's excellent. Go back and check it out if you're bored. But you're an expert in traumatic brain injury, and you contacted me about Matthew, and you've done some amazing work on soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and also athletes with PTSD and the issues that come out of PTSD, not just psychological, but traumatic brain injury, which is something that we're dealing with more with these series of wars than we ever have before because of the advancements in medical science.

They're able to keep people alive that may have died before, and also they're able to recognize what's going on what shell shock is this term that they used uh after uh world war ii and you know they changed it a little bit in vietnam they altered the name of it but essentially we're dealing with the same issues correct we're dealing with the trauma to both the mind and the the consciousness that's happening to people that experience horrible things, see horrible things, but also experience damage to their actual brain itself. Absolutely. The point of foundation is the distinction between what PTSD is versus minimal or mild traumatic brain injury.

Unfortunately, about 410,000 vets are coming back with what's being labeled as PTSD, when in fact they have a form of traumatic brain injury. The distinction between the two is a psychological one, which is PTSD, and a physical one, which is traumatic brain. Under the psychological, you've witnessed horrible things out there in the battlefield, where you've seen your friends being gutted or IED, blowing them up and being left without any limbs. And then in the physical one, you actually have the impact of the explosion or penetrating wound like a shot to the head or being blungeoned in football. And it's believed that under the psychological one with the PTSD, football. And it's believed that under the psychological one with the PTSD, that reliving the event that precipitated is what causes you to become depressed and anxious and so forth.

Under the minimal or the mild traumatic brain injury, it's the physical trauma to the brain that leads to deficiencies of hormones, which is what my whole premise has been for my treatment of traumatic brain injury. So what's being missed is there are guys that go out there in the field who have already had issues of traumatic brain injury because they've been fighting, firing weapons which cause jolting action or they've been jumping off out of planes and hitting the ground at 10, 15, 20 miles an hour. 10, 15, 20 miles an hour, these type of impacts are significant enough to make traumatic brain injury and interrupt the way that the brain controls our hormone balance in our body. And this is all fairly new, this understanding of these things like jumping out of planes or even playing soccer and heading the ball. Correct. That's what we're finding in football. You know, by the time you get into, you know, National Football League, you've already gone through, you know, Pee Wee, Pop Warner, and high school, junior high school, and so forth, and college football. And by the time you get to the major games, you've already have the entire process of loss of functionality in the brain.

And then you need just one more hit, one more not even loss of consciousness to create the scenario of inflammation the brain that leads to hormonal deficiency yeah it's the the issue has always been thought of as when you when it comes to brain damage you always thought of people who have been beaten up like boxers that have had long careers or football players who have had long careers and football players who have had long careers and they just stayed in too long. But we're finding that a lot of athletes like Mark Henry, is that what his name was? No. What was his name?

The young guy? Chris Henry. Chris Henry. The young guy who fell off the back of a truck, did something really irrational. His girlfriend was driving away, jumped on the back of her truck, fell off, died, hit his head. But then when they examined his brain, like this guy has a brain of a 70-year-old Alzheimer's patient. Right.

And he was 26, I believe? 26? Mid-20s. And just a career of playing in the NFL, as well as college football, high school, the whole deal that, like you detailed, had left this guy with a significantly damaged brain before he was even 30 years old and he was running around functioning nobody had suspected this he was behaving like a normal person correct if you look at the suicides that have been happening in football when they're between the ages of 25 and 35 that committing suicide looking at their

brain you see that they're aging a lot more faster than normal person in fact a study that was performed by the NFL showed that there was an 18 times faster occurrence of Alzheimer's disease and people who have had traumatic brain injury playing in NFL we've had boxers as patients 2007 did a ESPN outside the Line with two football players and a boxer, James Toney. And we showed his hormone levels were down, you know, low. The laboratory read them all as being low. I didn't have to interpret it. The lab did.

So that verified the fact that they were really low. And he had a lot of difficulties with weight, with control, and so forth. And as the host of the show said, how can you be testosterone growth hormone deficient and still be able to do that kind of functioning? The personality takes over. It's just the way that the person projects their life. Hormones help to stabilize it, to make it available. And then you as an individual get to decide what you do. And he was in the ring fighting as though there was nothing wrong, but he had a lot of problems outside the ring. So what you're saying essentially is that it's just his discipline and his will that kept him fighting,

but he was significantly depleted. Correct. He was unbelievably depleted. And then looking at a gentleman by the name of Brad Leggett, who was with the Mariners and the Patriots, his hormone levels were incredibly low and he talks about how his um i'll use rejuvenation occurred where he improved in mental functioning physical functioning and physiological functioning when he had his hormones returned to normal and pat harlow was on the show and they all talked about their experience when uh from multiple head traumas i think pat said he had double digit head traumas. And, you know, if we go back and start doing some of the new technology, like a DT MRI,

which is an MRI that looks at the connectivity of nerves, look at a PET scan or a SPECT scan that looks at the flow of blood through the brain, and you can find areas of deficit because they've been damaged and you can't get them back. And Matthew, how did you get in touch with dr gordon and had this whole process start well i'll start with your show actually when he was on here last time um i was in the hospital for a suicide attempt and was an avid listener just was listening to that he was on here talking about it you know i was at my last i had no other options essentially and um you're a veteran explain explain your

history for the people listening to this sure i'm a navy seal medic i've been out since 2008 um i live up in washington got out started having um all kinds of issues just kind of down spiraled went into the va finally and said this is going on immediately they diagnosed me with ptsd handed me about 10 medications and then we did follow-ups checkups and what kind of medications ssris yeah antidepressants anti-anxiety meds i have chronic pain so they dosed me up on pain medications oxycontins things along those lines fentanyl morphine oxycontin yeah i was on all three at one point jesus um by the way how high did you get off the ground i was just thinking all three at once holy that's like a fucking did he share? You had what? Wow. And so I was just having a lot of issues.

I was really depressed. I started gaining weight. Couldn't get up out of bed. I was married at the time, really struggling with all that. Then my wife left me because of what was going on. I mean, I literally had no hope because I was thinking that I can't be fixed because they're giving me all these things saying, this is going to make you better, this is going to make you better.

And my mind wasn't getting any better. So I decided it was better that I just wasn't here. And ended up in the hospital, was there for a week. My wife actually brought me my iPod and all my stuff, so I was able to listen because she knew that I listened to the show. And he was on here, and literally the day I got out, I went on and I applied, got a grant, had all my lab work done, got sent to him. He sent me all my results back, and so we figured out kind of what kind of protocol I needed to do. And then I flew down here to talk to him and started uh the trt so what do you think i mean if you could do you have like a series of events

that you can recall that caused your injuries or is it just uh just the entire entirety of your career in the military well i was in two uh ied explosions to the face so i have six bolts in my jaw i took shrapnel to the side of my face. I was shot in my leg. Just from all the damage of doing everything, not related to any mission, but I ended up having surgeries on my shoulder, arthritis in all my joints. I have back issues. I mean, so it just all kind of compounded into one of damage.

And then just, you know, shooting M4s all day, jumping out of things, of damage and then just you know shooting m4s all day jumping out of things rolling around you know even just um you know just hand-to-hand combat when we're you know practicing things you can get thrown on the ground yeah and you know over time it's just that's essentially what it was it's just so much stuff happened over time that it just compounded and did you feel this coming on slowly or was it very quickly was it when you got home was it when you were over there um that's a hard thing to answer because for me it wasn't very noticeable other than the fact that i just didn't feel good uh mentally i wasn't out of there mentally you learn to shut things off you become desensitized to the world around you. As a soldier.

It's a survival mechanism. And so emotionally, I was able to do that, to turn it off where everyone else around me could see something was wrong. I wasn't acknowledging it because to me, there wasn't anything wrong. But, you know, I just thought the pain that I had, that was just going to be the way it was. I was depressed with everything. I thought, Hey, that's just life. Now I went and did this. Now I have to deal with that. And you have this stubborn mentality because you put all these goals in front of you and you've always accomplished them. So now here's something that they're saying, yeah, you have this. Okay. I can beat this too. But as you're, you keep going, you're finding, Hey, I'm not doing that. I can't beat

this. What's going on here? So then you look at yourself and you go, this is just me. And does it get to a point where it seems like life itself is so painful and there's so much negativity involved in your day-to-day existence that it seems pointless and you just want to shut it off and end it? What's the mindset before you decide to try to take your life? That's exactly the mindset. I mean, for me, the breaking point was, I think, when my wife left because she didn't leave because she didn't love me. She left because she couldn't live with me.

And if this person that I love and who loves me back can't live with me, then what's the point of me being here? And if she's begging me to get better and I'm going to counseling I'm going on all these medications they're switching my medications up every three months because they're fucking not working and you're going okay I can't keep doing this I can't keep going on meds I can't keep being stoned out of my mind I guess you could say with all the pain meds and just I mean I didn't even feel like a human being there was this fog I didn't have cognitive function.

I could barely read. I'm an avid reader. I mean, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And I was like, fuck this. I can't do it. It just, even, even sleeping. It was like, all right, I guess I couldn't sleep. Struggled with that.

So even sleep wasn't even giving me comfort. And so it was just, you know, there was no point to be here here and were you in contact still with a lot of the guys you served with and did they have similar issues some of them did some of them um had different kind of issues um i think there's a stigma that ptsd causes this huge aggression that's you know anyone i discuss what they and i tell them you know i have ptsd like have PTSD. Like, oh, are you going to... They're worried you're going to fucking snap and kill everybody. Yeah, and I think that's not... I don't know if that's as common as it's been made out to be.

I think there's just been some huge cases and it's come out. But it definitely is an issue. But for me, that wasn't the case. Excuse me. For me, it was more just internalizing everything and shutting off. But having the ability... I was telling Dr. Gordon this yesterday, you know, for like for my wife, she didn't know what Matthew she was getting each morning. There was the Matthew who was loving, could listen or whatever, you know, the one she

married or she was going to get the Matthew who could rip her soul out and eat it right in front of her. And she didn't know. And I was never, you know, I never hurt her. But there's definitely, when you shut off emotions, there's a fierceness to that. And it's scary. You know, she would tell me, you know, your face scares me.

And I wouldn't hurt her, but it's a protection thing for me. And you just learn. So a protection thing meaning like your aggression is almost like to shut other people out yeah well yeah there's multiple things that one i didn't want to deal with it and two if i could shut them out then um then i didn't have to acknowledge that i was interactions i just didn't want to interact i didn't want to talk to you i don't even want to look at you just go away and because you could see the pain every time they look at you. And it's just a reminder.

It's that case of, you know, you can't get better until you acknowledge it's wrong. Right. So you just don't acknowledge it. You just say, fuck it. So you hear about Dr. Gordon on the podcast. You hear about this, the treatment for traumatic brain injury. And you hear about hormone replacement and the damage to the pituitary gland that happens during these impacts you you get together and you start hormone replacement therapy and then what are the results well sounds like an infomercial it does i mean it

almost sounds it almost sounds like a miracle cure but at this point for me it was um within 10 days the biggest thing for me was my cognitive function. Within 10 days, the fog was lifted. I could think clearly. I could do things again. And even physically, within those first 10 days, I was able to get out of bed, less pain. I could move. And then within like six weeks, I started feeling like Matthew. I started feeling like me. Okay, I can go to the gym today. You know what? I can go do this today. I can read today. I can interact today. I mean, it, it's so hard to describe because you got so used to how it felt that once it starts changing, you're like, Whoa, this is unreal. This is happening. So this I'm a different person,

my real, I'm the real me, but a different person than, you know, I have been the last couple of years. And so it's, it's almost an adjustment because now you got to go back and try to just heal all the damage that you did around you. Wow. You know? So just replacing your hormones had that significant an effect on your wellbeing, how you interacted with people, how you could cope. It changed everything.

That's amazing. So what, what exactly did you, what would you put them on? Tell me what, what, how did it start? your well-being how you interacted with people how you could cope changed everything that's amazing so what what exactly did you what would you put him on tell me what what how did it start is this a medical issue you want to talk about that no he's giving me yeah he gave me the green light for it uh you know we ran through a 28 point hormonal assessment and that 28 hormone assessment looks at brain regulation of the peripheral hormones. You know, in order to make testosterone, a signal comes from the pituitary and tells your testicles or in a woman, the ovaries, to make gastrointestosterone and then whatever. And in looking at his pattern, he had a very deep deficiency of the regulatory mechanism for production of testosterone.

But testosterone is only one of a multitude of hormones that we focus on there's dht dihydrotestosterone there's dhea di dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate and what we're finding is that we think of hormones as gender or sex hormones well the sex aspect of it is maybe 30 40 percent the ridge the remainder is on repair and maintenance of our body. One of the greatest things about testosterone is anti-inflammatory. What happened to your joint pains and your back pains on testosterone? It's reduced by half that first week. That's incredible. And this is in the literature. I won't get too technical because I won't understand it myself, but the issue is that the testosterone, like growth hormone, like estradiol, like progesterone,

all regulate inflammatory chemistry in our body, our immune system. And we've also found in the past 7 to 10 years that the brain makes its own hormones, its own hormones being testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, estrogen, and so forth, in the brain. And what they do is they regulate the ability of the nerves. And I just gave a lecture that we called the non-permissive environment, which talks about when you have head trauma, neurotrauma, where you've been hit or explosion or so forth, where areas of the brain shut down in their ability to produce hormones that regulate how you feel and your ability to have cognitive functioning. So not only on testosterone replacement, we use physiological

dosing, which is an average 25 to 35-year-old male makes about 4 to 10 milligrams a day. So we use 60 milligrams a week or 80 milligrams a week, which is about a fourth the amount that's used out there by traditional physicians who are replacing testosterone. And you got phenomenal response without any of the side effects. the hormone replacements includes anti-inflammatory medication which are all natural things like PQQ which is a form of CoQ10 that stopped the production of oxygen they call it reactive oxygen species which are oxidative chemistry oxidants and that leads to death of cells and there's an incredible amount of

literature that has been out for many, many years, and now it's getting more focused that in order for us to heal the brain, not only do we have to replace the hormones, but we also have to protect it from this oxidative stress that the brain goes through. Sounds like, you know, one of those trendy kind of statements, but it's actually factual. And there's just thousands of articles coming out on how much we need glutathione, or we need vitamin C, or PQQ, CoQ10, all the things that take the free radicals that are damaging the ability of the brain to regenerate. And in this lecture I just gave, back in 1911, there was a guy by the name of Tallow who proved that we can generate our nerve cells, our neurons. And then, you know, 1928, and, there was a guy by the name of Tallow who proved that we can generate our nerve cells, our neurons. And then, you know, 1928, then there's a guy in Canada who's like the guru in the ability to regenerate the brain.

But you have to have the right environment. That right environment involves, you know, hormones and also to help step up the system's ability to fight the oxidative stress. Why is this, if if not ignored why is this not commonly known by a lot of physicians or by a lot of people that talk about different neurochemicals that change behavior because we think of dopamine we think of serotonin those are the two big ones right when you think of serotonin reuptake inhibitors when you think of like antidepressants or when you think of people depleting that with drugs, you're thinking of dopamine and serotonin primarily. Very rarely do the other ones get brought up.

Well, I think, unfortunately, there's a financial motivation to things. Matthew is on probably about $40 or $50 a month of medication. One of the medications that he was on was a couple hundred dollars a month. And when you're talking about, I think you said 15 total medications, that when you add up the cost per month, you're talking about thousands of dollars a month. So there's an industry in keeping these people medicated. Big business. Industry as well as, you know, the analogy that I make is if you remember back in Legionella pneumophilia in Philadelphia, which was a lung infection, they went and gave these people,

you know, thousand dollar drugs. And it turned out that it was a 50 cent drug, erythromycin, that treated it. We're looking for things that are so brand new that we've ignored the very basic fundamentals. My martial arts instructor always said, back to basics, back to basics. Thank you, Byung-Yoo. So Jason Hall, you're a screenwriter. You wrote American Sniper, which is being directed by Clint Eastwood, which is, when is that coming out? It comes out at Christmas and it's about Chris Kyle famous story the book American Sniper of course best selling book and a tragedy

where he was killed he was working with PTSD sufferers and he was working with someone on the range who was suffering and wound up getting killed by them. How did you get involved in all this? I'll say first that, you know, that's a pending trial. So we don't know if that guy had PTSD or he just had a screw loose or what it was.

He got approached by a woman who was working in a parking lot. Get that sucker right up to your mouth. A woman who was working in the parking lot at his kid's school said, you know, my kid is suffering. He read your book. He served. Can you help him out? And that's about all he got. And he'd been helping out a lot of vets and uh you know this guy had it in for him and uh it was it was a tragic story i met chris uh in 2010 he got out in

2009 i heard his story and i went I went down to Texas to meet him. I'd never been to Texas before either and hadn't met many Navy SEAL snipers. Welcome to America. Texas and Navy SEALs all together. I showed up as like 60 cops, 60 Texas cops. Half of all the Texas Rangers were in the room, and I don't drink, so I wasn't real popular at first. were in the room and uh and i don't drink so i wasn't real popular at first the the only way i could ingratiate myself to them was uh one of them was picking on me and calling me a hollywood liberal and this and that and panty waste and and uh so i threw him in a front headlock and i i

jacked him up a little bit and then chris finally started talking to me he's like all right i'd choke him out a little bit yeah um how did you get involved in this you you read the story and you i heard the story yeah i heard the story this guy had shot you know he got more confirmed kills than anyone in u.s military history and uh i called a buddy of mine who was serving he had uh he had been seal team six he was working down at the CIA at the farm. And I said, hey, this guy's got more confirmed kills than anybody, and he hit a shot from 2,100 yards. Confirmed kill at 2,100 yards. He's like, I got news for you, buddy.

Your guy's full of shit. Your guy's full of shit. There are five guys on the planet who can hit that shot, and your boy's not one of them. I was like, all right, well, look it up. So he calls back, and he's like chris kyle's one of the five wow yeah there's a vortex optics some friends of mine that provide me with scopes and stuff for hunting they uh they actually got a call from someone in afghanistan that was about to shoot somebody and they they needed to know how to adjust their scope

correctly so they were talking over a sat phone with the guys at vortex they're giving them the exact adjustments to make some you know like fucking thousand yard shot yeah i mean he was we got him thanks take care what the fuck it's okay when you get to like real long distance and it's like,000 yards plus, a lot of it is just calculations and mathematics and understanding scopes and how much the bullet's going to drop. Yeah, and I think some of it is instinct, and I think some of it is, you know, he said God kissed the bullet.

Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ. Amen. God's a mean fuck. Or not. Either way. He kissed it or he blew on it yeah whatever happened it worked um so you uh get involved with these guys you uh start um in just becoming immersed

in the world of of uh these soldiers and their issues and how did you get connected to uh matthew and to dr gordon well when i met chris you know in, I met him, I looked him in the eye, and I was like, oh, shit. You know, this guy's not home yet. Like, you could see it in his eyes. There was something going on, and it felt like there was turmoil there. It felt like he was still fighting. And I called my wife, and I was like, I don't know what I'm doing here. I don't know what's going to go on with this guy.

I don't know, you know, how he's going to work it out. But he's got some stuff to work out. And it was hard to look at. It was hard to look into his eyes. And thankfully, his wife and his kids showed up the next day. And I saw it change. I saw for a minute the fog kind of lifted. And I saw him light up.

His kids ran into his arms. And I saw, like, here's what this guy was like before the war you know this is the man who who was there before the war and and here's maybe the man that he could become again wow how many of these guys are just tough and they just deal with this new reality i mean it seems like that is a big part of what's going on when you're saying the guy wasn't back yet but yet he was physically and he was going through emotions and living his life but all the the shit that probably was going on in his brain and certainly going on in his psyche right i think most come back that way i think that's their first mentality is like for me you don't you're not gonna admit that right i've beaten things worse

than this i'm gonna keep going especially seals right yeah you have to just to get through buds just to get through any of it that's what i said but any any challenge has been in front of me it seems like i've completed it and so this that's all it was and once i finally realized that i couldn't i was broken because then Because then I really felt broken. Because it's never happened to me. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel's just all dark. It goes dark to the end of time.

Yeah. I mean, the best parts about me were gone. And had Chris Kyle, had he received any treatment for PTSD other than the standard dose of painkillers and SSRIs and what have you? No, you know, I think Chris, I think Chris dealt with it doing some drinking and then he finally kind of worked his way through it, got a little, you know, got back into church and started actually helping these guys, helping other veterans. And he found peace in that. He found peace in helping other guys. And, you you know i can't speak

to to what he felt when he laid his head down on the pillow at night but uh he found some real solace in in helping these vets and they you know they'd bring them up and they'd go out shooting at the range or go hunting and uh you know and end up talking around the bed of a pickup truck for four hours with a couple of beers and and then you you get a little bit of this camaraderie and, and they don't feel so alone. We had a purpose again. You have a purpose while you're in, you have a job, you get out and it's gone. It's ripped from you. And there's not, you know, there's no clear goal or mission in front of you anymore. So you kind of search for that. Like for me, I kind of was trying to figure out what, you know, what, what the fuck am I going

to do with myself now? What mission can I accomplish? And it's not there anymore. There's no people, you know, there's the structure of things are gone. The command is gone. It's just you. And I think if it hadn't been for my wife, I never even would have gone in to the VA, honestly. Because there just happened to be someone that lived with me the whole time who's like, you need to go in or I'm gone. And, I mean, if she hadn't have been there, I'd probably still be that way now, honestly. The UFC has done a lot of work for traumatic brain injury and in helping to fund the Intrepid Center for Traumatic Brain Injury. And one of the most shocking things to me when we got involved and we started doing these fights for the troops was that there was no funding for this, that they had to get funding from other

sources, that they had to get funding from donations, and they had to ask people to call in and donate. And it's just unbelievably shocking to me that we spend so much money to send these guys over there, so much money for weapons, and so much money for the latest high-tech ways to kill people, and so little money on how to treat these guys when they come back, and girls. I mean, it's an issue. So little money, and also so little money on how to treat these guys when they come back and girls. I mean, it's an issue. So little money and also so little imagination and so little willingness to explore new things.

We're talking about a fucking blood test. Yeah. He's talking about a blood test to test their hormones. And it's like, oh, what a crazy idea. This guy's out of the box. He's crackers. And you look at the symptoms they're having it's the same symptoms the guys in the nfl are having it's the same symptoms that guys with

low testosterone are having and it's not a huge mystery you know but it is a mystery to to all these people and you know we're also talking about chris kyle who was the achilles of iraq and like that guy was having a hard time. That guy had to go through the same thing and go talk to somebody. You know, there's a lot of guys out there who served and got no thanks for it. They got no recognition. They were anonymous soldiers in a war that nobody wanted. And they came home and they were messed up.

Most. Most of them. Most are like that. You know, and look, I'm sure there's guys who came home and they were okay. Like, I haven't met a ton of those guys. Some of the SEALs are like that. They're fine. You know, God bless. But I spent the last year,

after writing Sniper, I'm adapting a book called Thank You for Your Service. And this guy followed these guys home. He followed a battalion of Army guys home from Iraq and followed their wanderings into, like, how they were going to get back into their lives and how these guys were going to deal with their stress and dealing with the VA. And it was a nightmare, man. And you meet these guys that just don't have any hope.

They don't have any hope. And you meet these guys that just, they don't have any hope. They don't have any hope. And, you know, some of them have the PTSD and some of them have additional injuries like Matthew had. And they've got nothing. They've got nothing. And the VA is like, you know, you're talking 22 soldiers a day kill themselves. Well, more soldiers have killed themselves than have died in the war. Which is the first time in any war in U.S. history.

Well, we keep records of it now. You know, there's a website which is called Prevention and Awareness, Suicide Prevention and Awareness, which is a military site which keeps track of all the suicides and also things to prevent it. And they keep records of records of the DOD. And 22 a day, I think, is not an accurate number. And there was another report that came out where it's like 40 a day, where it's even more. But you're right, in 2012, when they started really releasing the numbers, there were more people killed, more people committed suicide than people were killed in a year of fighting

in 2012. That's un-fucking-believable. From a patient standpoint, going to the VA, I like the VA. They've been nothing but very kind to me and very good to me. So I don't have anything in that regard to say. But when you go in there and you get diagnosed with PTSD, they slam you, one, with the meds, and two, with all these appointments to talk to people who people who one you're not going to fucking relate to i'm sorry but miss suzy over there hasn't seen what i've seen or done what i've done and she's trying to engage me in this conversation and all i want to do is slam

her face on the floor because she's trying to act as if she's my friend and knows what i'm talking about and she doesn't and i know she only has goodwill but as a patient sitting there and this is supposed to help you and it's not helping you know like this is fucking stupid and that's what happens most people go to like one or two sessions and never go to counseling again you cannot fix the mind when the body is not working when it's physiologically not working correctly the mind will never get better so that's essentially what's happening is they're trying to fix these the mind and these mental issues without fixing the physiological aspect of it and then wondering why none of these people are getting better okay well why are none

of these medications working how many more medications can we give you you know before you end up in a situation like mine and that's what what's happening. And it's, that part of it is ridiculous. And that part of it angers me because it is such an easy fix. It's such a, it seems like an easy fix, you know, as a patient. Or at least an effective fix. An effective fix. But it's that, you know, I remember when I first was going in there for my chronic pain, you know, they started me off with like aspirin, Tylenol. They went through this progression to where they were. And I remember

my doctor look at me saying, I know what you need, but I have to do it this way. So not only did I waste another six months to a year going on these ineffective, cause I, I did need something for my pain. Probably not what they gave me, but that's just another you know um example of sometimes i think they know that it's not working but they're in this bureaucracy where they have to just that's you know it's a federal institution they have to do this so they have to have sort of a chain of prescriptions there's a protocol this just didn't work we tried that and documentation of it is that what it is well yeah i mean it's a rainbow of medications that everyone starts off on it seems like and that's what everyone's getting when they go in there and then they're wondering well none of them are effect you know some of them are effective but

as a whole they're not and so you go in there i mean i was going in you know you know i would go in after 30 days no it's not really doing anything all right let's try it another two months okay here's three months. Well, let's either up your dose or let's just throw that shit in the garbage and give you something else. So not only are you taking something my body's been on for three months now and then just introducing it to something else. It was like I was becoming worse. I was just becoming more just not. Well, and the frustration too.

Oh, yeah. Frustration. By the end of that you need a stronger medication just deal with all the appointments you've been to oh it's bananas yeah it's ridiculous i mean i i did stop going to all my mental counseling sessions because i knew that wasn't was wasn't what was going to help me i didn't need especially not talking to them you know maybe maybe a friend or some but a lot of that stuff that happens over there, I don't want to talk about it at all. It's very sacred.

It's very personal and intimate. And to me, it's not a game. Most of the people around you talk to, and it's a fucking video game. It's Call of Duty. And they sit there, and they talk, and he was at that, like that. And you're like, listen, this is not okay. So you just don't say anything. Not only that, I'm not going to tell my wife because she doesn't need to know any of this

horror stuff that I went through. So you just internalize it. You internalize it. Your buddies, you almost don't want to talk about it because, you know, either your soul buddies or just anyone else you knew in the military, because then you're bringing it up to the surface again. So it just becomes this thing where you take the deepest aspects of your soul and you just shove it the fuck in there and then you pray and walk away and that is part of the problem and it's a mental issue it's that mental issue of like i think it progresses down this um this slope downhill because when your body just starts malfunctioning all the stuff that you're trying to deal with mentally goes with it it It just all goes down. And then you can't start handling just the daily things of life around you. You can't handle, oh, they got my coffee wrong. All right, well, now I'm fucking pissed and let's

go break a ton of shit. Just simple things like that, that every day, it's like, no, it's not a big issue. But you can't handle the little things around you anymore. You don't have a buffer. you know, but you can't handle the little things around you. You don't have a buffer. Yeah, there's no buffer. There's no nothing. I mean, and you find things to do. I try to find all kinds of hobbies to do and they work for a week,

but then you're just, you realize you're right where you were and you just keep moving on and it just never gets better. And that's the thing that was so frustrating about it. It's also got to be frustrating for you, Dr. Gordon, It's also got to be frustrating for you, Dr. Gordon, to know that there's sort of an ignorance involved in just treating the mind or just treating the symptoms of antidepressant with these kind of medications when you're dealing with so many different things holistically. The entire body has so many issues that aren't being addressed, and they're just addressing this one thing because this is all these doctors know. Correct. It's really a masking process that they're doing. The patient has complaints of isolation, which Matthew had, isolation, withdrawal, and hedonism.

He weren't enjoying doing the things you were enjoying before, and that's classical depression, so put him on an antidepressant. You're having difficulty sleeping, put them on trazodone, put them on whatever medication. And the frustration is the literature is so clear. I mean, I didn't invent anything. I just sit in front of the computer for eight, nine hours a day and read the literature that's coming out from all over the planet, and they're so compelling that I put it into clinical application with not only the veterans but with the civilians who have had traumatic brain injury from motor vehicle accidents, slip and fall, what have you.

And the responses across the board, once you find the laboratory-proven deficiencies or insufficiencies and you replace it, you get these incredible responses. A woman 32 years ago who had a motor vehicle accident, head-on, where her neck hit the steering wheel and crushed her carotid, and she had a stroke on the opposite side. 32 years of being on a multitude of medications, and then she comes in, and within a month, she's feeling better. They had her on Adderall to counteract the side effects of the five psychotropic drugs like the SSRIs and whatever. And at one month, she goes back to her psychiatrist in the south, and she says to the doc, a female doc,

she says, I'd like to get off these medications. The doc says to her, honey, I put people on antidepressants. I don't take them off. And that's the mentality that we have to start educating that there are all our alternatives but they're being told the quick fix is to put them on an antidepressant listening to matthew's story in 10 days the clouds started to lift the fog started to dissipate and by six weeks he was coming back to who matthew remembered himself being and that's the place then that's the place where he can deal with the other stuff that has been suppressing yes correct exactly because these are these things

are not independent of each other correct uh you know in the past uh i started in 2004 i had uh four head traumas and when i was between 34 and 46 i think i shared this with you once before between 34 and 46 i I started developing depression. Depression was on Paxil. Just wasn't a happy camp. What were your head traumas from? Let's see. At four years of age, playing jungle gym in New York during the winter,

I hit my head on the metal bars, landed up in the ground. Believe it or not, I was sitting with... How dare you. How dare you. Shut that off, son. Okay, shoot it. And then when I was riding my bicycle to Hebrew school between 12 and 13, I was hit by a car, knocked down, cut my face, cut my chin. Let's see, at 18 years of age on the swim team, shelf, a large shelf fell on my head and knocked me out.

So I was, you know, went through undergraduate, medical school, residency, everything was fine. But between 34 and 46, started developing all these symptoms. And then I went to a facility and had my hormones checked. And I was thyroid, which you saw me take earlier, thyroid, testosterone growth, hormone deficient. And I started on it within a period, let's see, August to November 3rd, I woke up totally different person, similar to what Matthew was stating. And not until that was 99, not until 2004, when I read an article out of Turkey. Turkey, they have a lot of pugilists. They like boxing. And there was this one article that said that boxers in Turkey were found to have unusually high amounts of growth hormone deficiency.

The following year, Muay Thai in Thailand came out, and then that was my epiphany. I went back to the literature and started finding 1, 2, 5, 10 articles talking about head trauma associated with hormone deficiency. And from 2004 until present, that's all I read is these relationships. And we know in gerontology and geriatric medicine, internal medicine, that as male gets to be in the 60s and 70s, that you see them go through a process that they call dysthymia, which is a mild kind of blue, you know, feeling blue, depression. And they have significant testosterone deficiency. When you replace it, they get better. So why can't we see that things that accelerate your loss, head trauma, leading to testosterone deficiency, causing depression, that looking at the older generation who have, or the older age individuals who have hormone deficiency, both males and females,

that they develop depression. Why can't you link the two? And that's where the problem's been in linking the two issues. Hormone deficiency for whatever cause can predispose you to issues of psychological problems. Psychological problems like what? Depression, anxiety. Well, the number one is fatigue. Did you have fatigue? Okay, fatigue. Fatigue without being able to sleep. Correct. Fatigue, insomnia, depression, rage.

Just for no reason, you just start being angry and rage, screaming at people. Patience is gone. Libido, sexual drive is gone. You start doubting yourself. Sense of well-being is gone. A plum is gone. Confidence is gone. Assertiveness is gone. Libido, sexual drive is gone. You start doubting yourself. A sense of well-being is gone. A plum is gone. Confidence is gone. Assertiveness is gone. And that's this issue of what they call comorbidity when you're arguing the fact of it being PTSD psychological versus a physiological cause for that psychological. I think the head trauma creates the scenario biochemically to

allow you to have sensitivity to these things that are called psychoaffective disease or psychoneurotic disease or whatever they're using today so it predisposes it so it makes you susceptible to the thoughts correct to the bad thoughts correct what's the difference between you know you were talking when you were talking jason that when you saw when chris saw his kids his personality changed. That was a stimulus. That was something that, you know, put him on a peak. Same thing with hormone correction. It can correct those thoughts. And we're finding something called neurosteroids, which are the minor hormones that run through our body that are lost during inflammatory processes throughout the body, can affect the brain, that stabilize our ability to not be schizophrenic, our ability not to be

depressed, our cognitive ability so that the long neurons that conduct information over a long period of time to ingrain our memories and so forth are stabilized. And if you lose that stabilization, it's like pulling the plug. You lose that ability to control it or turning the sound all the way down. So by correcting the hormones, it allows for the sound to come back up to where it should be so that you can function at the level that Matthew is. We have a lot of people that have had a multitude of injuries. What happened was because of a laboratory access medical lab in Florida, they gave me a grant. And what happens is that they gave me a chunk. And what happens is they gave me a chunk

of money, and I matched it out of my pocket, out of my practice, to provide the type of services that Matthew and a large group of other vets from the Green Berets, from the Navy, unshipped Navy, same Navy, right? Yeah, the same Navy. Blue side. The blue side, right. And in fact, Matthew... The black shoe Navy. I think Matthew was the last one to get in on this program because we ran out of funds. And we did a radio show a couple of weeks ago, and one of my patients calls and offers us money

to get the system back up and running. And last week when I was lecturing in Vegas, I'm approached by someone who had put in a grant with the DOD, Dr. Sangeeta Paddy and Dr. Dash at the University of Texas, who are now helping me to apply for a DOD grant so that I can continue doing the work that we've been doing. I'm taking money out of my pocket and uh the lab is still uh providing us with uh funds so that we can have a trickle of people but before we get 10 people at a time and they've all gotten better there's not a lot of people that are talking about this though in in the sense that the way you're talking about it like did you see the hbo real sports piece on traumatic brain injury and football players? No. Well, you're seeing all these pieces on these guys that have all these issues,

but what they're saying essentially is we have to be careful with the amount of damage these guys take in football, and there's got to be some sort of methods in place to mitigate this, or at least to monitor, like put sensors on the helmets. They're not talking about hormones. No, they're not talking about hormones no they're not talking about an another avenue of treatment that is based upon doing the right testing to see what the problem is they're not doing the testing to find the hormone deficiency they're finding brain damage they're finding you're going to find tte you know the um encephalopathy from trauma you're going to

find that and what the literature as i referred earlier, is showing us that we can regenerate neurons. It's been done. We can heal the brain. In a piece that came out in Life Extension Magazine a couple years ago, they interviewed me for this thing about healing the brain with hormones. It's happening. In healing the brain, regenerating neurons, how is that done, and what's the process involved? Well, it was my three-hour lecture, so I'll make it as short as I can.

Having head trauma initiates a group of inflammatory cascades in the brain that change the chemistry of the brain so that the natural ability of the brain to regenerate nerves is lost. We're finding that thyroid hormone, specifically thyroid 3, triiodothyronine, is extremely important to help stem cells in the brain, which they just found, you know, recently in the past 10 years, that we have stem cells left in the brain that can regenerate the brain. So when you're thyroid deficient, what happens is these cells lose their ability to

stimulate growth factors for nerve regeneration. And so having all the hormones back, removing the inflammatory processes in the brain can foster a neuro permissive environment where the nerves will grow. And the science is there. They're showing the things that stop it, the things that stimulate it. And in head trauma, they're not even testing it because the science is there. They're showing the things that stop it, the things that stimulate it, and in head trauma they're not even testing it because the difficulty is in order to know what's going on in the brain, you have to take a brain biopsy. They've been trying to get markers. S100B is one of the markers they're working with right now

that just tells you that it's happened. We're doing so phenomenal at diagnosing that you have traumatic brain injury and seeing it on one of the neuroradiological techniques, but they're failing in treatment. What about the connective tissue between the brain and the skull itself? I mean, isn't that an issue with boxers and fighters that have had repeated trauma that the connective tissue gets damaged? Well, what happens is subdural hematoma, which is a bleed between the pia mater and the brain,

and then there's intracerebral bleeding that occurs. And what happens, the cause for loss of consciousness is because you've torn, you've sheared is what they call it, shearing or diffuse axonial trauma. You've broken the long nerves that connect everything to keep you stimulated to be awake. And through this process called an MRI or a DT MRI, you can actually see where nerves have broken. And when you break them, that's when you lose consciousness. And so we can detect it. We can not regenerate those directly, but we can build secondary pathways. And that's what they're finding.

There's a chemical called NOGOA, N-O-G-O-A, which actually inhibits the ability of nerves to regenerate. And it's by controlling the environment, you know, using IV glutathione, using some of the IV products that we have that can allow the brain to have an environment where it can regenerate. So the trauma to the brain itself, the nerves that get damaged will never be replaced, but the secondary pathways that are created in response to that damage, can they put someone back to the same state that they were at will they always be diminished like say you're talking about a guy like you know unnamed mma

champion who at the end of his career starts getting knocked out a bunch of times just and we see that with guys who used to be able to take tremendous punches and now all of a sudden they get hit and they just go is that because of all those nerve breaks that have happened over the course of their career and the secondary pathways are just simply inadequate? Or is there another response going on where the mind is protecting itself? This is what I've heard described to me. They're shutting off quicker because the mind has recognized this pattern. Oh, we're receiving trauma. The best way to mitigate this is just shut off well that's a

simplified version of it not to make it too deep but their tolerance has changed where in the past they have a regenerative capacity or they have an endogenous system inside that can help to keep things in balance when you've lost the ability of this automated system to control things, you pass out. Whether or not it's the vascular, you're more sensitive vascular. So on the head trauma, the blood shunts from one area to another. So you lose the blood that keeps you awake and you pass out. Neurologically, yes, they could be breaking more nerves and therefore, um, losing it more readily. It's about resilience, tolerance, and how much of that you've lost.

So you no longer, you know, have a hundred thousand dollars in your bank account. You got a penny. So when you buy that piece of gum that you can't buy, you've, you're empty. So any shot, I mean, that's what we see. Any shot to the head head they just start going and that doesn't get fixed correct can't answer whether it gets fixed or not because depends on the individual individual looking at their hormonal melu looking at anything else that's uh comorbid things that are predisposing them to have a more sensitive response to it

uh you know certain drugs, alcohol. I mean, a lot of the drugs that we use, there's one drug that's used a lot, I won't say the name, but it deals with cholesterol, that doesn't allow cells to regenerate. Also, it whacks your vitamin D and your CoQ10. Lipitor? Something like that? Why can't you say the name?

He doesn't want to get sued. He doesn't want the fucking evil army coming after him. Well, there are articles showing that the cells break down more readily. And there's a process, four processes in the brain which regulate nerves staying strong and then being destroyed by our own body. So anyone who's on those kind of drugs, like anti-cholesterol drugs, they're risking a lot of damage to their body. There are multitudinal levels. You shut off. Because I have a friend who's on it.

Well, Anthony Bourdain's on it. You know, and he's on it because he won't stop eating pork. Is it kosher? No. I don't believe he's Jewish. He may be. No, it's the pork kosher. No.

Obviously, he isn't. It doesn't. Bourdain's French, right? It could be Jewish. I don't think he is. Well, he's not religious. He's in Libya,. He doesn't. Bourdain is French, right? He could be Jewish. I don't think he is. Well, he's not religious. He's in Libya, so it doesn't matter. Yeah.

My point is he's taking this just because he doesn't want to do anything to reduce his cholesterol. Okay. Because he enjoys fatty, awesome food. Enjoy it. But that shit is not good, right? is not good, right? Well, it shuts off CoQ10, vitamin D. In one of the chapters of the new book where I talk about a treatment for hormonal, the first case that I present is a guy who came into me who was on one of those cholesterol-lowering drugs, and all his hormones were down because cholesterol is the precursor to all our hormones, our androgens and estrogens. So cortisol, cortisol, pregnenolone, testosterone,

estradiol, and DHT and DHEA, and they were all reduced. All we did is stopped his statin drug and it all came up. I didn't have to do anything. And what do you do to reduce cholesterol other than diet, like for a guy like that? Well, it nice worm a box of worms the question is is cholesterol really the issue when you look at the statistics 50 of all heart attacks happen in people with low or normal levels of cholesterol so the question that any intelligent person has to ask excluding myself is that um then what's causing? How do these people get heart attacks if their cholesterol is normal or low? Why don't I have a heart attack with my cholesterol between 275 and 349 and my ultra-fast CT scan that looked at my coronary arteries were perfectly clear?

How is it that one of my best buddies who's an ex-fighter pilot has a cholesterol 140 to 150 and he ended up having open heart surgery because his calcium count was greater than 2,000. Mine was zero. His was greater than 2,000. Less than 100, great. Greater than 400, dangerous. He was greater than 2,000. He had 95% occlusion of the main artery, left anterior descending,

ends up having open-heart surgery and artery replaced from his leg. How do you account for it? Well, we went back and we did a series of tests, which were gifted by this laboratory I work with in Florida, which is called an LP6 that looks at the inflammatory markers, inflammation markers that lead to heart disease. So something called PLAC, small density LDL, homocysteine, C-reactive protein. There's a whole group of chemistry that causes inflammation to lead to the hardening of arteries and the body responds by putting calcium down, and that's the atherosclerotic lesions, to try and work like a Band-Aid.

And what spun off that, you've heard of chelation therapy. Well, chelation therapy for many years has been poo-pooed by the medical community, and three years ago the federal government did a study, and what did they say? Chelation therapy works. What is chelation therapy for many years has been poo-pooed by the medical community. And three years ago, the federal government did a study, and what did they say? Chelation therapy works. What is chelation therapy exactly? Chelation is two levels of it. One is to remove all the toxins from the body. Our focus was to try and remove the calcium deposition in the arteries

and use calcium EDTA, sodium EDTA, phosphatidylcholine chemicals that remove it. There's another product which is called K1, 2, sodium imidita, phosphatidylcholine, chemicals that remove it. There's another product which is called K1, 2, 3, and 7, which help to remove calcium deposition from the lining of the arteries. So if you can remove the calcification, you improve the atherosclerotic lesions that narrow the blood vessels and lead to spasming and inflammation that calls in cholesterol. Cholesterol has two major functions. One is to supply the cells with a precursor to all our hormones, except growth hormone and so forth and thyroid, and all the sex hormones,

and also to repair the wall of the arteries. And studies that were done where they took a whole bunch of stuff like trans fatty acids, nicotine, sugar, uric acid, cholesterol, C-reactive protein, testosterone, estrogen. They put it in cultures of the lining of the arteries called endothelia. The only one that didn't cause inflammation was cholesterol. Wow. Wow.

And there are a lot of articles that talk about this, the myth of cholesterol is myth, and that's what I see. Otherwise, I'd have hardening of the arteries. But my genetics on this panel that we do in LP6, all my inflammatory markers are low, my cholesterol is high. In Keith, his inflammatory markers are high, but with low cholesterol. So is this just a legacy diagnosis? Is this just something that we've said for so many years?

Cholesterol causes heart attacks. And it just imprinted in our brains. Do you remember when people say sodium causes high blood pressure? Right. But salt's a mineral, goddammit. It's an important part of your body. You need salt. You need a certain amount of it.

Correct. And I think they're making generic statements where they're selective. It should be selective. In certain people, sodium might be bad. In certain people, cholesterol might be bad. I don't see it. Wasn't that sodium, the whole diagnosis of sodium causing all these health problems, wasn't that like inherently flawed in the first place?

Yes. What was that? I don't remember what it was specifically, but they were saying that overload of salt in certain racial groups. Can I say that? Yes, you can. Okay, fine. Don't say the blacks.

Okay, fine. Then I won't say that. I'll say in certain racial groups, they've always been known to be more susceptible to kidney-related issues and fluid retention on sodium. So it predisposes them to enlargement of the heart, congestive heart failure, fluid retention, and high blood pressure. So in treating certain racial groups, you use diuretics that make you go pee to lose the fluid in the blood,

and other groups use beta blockers to relax the contraction of the heart, other ones to stretch the blood vessels and so forth. So every genetic predisposition has a specific kind of medication that works best. So you can't ubiquitously say, okay, everybody needs a statin drug, everybody needs a water pill, everybody needs a beta blocker. You have to be very selective. And this is what's being lost, as Matthew experienced in his experience. You walk in with any of his symptoms, and everybody gets on a prepaid package of medication instead of individualizing what he needs. He just needed a blood test, a $179 blood test to look at just his testosterone-related issues and find out he was deficient and replace it. Are you still on your medication?

Any medication? Nope. You're off everything. Didn't you go through withdrawal with that morphine? Oh, I'm sure. It's been a while. But no, I still take oxycodone. I think I'm down to between two and three pills a day.

So it's 5-325. How many were you on at the peak? Eight a day. Eight a day, and that's with morphine um i was on four day and then so you're still taking oxycodone for pain i do yeah and what is it what what is causing your pain um well my gunshot wound in my leg i developed compartment syndrome in there so essentially i guess the easiest way to describe that is the blood goes into the tissue it doesn't have anywhere to go so the pressure built up and it starts

breaking down muscle muscle tissue and it's painful I have six titanium bolts in my jaw from one of the explosions so I have a lot of joint issues and I took shrapnel on the side by my ear canal so I just have joint pain from all the movement um yeah just stuff like i mean it's not i'm not near where i was i mean i have arthritis things like that um but yeah i mean i think i was on fentanyl 25 was it micrograms i think is what it was 25 micrograms every three days so it was a patch um morphine it was um 40 milligrams a day i believe because i think they're 20 milligram pills i'd have to remember that and then oxycodone was uh five 325s and i was on eight of those and then so now i'm down to no fentanyl no morphine and uh just

three oxys a day and it seems to me i mean i'm i'm ignorant to this but that still seems like a lot of pain medication for your body to absorb and process is that it is a lot but you know he's got a detox i mean you can go through cold turkey but he still has process i mean it's so i've been on um it's a saucer replacement a little over three months and wow from there i went from um i got off the fentanyl a little bit before i started that because i just i couldn't function with that and it was too too high not high i didn't feel high because i was in pain but i felt down like uh suppressed immunosuppressed i guess something like that so i went off the morphine and then within three months i went from eight oxys down to three and so i mean it could be two or three just kind of depends how

i am during the day so i might take one in the morning when i wake up and then maybe one at night and is the goal to eventually eliminate that completely yes yeah hopefully three months is pretty significant uh improvement i mean that's amazing It's such a short period of time. That's the pain meds. That's even the antidepressants, anti-anxiety. I mean, it's all this stuff. I mean, the only thing that's left out of like a 12-medication panel is literally just the three pain meds.

How did it change your relationship at home? You have kids, right? Someone's getting personal. No, but I mean, this is what it is. We got divorced. You did? Yeah. at home and you have kids someone's getting personal no but i mean this is we got we got divorced so that yeah that and you have you have a couple kids right yeah um yeah i mean um yeah i mean we're divorced i mean i interact with uh with my ex every day but um i'm pretty sure she's got a bitter taste left in her mouth but does it

i'm maybe that was the wrong way to phrase the question how has it affected your ability to like oh deal with day-to-day life stuff yeah it's much better i mean it's hard to even describe because it's so normal i mean i feel so normal now to where it's not an issue. I'm not having that issue of just... The biggest thing for me, I think, was the ability to let go when things are upsetting. Little things that people, every day, just happen as part of life. Whereas for me, it was the end of the world and I want to tear things down. Where now, it just kind of goes off. My interactions with my ex have been better where now it just kind of goes off. Um, my interactions with

my ex have been better. There's a lot of hurt there. So that comes out sometimes and on both sides, cause a lot of, um, mistakes were made in anger or in pain. And you know, that's for me right now, the big thing is physically I'm getting to where I want to be and I'm getting, you know, I'm not, I'm not a hundred percent there, but I'm 80% physically where, where I want to be. of where, um, I can think as clearly as possible and deal with any of the things that have happened, whether, uh, pre-military, military and after. And it is going to be a challenge because, you know, I'm trying to heal broken relationships. You know, my wife, my ex and I, um, she's with someone and very happy. So there's nothing there. Um, I'll always love her. You know, she was the only woman I've ever loved.

And so that's there, but I want the best for her. And it wasn't with me at that time. And she's moved on and that's okay. Um, wasn't okay for me beforehand because I mentally couldn't process it. Whereas now I can look at it objectively and say, I get it. I just want you to be happy that's awesome man but good for you but it's a that's an attitude that man i wish more fucking people would take but it's not it's not easy months yeah it's incredible that's not easy now how many other people have you

turned on to this i mean you you must know other guys that are suffering from similar conditions or at least you suspect they might be sure um that's this process right now it's part of coming on this show is we're creating a dialogue as we like to say because no one knows this we want to empower veterans to be able to say hey go into their doctor and with something just to say hey can you do this because now they don't know and if they know they can at least, um, start something or contact me or maybe, you know, Jason now, or Dr. Gordon and just get some kind of info and get it going. Um, and that's the thing, you know, we're kind of limited because it's almost like there's just a handful of people that are doing this, Dr. Gordon, and then a few doctors

that he's trained and gone over. And, you know, they're not in every state and every city and every VA and every practice. And it seems like they're getting attacked to me. I mean, I got introduced at a Naval Special Warfare event to a guy who's doing some of this work down in Texas, Carrick. And, you know, you look him up and people are attacking him and, oh, this and that. And who are they getting attacked by? Other doctors? Other doctors, people saying they were licensed to do this or it's experimental medicine or, you know, these kinds of. Yeah, nothing that we're doing is experimental.

It's all written about. Doctors are treating it whether they know it or not. You know, they're treating patients who are testosterone deficient they never go into great depth to ask them their history because i know i get a lot of patients coming from other men's clinics type of organizations and there was a guy recently who wanted to transfer from his organization or from his clinic to us and i asked him to send a copy of his original labs, and to make sure it wasn't about using steroids for bodybuilding or something of that nature,

and he sent the labs over, and screaming on the lab results, very limited, but significant enough, you can see that he had traumatic brain injury in the past, so I called him up, he was 41 years of age, called him up, I introduced myself, and I said said were you ever in an accident he said yeah at 18 years of age he was broadsided in the car and his head whiplashed and hit the glass and broke the glass the window so we need to go and do a better job at history relative to traumatic brain injury we're finding people who have hormonal deficiency and never ask about their history or else someone comes into their doc because they're depressed. And the first thing

they do is they put them on a drug instead of asking them, have you had any head traumas or any slip and falls or anything? Well, there's that delay effect too. It doesn't have to be onset. So when you go in there with this problem, no one's thinking to go, Hey, did you have this? Because it might've happened 10 years ago. That's an issue with fighters. It's a big issue with fighters where I see guys who have retired, and then even though they've retired, like say if they retire in 2010, you will see them three, four years later with no fights at all, they've deteriorated significantly. Correct. Over that period of time.

How long does it take? I've heard heard 10 years it can be up to 17 there's an article that came out just recently that said that it can take 17 years and it might be that all their fights uh brought them up to the edge and then something silly like getting into a automobile accident five to seven miles an hour pushed them over the edge. We had someone in San Diego. They had traumatic brain injury from a 5 to 7 mile an hour rear end. But they've had history of trauma in the past. It's just how much of the hormone melu do you have to lose before you flip into symptoms? You know, we have a lot of reserve systems in our body, growth hormone reserve.

And when you lose that reserve, you start deteriorating from growth hormone deficiency. The same thing with testosterone, estrogen, and all the hormones. We have a reserve mechanism where there's a little bit hanging around. When you lose that reserve, you lose the battle. You then become susceptible to all the situation, you know, the depression, the fatigue, and so forth that occur. And how'd you guys all get involved together? How did Jason get into this? I looked him up. He didn't look me up. He looked you up on the internet.

Did you really? Yeah. What did you put in? Mark Gordon or what? No, I just, you know, I've been hanging out with these guys. You went to DAPE? No, I looked up PTSD hormone, and your name came up. Oh, okay.

You know, TBI PTSD hormone therapy. Okay. And how did you hear about the hormone therapy? Because I've heard of some pretty well-known Navy SEALs going out and getting this therapy that clearly wasn't available to the Army guys I was talking to, who have never heard of this at all in any way shape or form and you know because this guy had some ways and means and and was was known he was able to go get this therapy and is able to go get it and you know it significantly helped his his quality of life and so to me you

know this this movie that we made is about a guy who makes this huge sacrifice, you know, and he sacrifices spiritually, mentally, his family, everything for his beliefs. And he comes home and he's got to fight another war. You know, this guy fought as hard to get home as he fought over there. And I just feel like we're looking at this thing and it's kind of like the public is just standing outside a glass and and banging their head on it everyone's like well why are these guys shooting themselves they hear the statistic they're like why are these guys putting guns in their mouths i don't get it they're not even asking that question the general

public is completely ignorant to it i mean the average person you walk down the street say how many soldiers kill themselves they they would have no idea that it would be as many if not more than dying that stigma i was telling you about you say you have ptsd or something and then meet whoa you uh we need to lock you up you know there's that mentality that now you're dangerous and it's so i think they it's you know ignorance is bliss let's just well it's hard to talk about it's hard to like it's hard to dig in you know, it's hard to talk about. It's hard to dig in. And it's hard to... We have this thing where we're like, thank you for your service.

And it's the polite thing to say, and it kind of also puts a hand up at the same time. You're like, thanks for your service. I don't really want to know what you saw or what you did. And a lot of the guys, correct me if I'm wrong, who served are like, hey, you wouldn't thank me if you knew what I had to do Yeah, you know and and it's uh it it kind of prevents conversation in a way

Well, there's also that movement out there. That's not support the troops You know and it kind of I mean I remember coming back a few times and seeing protests and it's it didn't anger me but it was a situation of it's like You if you just knew this wouldn't be what you're doing right now so convenient to protest I mean just saying that you support the troops and just saying that you you know you you you want them to come back home if you really support the troops come back home but that's all that's very convenient it's very correct you know we all would

like less war in this world but the the reality of supporting the troops and the reality of the protesting is you're dealing with these people that have gone through something that you're never going to be able to comprehend it is absolutely impossible for you to be able to comprehend just psychologically what they're dealing with and to to add in this physical aspect of it the traumatic brain injury the loss of hormones the the loss of the ability to cope because of this hormonal deficiencies. There's so much going on. There's so much going on. And when you see people protesting and getting upset at troops, you're talking about kids.

You're talking about 18-year-old kids that are unbelievably easily influenced that are sent over there and essentially brainwashed. unbelievably easily influenced that are sent over there and essentially brainwashed you're immediately thrown into you're thrown into these training courses that treat you how to block things out how to become a trained killer and then they come back and people want to protest against them like what do you expect them to be unbelievably unique and be able to deal with this and process it in some sort of a strange and very unusual way where they don't, they become a conscientious objector, they step outside of it. I mean, when I see people protesting the actual soldiers themselves, it's very maddening. Because that could have been me.

It could have been a lot of us. It was you. And it could have been anybody who joins the military. And that shit drives me fucking crazy that you're blaming the soldiers for what happens. It's one of the most infuriating things. And I've seen it time and time again. It's so easy to do, and it's so short-sighted. Well, there's also no course when you're getting it.

I mean, really, they do all these training things to help you deal with getting out. But there's no magic course that you take, and all of a sudden you can fucking deal with life again. I mean, you're used to a structured life almost every day of you do this at 6 o'clock in the morning. You do this at 10 o'clock in the morning. You do this. You eat here. You eat when they tell you. You eat this much.

You do this. And then you go over there and you're doing the same kind of, you do these routines. You do these routines. And then you get out and you're literally left to just fucking figure it out guys say that about prison as well yeah well that's why a lot of guys want to go back to prison i mean i i've known people who um have gotten out couldn't handle it and went back in because they were so used to that structured life it almost is that kind of indoctrination of when you're 18 in a way because that's all they've known and they're still babies at 18 they don't you know and they that's

just how life was that's just what they know and they go back and it's comfortable it's comfortable yeah yeah listen to um what three or four years ago they had a strategy anyone coming into the military had to go through assessment and then when they exit they're supposed to go through some kind of exit assessment is that being done i don't know you don't know what's doing that but i mean collins i think you always be doing it yeah you always go in with some kind of a a basic assessment physically just to see if you meet certain criteria um but when you get out i mean so as like a person who is in charge of most of the team's health type of thing, you do like physicals, you do their lab work, you do all this stuff for them.

But, yeah, I mean, if it checks out, you just go, okay, you're good to go. I mean, you're not, I'm not doing anything extensive that needs to be done. Do they give you any psychological counseling about about how to reintegrate with society, how to deal with protests, how to deal with people calling you a baby killer, whatever the fuck? Vietnam. No.

You go through things where you... They have classes when you're PQSing out or however you want to call it that teach you basic skills to how to get out, reintegrate into the world. But I mean, it's very basic on like, you can learn like job skills.

I mean, I didn't personally do any of those courses. I did different things, but they have these things for them and you go through these things, but nothing like, can you train anyone really to how to deal with being called a baby killer i mean you can't i guess i mean you just i don't know well yeah we put all this money into training them to fight and then no money into training them to find peace right you know

very good way of putting it yeah the internal piece that they need yeah that we need and there's this uh i don't know you know i look at the med i've been doing a lot of thinking of the medication lately and stuff like that just because i can't believe everything that i've been given and you know it is it's like there's a market in this ptsd thing right now and it's just like everyone's coming back if you have this symptom or that symptom you go in there and you fall under this blanket of that and they're they're gonna put you in there and you're not getting out of it and they're they're gonna put you in there and you're not getting out of it because no one's gonna look any farther than that and that has to change they they're treating everything backwards and so who knows man that's the info

just needs to get out there well i think uh this is gonna help but obviously it helped you the first time um dr gordon talked about it it in the podcast that you heard. For sure, yeah. I mean, I'm deeply indebted that you have people on here that are coming in and sharing new ideas or just things that people need to hear. Yeah, I mean, this, yeah, I have no idea. I mean, I could be dead right now if that hadn't happened. Because, I mean, let's be frank, I probably would be dead. And that, in a way, probably needed to happen for me to get, you know,

enough courage to say this is something I need to try. I mean, I had nothing, nothing to lose by applying or nothing to lose about coming down here and just seeing what was going on and trying. Nothing to lose. And the problem right now is we need to get money so that we can help people we need funding we need to get the word out there um we're trying to get a non-charitable going so that we can get donations things like

that um you mean a non-profit or sorry 501c yeah what is a non-charitable? A non-profit. Sorry. I'm thinking of charity in my head. Right, right. Just so people get money, because how many people are on a waiting list? Right now we have about 28, and we just got another two, so we're up to 30. That's just your practice. And how many people like you are doing this all over the country? I mean, not just in California.

No one. Jesus Christ. Jason looked. I've got a couple of people who have looked. There's no one else doing it. Now, they're doing some very basic hormone because since 2004, I've been going around the world lecturing on traumatic brain injury and hormone deficiency syndrome, but it doesn't have the nuances that are in there. So they start off by giving just testosterone.

One of the issues with just giving testosterone is we have a mechanism in our body. If you give a hormone or a chemical into the body that's normally there, it shuts off the origin of that chemical. So upstream precursors are shut off. So in testosterone, the two very important upstream precursors are pregnenolone and DHEA. So it takes about four to six months before you shut off those two and they affect the brain. So what you'll see in patients who are just put on testosterone is that they'll start complaining that they're not experiencing the same effect. They're losing the benefit. And the commonest thing that's done is they increase the amount of testosterone, increase the amount of estrogen, they get bitch tits, and they get, you know, feminine

kind of attitudes and so forth. What are you trying to say about feminine attitudes well how dare you i've got three daughters you know what are you trying to say you're gonna get the feminists after you well as long as they're pretty that's fine pretty feminists you just said military intelligence yeah so um you know i think listen check. So, you know, you have to be. Listen, I think it took huge balls for you to come down here and do this, dude. I had no idea it was three months. Like, honestly, that's fucking awesome. It's a success story, but, you know, it's just how many other people do we need to have the same thing so they can wake up and want to live.

No, there's guys out there suffering man you know we have a captain families yeah captain who is um 21 years after his initial uh traumatic brain injury um in five weeks he was 70 better he gets better he gets redeployed to afghanistan because he's better and for a year he comes back and he's up in the 80% improvement, 90%. Now he's been put at that five-shaped building in Washington or wherever it really is. And he's trying to help to find the avenue for us because he's living, breathing proof that what we do, it works. And it is very simple.

Basics. Back to the basics. Replace the hormones that are deficient and protect the brain. And it works. And the other thing is that we're missing are things like Alzheimer's disease. We talk about traumatic brain injury. We think it's just blunt injury to the head. Well, ionizing radiation from excessive x-rays, CT scans, regular dental x-rays, skull x-rays

can cause damage to the control mechanism in the brain called the hypothalamus. Also, subdural hematomas, which is bleeding in the brain from, like, boxing, has now been associated with all the same symptoms and hormonal deficiencies akin to traumatic brain injury. So strokes is another one. Surgery. I have one of the top. The Robin Williams issue that you. Well, this is that now there was one article that came out that started looking at this where there are some 20,700 articles that have been written on.

I know that because I use something called Google Scholar. And it tells you in 0.01 seconds it pulled up, know 20,700 articles and you put in cabbage which is coronary artery bypass graft and depression and you see 20,700 articles come up talking about post-surgical or post-heart surgery depression and Robin Williams in 2009 had a major heart surgery on the aortic valve replacement and now what we're also finding is that thyroid changes, the thyroid production in the body changes after prolonged surgery, and it generates a form of thyroid hormone that's inactive. And associated with low thyroid is depression.

Associated with damage to the pituitary from prolonged surgery is hormonal shutdown. So I believe that it probably is contributory, especially when the pathologist came out and said that there were no drugs and no medication, no alcohol, no medication in his blood. But of course, they're not going to look at the hormone mail to see if there was a deficiency. Low levels of testosterone leads to depression. And you can find 70,000 articles in this chapter on neuropsychiatry and traumatic brain injury. There are 432,000 articles on growth hormone deficiency and depression. There are 235,000 articles on thyroid, 70,000 on testosterone.

DHEA has about 17,000. Estrogen has a large amount. Progesterone. All have depression articles that have been written since 2000 to 2013. Almost 850,000 articles. They're just producing it? They're just publishing them to publish it and no one's reading them? So essentially what we're dealing with when it comes to happiness and avoiding depression is the entire body as a unit as an individual unit has to be balanced correct

you have to be healthy you have to have the proper nutrients you have to have rest and exercise and you have to have your hormones in line if they are not in line you're going to deal with all sorts of issues compensatory issues depression the all the buffers that cause you to lash out like to not lash out all those are gone correct yeah this is a crazy thing to talk about i'm sorry to interrupt you but it's just it seems like this is a rush to get this information out here while these 40 soldiers are killing themselves a day and we're just talking about soldiers we're not dealing with people in car accidents people kickbox you know the people who played football that are all dealing with this there's a lot going on here yeah there's more than enough going on and the resistance of the industry my industry in the medical industry

is what is perplexing on one part because we went through medical school and hopefully we all read the Hippocratic Oath and we're supposed to serve the betterment of humanity in trying to help fix them. And I don't think that's being done. I don't think it's really being focused on. I think, unfortunately, I believe that we're more pawns in a game of chess where, you know, pharmaceutical companies are dictating to the insurance companies, insurance companies

are dictating to both the patients and to the physicians on how to run medicine so that you walk into your office and, you know, you're no longer an individual. You're just a number on a card. But the people getting this treatment are the rich 45-year-old white guys who can afford it. Who are all on testosterone. Right. Who are all finding some benefit to their body and mind. But even that is not being done correctly.

No, it doesn't sound like it's being done correctly at all. They're doing it at the entry point. I mean, I've been giving classes on andropause, which is testosterone deficiency, and menopause, which is growth hormone deficiency, and menopause, and how to balance female hormones a little better since 2001. And a lot of docs are listening to it. A lot of docs went into the industry to make money and therefore they go to one class, you know, one class for three days like I just participated in and they walk out and they're the expert. I don't consider myself an expert on anything. I think I know a little bit and try not to get in trouble by keep on reading so I know a little bit more. And what I do is I go out and I share this information. I'm at USC, and when I was in Chicago, I was teaching in medical school there.

And that's just my personality. I read a lot, and I find ways to deliver it so it's palatable and usable in a very relatively short period of time. But you have to change, you know, unfortunately, since 2008, everything is financially oriented. 2008, everything is financially oriented. So I've put my family life and the quality of my life partially on the line because I try to make it so that my office comes as close as possible to breaking

even, and my outside lecturing, whatever, is what really I get my uh... I put in the wrong place. To afford to be able to do it and our pricing, I mean, the laboratory tests, patients are paying a third of the average. I'm a medical director of education for the laboratory, and the lab has put a lot into what I do.

They support what I do by matching the funds that I personally put into it so that people like Matt and I have some patients who are not in the military, put into it so that people like matt and i have some patients who are not in the military are not in law enforcement and other areas of government um government who are just great cases that i want to you know i want to see it work it works and i can back this i know you do this because i know you very well and this is a real labor of love for you this is a very important thing for you this is not just lip service this is something that you've from the moment i met you've been very adamant about this and it's because of guys like matthew and this is one of the reasons why you wanted to bring matthew in here and you you contacted me right after you started treating him and right after you started experiencing positive results and i could tell that this

was something that was very important to you which is is why we brought Matthew in here to discuss this. Right, and I'll tell you, Jason is in an arena where I've been trying diligently for the past three, four years to get some champion for what we're doing, someone in the entertainment world to step in and to pick this up and to help spread the word. You know, without saying their names, some of the people in the industry that I see, I work with, could do it, but they don't want to be looked at as being out there

on the fringe. Because even though I'm in core medicine, everything I do is called evidence-based. Every single thing I do is an article. And I have a collection of 7,400 articles that I've gone through in the past, you know, 10 years that address each area. And, you know, a colleague says, you know, I'd like to see an article on testosterone and heart, you know, with that craziness that was going on. So I sent him my portfolio with, you know, 600 articles about heart and testosterone and all the benefits. So there are thousands of articles, benefit of testosterone in the heart, and you come out with these three bullshit articles that try to taint the benefits of testosterone. And we had one of the top guys in Harvard,

Dr. Abraham Morgenthaler, who wrote the book Testosterone for Life that refutes testosterone-causing prostate cancer. He came to us in the beginning of the year to an organization called Age Management Medical Group and gave a phenomenal dissertation on the bullshit of these articles showing that they show a 3%, they report a 3% increase in coronary artery disease, greater heart attack on testosterone when the actual statistics showed a 30% improvement. But the way they picked and chose everything but how how is it the fringe

these guys don't want to be perceived as being on the fringe but they're coming to you as patients well it's that's what i you know personal and public right it's about personal image and public but how do you how do you push this thing across the line so it's not fringe i've been on the phone with them frequently trying to get them if they don't want to stand up and be participant direct me to someone direct me to one of the stuff like this I think stuff like this

yeah I think stuff like this especially something like this where it's a long form uninterrupted conversation you can really get deep into the facts and the reality and your anecdotal experiences controversy is not new to you

yeah everything I do is controversial I don't have to worry about it what's the hottest controversy you're in right now? I don't know. If it's cage fighting, forcing people to eat animal dicks, dirty jokes, pot advocacy. I mean, I don't have a single thing that I do that doesn't have somebody hating me, so it's okay. So you're enjoying life enough yet?

But I mean, everything I'm saying, though. No, I think we're good. enough yet but i mean do we have to everything i'm saying though no i think we're good but everything i'm saying though regardless of whatever it is whatever the subject is this is what i truly believe i don't have any other motivations so i'm fine with the controversy and i think hormones have a stigma in this country because of barry ponds and fucking sammy sosa and all this crazy shit where everybody's like, oh, those fucking cheaters in baseball, they've ruined everything and sports and everyone is so concerned with what we hear about with cheating and steroids and athletic performance that, man, you're missing out on a core essential aspect of being a human being, being a man, especially

the lack of testosterone directly related to depression, directly related to these people that start hitting age, regardless of traumatic brain injury. They start getting older, and they feel like fucking shit. They feel like shit. And I've talked to a lot of them. They get on testosterone, and all of a sudden, they glow again. They have energy. They want to start doing things. They're active.

And someone, I've talked to guys who are on testosterone that don't like to talk about it. Because they're worried that someone is going to look at them, first of all, as being inferior. Because they need to add artificial testosterone to their system. And that they might be a roid head now. They might be a cheater. And I'm like, what are you fucking playing? You're 55 years old, are you playing Major League Baseball behind my back?

You're cheating at life! You're a life cheater! You're doing too good with these new hormones. Meanwhile, you'll take aspirin if you have a fucking headache, you'll take ibuprofen, you'll take medication if you're sick. Why won't you take testosterone? Why won't you get your hormone levels changed? I have a very good friend that won't do it because he's afraid of all these other things i'm like bro you look like shit

and you're tired all the time right like what are you worried about right but the and the difference to me is like us being there and these guys who like i sat down with a guy two weeks ago wrote a script about him met him for the first time lovely Lovely guy, like the sweetest, sweetest, nicest guy, loves to fish and all this. And I'm like, so how is it? Like, we really get down to basics. He's like, it's good, man. It's good. But some days I just have to find a reason to go on living.

And you're just like, you understand at that point how different it is for these guys, like how much more drastic it is, how much more important it is to reach out to these guys. And somebody's got to do it. This is a subject that's very near and dear to my heart, both because I know a lot of guys in the military from martial arts and just from life in general. And I know a lot of guys have had head trauma from fighting. And I've had a bunch of head trauma myself. That explains it explains it yeah i'm sure there's some bad shit going on there that must be it doesn't make any sense but it's a it's a subject that's very near and dear to my heart and once we started getting into it we started discussing it it was very confusing to me that

i wasn't hearing this echoed in other places and when sometimes when you hear things and you don't hear it echoed in other places you say well maybe i'm talking to a crackpot maybe this guy's fucking crazy he's just trying to get everybody on the juice but when you when you research it and you find the all the hypocrisy and the contradictions involved in the the counteracting of it or the uh the the people who are against it uh you you start realizing like well this is not a rationally approached subject this is a subject that for whatever reason is either the people who are talking about it are ignorant of it they don't have personal experience in it they don't have they don't have a conversation

with a guy like you that has spent decades working on this stuff there's this is not this is not a really well understood subject for a lot of physicians they don't have pharmaceutical reps coming in and telling them that they need to replace uh testosterone for whatever reason we're starting to see it with that's an issue? The pharmaceutical reps coming into offices? Which doesn't make any sense because there are what? The underarm deodorant testosterone. There's the rub-on cream. They have underarm deodorant testosterone?

No, it looks like an underarm deodorant thing to try to avoid contaminating your loved ones with excessive amount of testosterone. Oh, with the cream. With the creams that you put all over your body. We don't use any creams per se, except for fun issues. Well, don't... How dare you? Don't the creams have also some sort of absorption issue as well?

Well, what happens is when you put a cream, a 10% or a 5% gel or cream of testosterone on the skin, the little hair follicles have an enzyme in it that convert it from testosterone to dihydrotestosterone which is the active form of testosterone that you want in the cell not floating around in the blood to cause loss of hair don't point to my head how dare you see that shit motherfucker loss just loss of hair shrinkage of your testicles don't point at me again my balls are plenty normal. Over there, your monster over there. The werewolf? The werewolf.

And enlargement of the prostate. For women, enlargement of the clitoris. Not bad. It's an imbalance. It's an imbalance, right? The lack of DHT along with the teeth. You get too much DHT instead of having free testosterone that you need to get into the brain. So we're interacting with some other delivery technologies aside from injectable and topical that increases the amount of testosterone that gets into the brain.

And we see the major benefits in our TBI and our head trauma and neurotrauma patients where they do phenomenally well. So it seems that, well well it doesn't seem that there's there's a whole panel of things that have to be balanced out in order for you to have a happy body you said at the beginning a holistic approach you need to have physical activity you have to have nutrition and you have to have a balance of everything you take into your body whether or not not it's a medication, a hormone, or a mineral, or a vitamin. You sent me another thing. This is very important to talk about because I sent it to a buddy who is experiencing some depression. You sent me something about Propecia or Proscar or whatever the…

Fenestride and Durasteride. Fenestride. Fenestride and Durasteride. Yeah, that has been shown to cause depression in people. And I have a buddy who got on that shit. He was experiencing some hair loss, got on that shit, and became really, really depressed. Right. The reason being is that testosterone, when it gets into the brain, goes through a cascade of changes from testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, 3-androstenedione.

changes from testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, 3-androstenedione, and then it stimulates a chemical called adenocyclase, which gives us our upgrade feeling. And when you block the conversion of testosterone to DHT, you lose all that stuff down the road. So you can have issues with anger, depression. We have a couple of people who developed it within a short period of time like 18 months on um the finasteride and uh had to put them on to hcg a little clomid and a little testosterone six months they're back in line they were depressed they lost their libido um and it's because the effect of dht and testosterone in the brain testosterone growth hormone also work in an area of the brain for memory recall and the ability to learn new things called the hippocampus also our panoramic vision and our panoramic memories so you look at something panoramically

or you have a sequence of of um of memories that you can lose if you lose your testosterone in the parahippocampus area of the brain. It also kills your dick like pesticide. Oh, DHT does. That fucking, that finasteride stuff? Oh, yeah. That's because DHT is important. Yeah. Testosterone is important.

DHT in the brain. So when you use stuff that converts the DHT from the application on the skin, it gets into the blood, but it doesn't get into the brain. So you have to generate your DHT in the brain, in the cells, not into the blood but it doesn't get into the brain so you have to generate your dht in the brain in the cells not in the blood and when i look at people who are on uh some of the topical products out there you see free testosterone is good total testosterone is outrageously high and dht is sky high and they're wondering why their hair is falling out in a handful or else their testicles are disappearing or else, you know. But their strength's up. Great strength from DHT.

But it's this pill that makes your hair fall out. I mean, that's like, that's one of those things. Like, if someone can come up with a pill that keeps your hair from falling out, boy, that's a very popular thing. And then you look at the side effects. It's like, don't give it to pregnant women. Your fucking kid's going to be fucked up if she touches it. Like, you can't even touch it if you're a pregnant woman. Like, don't take something that a woman can't even touch when she's pregnant.

And the reason is that they found that DHT helps to distinguish the brain's gender orientation. DHT, dihydrotestosterone. Gender orientation. Meaning that you can have externally a um you know a male body but a female mentality whoa yeah and it's biochemical so do you think that this is uh maybe possibly related to transgender people that that say they're born a man physically but they they're born born the wrong sex. DHT related. I think that's it.

I don't believe in the social cultural reasons for it. Someone becoming homosexual or lesbian, there's, as a PTSD kind of response, I used to date a gal who was a lesbian who, just go off the move. Did you fix her? No, it wasn't my goal to fix her. She needed to be who she was. But she had been raped. I'm kidding. Yeah, I know you were.

She had been raped multiple times when she lived in this country that's always conflicting over there in the east area. Okay. Okay. I don't know what you're saying. Middle east area. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, that country that everyone's picking on because it's a warmongering country.

Okay. It creates all the wars warmongering country. Okay. It creates all the wars. Syria? Israel. Israel. Oh, okay. So she was raped in Israel by some people there. And she feared men.

She had a PTSD. Every time she got close with a guy, she would freak out. And she didn't have it with women. And that was, you know, the PTS. But I think, you know, they say it's a choice. Well, I don't think it's a choice in all the cases. I think in the transgender, they were put into the wrong body. Their mindset was in the wrong body or their body was right.

The mindset was treated with hormones that created the other gender. And they're fulfilling it by transgender surgery. You know, I worked in Thailand for the past four years, going back to start another project, and was exposed to a lot of the transgender or the gender reassignment individuals relative to hormones. And there were people who were in the wrong body. I mean, their physical expression in the opposite sex they were born in was obviously the wrong body. And they went through surgery to have things corrected for them. And do you think this is related to these hormones in the womb?

I think it's hormones. It could be, you know, alcohol, cocaine, crack, meth, any kind of chemistry that is introduced to the woman's body during that very friable period of time, the first seven weeks where everything starts developing, and the change in hormones, whether or not it's externally introduced or internally manufactured because of things that they've been taking into their body like alcohol, which can alter chemistry, or smoking weed that can cause an elevation an elevation estradiol levels and if you have elevation estradiol levels in a in a male you can predispose them to be female brain wise physiologically male female in mental this is uh an issue that a lot of people get very emotional about when you're talking about transgender folks yes and when you break it down to a chemical relationship and you break it down to uh this what

you're saying about the introduction of the certain chemicals in the womb people resist this information yes they do they they'd like to say that you know uh they're always female uh they want to be female um or male or male yes sorry i just preference female regardless but um yeah it's a very heated very emotional because you don't want to have that doubt that they were a male you want to eliminate the fact that they were a male and that they're a female as you know in in mma the situation that's going on the situation i'm involved in well i'm involved in it because i i was one of many people that thought it was incorrect there's a woman that was born a man she's a man for 30 years and then uh had gender reassignment surgery two years later was

fighting women in mma fights never fought as a man and was fighting and just beating the fuck out of these chicks and not letting them know the first two at least that she used to be a man which i thought was just completely incorrect and i i based it on my knowledge of martial arts my knowledge of things like the size of hands and shoulders and the different relationship that the the body parts of the hips just the the the structure of a male body is very different and then if you take steroids one of the things about steroids that's hugely problematic for people that you know uh cheated and then don't cheat anymore is that when you cheat when you take steroids and i'm not talking just about testosterone i'm talking about like real radical steroids that a

lot of people have taken you enact permanent changes to your body not just permanent changes but permanent changes that improve the performance of your body forever you there's been many studies that have come out recently that people have taken steroids you know x amount of years ago and been off them for a long time still have the benefits of taking those steroids if you've taken 30 years of testosterone in a male frame a male frame which has different tendons which has different just different jaw structure which changes your ability to absorb punishment two years of estrogen therapy how much of that is going to change that? Externally, it'll change.

Estrogen has counteract some of the benefits of testosterone. So the question is, is there also supplementation of testosterone at the same time of taking estrogen? Or are they using testosterone to convert into estrogen as a means of getting their estrogen? You'd have to look at how they're being treated and their personal selection of what cocktail of hormones that they're taking. Usually what happens is cyprosterone acetate is a drug that's used to block the androgen receptors so that a woman can develop the, or a transgender woman can develop the softness and the femininity of her body. But if the individual, the transgender female, ending up as a female, maintains a lot of the muscle striations and contours of a male, then

they're probably not getting adequate amount of estrogen or they're supplementing with one form of either testosterone or Deco or an angel on or Deca and Angelo on what Andrew and of our some of the other DHT like products so be interesting to find out what the chemistry the biochemistry is the individual but you're right muscle muscle response time, absorption, hips, tendons, cartilage and joints, resilience, thickness of the bone. Men have more dense bones, more dense jaws than women. Mindset, the aggression. There's a totally different aggression. Imprinting. Imprinting, right, from that 30 years.

Men are different for a lot of ways the way we analyze things in all fairness to when it comes to bone density um african-american women have similar bone density to white men correct for whatever reason um my significant other is a dentist and would share with me over the past 30 some odd years about the um difference between different racial groups and the african-american have much thicker bones much thicker bones comparable to a male female to male yes and estrogen in taking estrogen um post transition transition estrogen allows the bone density to remain because estrogen which is one of the issues in osteoporosis, is when women go through menopause, their body stops producing estrogen, so their bones

lack density. So in giving transgender male estrogen, it actually preserves bone density, so keeps them with a male bone density. Correct. They don't lose it as long as they make sure that not only vitamin D but estradiol, testosterone, growth hormone all help with bone density. In fact, growth hormone works about 1.6% increase in bone density in a year. So it raises the bone density. We have patients who are growth hormone deficient with thinning of the bones. We put them back on physiologic dosing of growth hormone.

You see in six months to a year, the bone density responds, where in using some of the medication that are out there, which I won't name, you know, can take 23 years. And bone density is also altered by weightlifting, correct? Correct. The body responds through pulling. I mean, people, the most common abnormal example of that are either Achilles tendon spurs or plantar fasciitis spurs. From pulling of muscle or tendon on bone, it stimulates more bone to be made.

So if you're stressing the bones is really what it is, you increase the density. So if you look at people who are sedentary, drink alcohol, blonde, blue-eyed, male or female, you'll see Scandinavian study. You'll see that their bone density is less than people who are dark-skinned, dark-haired, and physically active. These are things that help to maintain and promote denser bone. What happens to tendon strength and things along those lines? Because tendons play a vital role in striking in combat sports. Right. Specifically about tendons, I can't answer other than the muscle. It improves the muscle and muscles are connected to tendons. Tendons are a inert kind of tissue. It's the muscle that pull

on the tendon. So it's the muscle issue. But the muscles decreased with estrogen therapy. They can just decrease with estrogen therapy, but if they're also on something that puts back testosterone, you can generate a balance so they get some softening, but they don't lose the muscle. And then estrogen, you'd have to look at the biochemistry of it to really answer it. Because if you're being strict on the process of total transgender transformation you need to give them lots of estrogen and diminish the testosterone which competes with the estrogen so if you want to be a dominant estrogen dominant to be a female estrogen dominant then you have to wipe out the testosterone well this has been such a highly charged and emotional discussion and and it becomes a transphobic or an anti-transgender

argument more than it becomes an argument of fairness involving a sport where the very goal is to use your body to hurt somebody else and if you have some sort of an just natural physiological advantages uh over that person because you were born male not because you're i mean there's a spectrum involving women there's some women that are very feminine very petite and there's some women that are very thick and very physically strong just naturally but from the womb you know no added hormones no added anything so but the idea is that that's mitigated by weight classes the idea is that 135 pound woman and 135 135-pound woman, they're both 135 pounds. They're pretty, whether they're, you know, there's variations, but pretty close.

Let's have them compete against each other. But a 135-pound man versus a 135-pound woman, very different. 135-pound transitioning man to transgender woman woman still different than a biological woman they would have um undue disadvantage the competitor against the female natural born natural born female would have undue disadvantage against a transgender uh female one that went from male to female um genetically um you know you're always going to be a male, genetically. So it means that the biochemistry, when you put these things into it, the body will respond to preference male,

unless you totally put in chemistry to stop that. And that's that cyprin... But let's assume that they even do put the chemicals in to stop that. Would they still have significant advantages in any areas? Yes, for a time frame, they would until the optimal effects that you're looking for by giving estrogen for softening the musculature take effect. Well, it's still, there's a 10% benefit that men have over women, like across the board in reaction time. Would that still be a factor if they had transitioned to a woman i really don't know that answer that would be is there probably hasn't been that many studies on this as well i think the

biggest problem in this one case that you're talking about is that there's really no precedence there's no wealth of documentation where they've actually looked at someone who goes from male to female and gets into some male sports whether or not it's wrestling or grappling or mma or whatever the situation is or baseball was there someone recently went into transitional went into a sport it's cyclist do you know about that yeah michelle Dumarek. Yeah, it's a fascinating story. She transitioned. She had sex reassignment surgery, became a woman, and started competing in biking. And in her first, she entered a novice female class.

Her first finish was 2.5 seconds faster than the winner of the professional female category uh she went on to uh win the fall in 2002 she uh she was awarded a license to race in the women's category three weeks later she entered her first race in the pro women's class finished third the following week she placed first beating her competition by 10 seconds and this is you know a novice a person who's just just entering into this world of professional racing and she's just stomping these women a wave of protests ensued a petition was created and signed by female and a few male racers asking her to be disqualified because she had a race license the request was denied so it became this huge controversy um

and you know this is another example of someone who has an unfair physical advantage or is thought to have that chemically. There's another problem with this is that there's a lot of confirmation bias about this, and there's a lot of emotions that are riding on this. And this person who we're talking about, the person in question, has become essentially a poster boy for transgender rights and transgender acceptance. And I couldn't think of a worse possible example. It's one thing to say, hey, you know, this person wants their own personal freedom to be living their life as a woman. Do you accept that? Absolutely. Change your name, change whatever you you want but when you're asking for that right but you're entering into combat sports with natural born females and literally beating the shit out of them boy that gets really fucking tricky that gets really tricky so what do you think the resolve will be have a separate organization that only deals with transgender

that's the best way i mean that's probably the best way to handle it. But if there's a point at which the body provides homeostasis as a woman after doing all that testing, isn't that measurable? It's measurable, but it's going to take a long time.

They might be in their 70s by the time it takes over. So it takes decades. But the point is, they're genetically, whatever you throw into their body, their body's going to respond to it as their original gender. So the testosterone that you're talking about, the problem that people have that I've talked to is if I start taking this thing, I'm going to have to take it the rest of my life. If you're deficient i used to get this for past 14 years you're a diabetic who needs insulin right what are you going to do rest of your life correct same thing with testosterone thyroid i'm committed to my thyroid for the rest of my life because without it i gain you know, my thought processes are slowed down, and now I race all the time,

okay, brain-wise. So you have to treat it like a disorder, a disease? It's a deficiency syndrome. Yeah, you know, I don't understand why, you know, my colleagues tend to isolate it just as you, you know, positioned it. If you're deficient, you replace, you replace or replenish it, bring it back to where the normal level is. The other thing is we have developed statistical models for at 20 years of age, you need this amount of hormone at 40, this amount, which is less, and at 60, this amount. Why don't we replace everything to one where the healthiest between 25 and 35? And that's the premise of of our practice and that's why we get the responses we do we don't return a 70 year old to the average 70 year old level because they weren't getting any benefit in the past so

we bring them to a level that has the the peak of it do you have 70 year old wives coming in you go this dude won't stop fucking me we just cut his fucking dose back. Jesus Christ. I had a, you brought it up. You brought it up. 94-year-old guy comes in on a walker. 94-year-old guy comes in on a walker. He was brought in by one of the guys that I talked about, Keith. And he'd been using the walker for about 17 years. Comes in, come in, and we put him on two hormones.

Now, in the past, I would draw the blood, get the results, and then start him. But he had a classical syndrome called the frailty syndrome. He was holding on to the walker and shaking because he didn't have muscle tone to support his own body. That is classical fatigue syndrome. So I put him on to a middle-of-the-road treatment protocol, low-dose regimen, and waited for the labs to come back, told them to come back in six weeks, came back in six weeks, and we started him, you know, reviewed the labs, and he was on an appropriate amount and drew blood again to monitor him, and we chit-chatted a little bit, and as he started leaving the room, he turns to

me and says, oh, by the way, Dr. Gordon, I probably should tell you i finally had sex with my 60 year old girlfriend and that tells you that at replacing the hormone that psychologically you have to be psychologically attuned to want to have sex you can't just have sex because the brain is you know not with you physiologically everything has to be working and physically you have to have the moves otherwise okay you did that with your hands the moves well that's what he did to me he's got some oh the other thing is he carried his walker in he knew it didn't walk on it he carried it in under his arm and i said to herman i said herman uh why are you carrying the walker he says well i've used it for 17 years i've got to continue using it i said did you use it today

he says no so leave it home he says but i'm afraid i might fall he's committed to his walker like you're committed to your thyroid absolutely so um i think it's different that's like if he needed if he didn't need the thyroid but he's still taking it with him his thyroid's committed to him how about levitra or silas or something like that it does help testosterone does help allegedly allegedly yes you wouldn't know anything about that so the answer is yes you've had some 90 year old dudes fucking the shit out of the unbelievable i shouldn't say like that well no um what what um have you ever had negative responses people you've put them on some sort of a hormone replacement protocol and there becomes issues absolutely what. What are those issues?

Let's see. A gentleman who was put on to 60 milligrams a week of testosterone and all he wanted to do was have sex with anything that walked. So we had to lower him down to 40 milligrams. Three patients who had a panic attack because this process of testosterone in the brain going to this thing called adenocyclase, if it's the wrong person or too much relative to their body, they can get a panic attack, which I've had in three patients. You lower the dose and it disappears. What's causing the panic attack? It's a chemical called adenocyclase, which is like a stimulant in the brain. It just pushes you over the edge. So is it that they have so much testosterone and then their body thinks, well, we must be in a dangerous area.

Is that why we have it? No, it's relative. Hormones are relative. It's not absolute. You can't say 100 is what everybody uses. You know, there are people who need 20 milligrams. I have one gal that the average production of a woman in a week is about 20 milligrams. She would use 20 milligrams a month.

And she'd meter it by her libido. So an average weekly dose she used every month because she was super sensitive to it. Women, when they get on testosterone, get super horny. They get assertive, which is great they get allegedly unless you're living with them they get confidence assertiveness uh they start feeling great they absolutely feel better uh competitive and it's all degrees of it's all acceptable degrees of and when you over treat them then you into, I want to be fucked now. Whoa.

In an hour, and in two hours, and three hours, and four hours. And you know you're using too much. You're saying this from personal experience? Absolutely not. Just reports. I had to go back and take human sexuality classes so that I can feel comfortable saying the F word on your show. Really? Absolutely.

You had to take it? No, I took it years ago. It helped me with dealing with my own upbringing and my conservative background. f-word on your show really absolutely you had to take it no i took it years ago you know it helped me with uh dealing with my own upbringing and my conservative background conservative well you grew up in a time with no internet man the world's changed absolutely working it out yeah doctors are dropping f-bombs left and right these days oh you got a fucking broken leg kid absolutely and being from new york you know fuck is what, and is first, and idea is second, and fuck is third. Yeah, it's a common one.

It's a common one. But there are better words, and some of us, there are better words. So, again, this people who have this response to the testosterone, they develop this anxiety issue. A panic attack. Panic attack. What exactly is a panic attack? Like, what's going on when you? A panic attack. Panic attack. What exactly is a panic attack? What's going on when you have a panic attack? It's an explosive fear of the unknown where they think something bad's going to happen

to them, and they get hyperventilation, and they get fast pulse, and from the hyperventilation they can actually pass out because they changed the pH of their blood. We had a guy in the UFC that was in the in the locker room about to fight had a panic attack and was hyperventilating and they actually pulled him from the fight. Mm-hmm. I'm breathing into a brown paper bag or a plastic bag or put one of those black hoods over their head. What does that do? What? The bag. What it is is when you hyperventilate you're blowing in getting in too much oxygen and getting rid of

your calcium and it falls out of solution. And calcium is responsible for neuroconductivity. So when you breathe in too much, you're getting too much? When you hyperventilate, you create a change in the acid balance, acid base, and calcium is used to try and stabilize it. So what happens is it falls out of solution. Calcium hydroxide. What does the black bag do uh i was just being funny but brown paper bag yeah i like plastic over brown paper why brown

paper makes too much crunching noise okay so the idea of a bag being that you're not getting all the oxygen from around you you're breathing in carbon dioxide you need to bring back you're blowing from hyperventilation you blow out a lot of carbon dioxide which You need to bring back. You're blowing from hyperventilation. You blow out a lot of carbon dioxide, which your body actually needs. You know, if you give someone pure oxygen, you can stop their breathing. Because the balance of breathing is between oxygen and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is actually what stimulates you to breathe. What about those, like, oxygen bars? What's the actor's name?

It starts with an H. Woody Harrelson, I think, has a lot of the oxygen bars. What's the actor's name? Who has such an age? Woody Harrelson, I think, has a lot of the oxygen bars. Yeah, they're great. You know, Michael Jackson used to sleep in one. What did they do for you? I thought he slept in a hyperbaric chamber. He did. And that has higher oxygen concentration.

So getting more oxygen, you know, in Las Vegas, you go to the airport. I was just there, and they have all these oxygen bars there. So after you've been bombed out for three days playing every night until two in the morning or never getting to bed, oxygen can help you with some improvement in improving your focus. But don't they pump it into the casinos as well? Yes. This supposedly is what they said. I don't know what the truth is. That's what keeps you up.

That's what I've heard, too. But I don't know if that's true. I don't know if they would ever fucking admit that you bring an oxygen meter in and if it's uh 21 or higher you know they are because it's i think 19 in the natural world they'll fucking tackle you you can walk in there with oxygen meter that's why they have all those he's counting cards tackle them that's why they have the cameras up there to make sure you don't bring oxygen meters and they fr frisk you for oxygen meters when you walk through the door. And the idea that the oxygen keeps you awake, is that what it is? Correct.

What are you doing? Snopes says it's false. Snopes says it's false? Yeah. How the fuck do they know? Oh, casino lore. False. It's just the gambling.

Gambling is a multi-level industry. Could you ask them, is it true that when you ask for a drink when you're playing craps, they put a lot of alcohol in it, so it disinhibitions, so that you put more money down than you have? Well, they definitely give you good free drinks when you're gambling. I mean, that's a fact. The scotch ad was good. That is a crazy fucking thing that they're allowed to do. Give you free drugs that lower your inhibitions and cause you to make

irresponsible decisions while you're doing something that involves gambling and correct fucking crazy but so they got to pump oxygen there i supported i'm 100 with it i've done those um those oxygen bars i did one in vegas once we sat down and tried it and i was my friend eddie and i was like you feel anything he's like i don think so. Did you get the one that flavored? The flavored air? Probably was. It was just going up my nose. I was sucking on it.

I don't even remember. But I remember giving up after a while. I was like, this is not enough. It's not like you have a shot, and you're like, whoo-hoo, this is working. Maybe you were awake. That was the problem. You had to be asleep to do it.

Oh, so if you're asleep and you have a little oxygen, it does something for you? It probably would help better. Yeah. The guy at the float lab, he pumps oxygen into the isolation tanks. He has an oxygen scrubber, like one of those ones that makes those weird noises. You know those oxygen scrubber things? It pumps air into the isolation tank to enhance the experience. I'm doing that tomorrow for the first time.

Where? Which place? Venice. Float Lab. Yeah. It's awesome. You're going to love it. Yeah.

It's awesome. Float Lab? It's a life-changing. I'm worried I'm going to have some flashbacks or something. You might. How long are you in the tank? Depends. You could do it for as little as an hour.

I've done it for half an hour if I just want to relax. Right. I have something to do and I'm just trying to unwind. I've got three kids, so I'm thinking three hours. Signal deprivation. Two hours is goodd wise it helps i do it every time i come down yeah yeah what uh what helps about it um you think in a clear fashion like things are coming to you and i believe you know it's just you you're able to kind of work through it a little bit better where there's no distraction distractions there's not yeah you don't got other stuff going on and and i i work better internalizing things like that like i was talking about the counseling for me that's just as my personality would never work because uh the

person i'm talking to doesn't know what what i went through but in my own mind when my own dialogue is talking to me back because i i the last time i was talking i remember talking to myself and i was talking back to me it was yeah it was very it was very strange but that's what was happening was i was bringing up things and i was talking and i was responding in fashion with what i was talking about, like calming myself down. It just worked better. Yeah, the way I describe it is the first 20 minutes or so of me in the tank is sort of like a seminar on my own life. It's like giving myself advice.

Because the mind untethered from the body is very difficult to get to that state. Unless you're doing some really fucking heavy meditation for long periods of time, it's very difficult to achieve the kind of state you get in an isolation tank after half an hour just floating. It takes me a while to get there. Yeah, you've got to calm down. Because I don't do it often. Yeah, that's a big part of it too. It takes me a while.

But once I'm there, yeah, it does help. I do leave clearer and it is something that I think is a benefit, especially for things like PTSD and mental issue. Yeah, if you had one near you and you could do it on a regular basis, I think it would help even more because part of it is relaxing with the experience itself. The experience to me, because I have one in my basement, it's a very natural part of life. I go in there all the time, so it's a natural thing.

It's not like, oh, what are we doing here? It's like, here we go again. It's normal. It's almost like a it got uh come on over buddy the other thing too was for me with my body just with pain you know i'm used to walking around a certain comfort level of just the way my body works so laying down in there when my body's not supporting itself i was able to let that go i let that go and just kind of focused like i said on my mind and that's a huge thing for me like i it wasn't until i did that the first time that i realized how much my body is impacting my mind you know really just because you get used to feeling a certain way the whole time especially with like pain or you know my leg or my knees you take that out of the equation

oh you know your mind's like, okay, this lets, we can focus on something else. And it is nice. And besides the alleviation of pressure, because you're not carrying your weight anymore, there's also Epsom salts in it, which is an excellent source of magnesium, which also relaxes the muscle. So you got like sort of a dual effect going on. You have this no gravity effect because you're completely floating, you're bobbing in this

water. And then you also have this no gravity effect because you're completely floating. You're bobbing in this water. And then you also have this magnesium. And this is one of the things that people always recommend for muscle soreness is Epsom salts. And this delivery method of getting the magnesium through your skin that way is supposed to be excellent as well. That's the biggest organ in the body. So it absorbs a lot. What do we need to do to help more people out here with this, to spread the word out about this, about what you're doing? And Matthew, thank you very much for doing this and coming on here.

And Jason, too. This is a very important issue. And I think all the things that we've discussed here today, the benefits, I think could really greatly help a lot of people so how do we uh how do we spread this well as we found out in january you had a impressive response curve for uh the program that we did we talked about you know bigfoot and we talked about bone arrows and we talked about um uh the injection yeah injection uh you know everything we talked about the injection, you know, everything we talked about and then led up to this area of TBI. I think finding a multitude of avenues, that's why I've been dragging Matthew with me to

some of the guys that I know around the states that have shows not as similar to yours but not as grand and have each helped to make a little dent and we just need someone to come up and champion. I'm going to get in touch with Howard Schultz, who's the CEO of Starbucks, who yesterday had this really great statement he made that we need to honor our vets by giving them a concert and a job. Now, in order for them to go to that concert and appreciate and enjoy it and have that job, we have to fix the underlying problem, not to mask it. And therefore, letting vets know that there is an option. And next year, April, I'll finish my book by January and then put on a class, which will be limited to 100 docs to come in, to be trained in this process, these protocols,

which are relatively simple. And then go out and start being representative of an alternative to antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds. Is there a bit of an uphill battle that has to be fought also with the idea of supplementing hormones to achieve a balance in the body? Because a lot of people, when they think of soldiers, what do they think of? They think of these testosterone-fueled savage men. And then, you know, you add testosterone to that. Boy, you know, like you're just going to make more aggressive crazier soldiers it doesn't work that way uh the reason is that is that the

yeah it's uphill battle um if they weren't in the military they go into a clinic now what's happening is uh you might have low testosterone syndrome let's check you and they do two tests and i find that they're low testosterone but they don't know the cause for it because they didn't do an extensive enough to say that's due to head trauma you know whichever way they can do it to get guys onto it ask the history of trauma do the lab tests and get them on it but the resistance is because the controversy that has always stood there with testosterone and with the balco and the uh barry bonds and all these things relative to the public eye that negative they demonize growth hormone they demonize testosterone instead of talking about the benefits of it and how it could be utilized in this specific situation

and it works so anyone who's listening you know you know someone who might be there to connect us with the right people in government and so forth to go and do it. That is the knee-jerk reaction, right? Yes. That immediately people want to think of it as like this is a cheating thing. This is a bad thing. Right. Just like the salt thing that we were talking about.

Right. Well, stop everybody's estrogen replacement. Stop everybody's insulin replacement or thyroid replacement. Our body had it from when we were born. So why do we assume that it's not necessary? I mean, I've had a number of women who came in who are significantly testosterone deficient with all the symptoms that women get from testosterone deficiency. They're not nice to be around. And their doctor says, well, you don't need it. You just need your estrogen replaced. And they don't even replace the progesterone,

and you need to have that balance so they don't get sleep deprivation, develop depression, panic attack, and end up in the emergency room every two weeks like we see. My thing, too, is that I don't think this is a cure for everybody. Every single person is going to fall under this category. You went to war. You suffered through some stuff, and now here's your your cure i don't think that's what it is but i think that there's a there's a two stages here there's the stage where you know like matthew talked about where he admitted he

didn't feel okay and he was willing to go seek some help for it you know and hopefully this movie you're watching chris who's a guy who was tough as nails. He was the baddest seal there ever was. He found a way to admit that he didn't feel okay and went and sought some help for it. Then in seeking help, there needs to be more pragmatic solutions. Like right now, we're looking at the thing and it's like it's a grab bag. And to me, this feels like a mind body solution. This isn't this isn't Freudian counseling.

This isn't some lady sitting there, you know, God bless these women who work at the VA and the men, too, who are these counselors. They go through hell. I mean, imagine sitting there every day. They're on the clock. They're seeing guys on their lunch breaks. They're seeing people after work. They have huge hearts, but they can't handle it. You know, and after a while you shut down.

You hear this story over and over again. You see the misery and it's just like it just sucks the life out of them, you know. And so I don't think that's the solution for everybody. I think that there's, you know, there's a number of things that are going to help people. But if this, if seeking blood work and seeking a mind-body solution through medicine is available and is out there in the public and is getting vetted through other doctors and spread among the medical community, then these guys have a chance. But if it's not, if it's just one thing one doctor sitting here and uh you know some guy in missouri is not going to make it out to see dr gordon i think it's really important that you said what you said about the it's it's not the solution for everybody and it's only one part of it that what we said before this is a holistic approach but if you don't heal the body

it's going to be incredibly difficult to put the mind at peace yeah and it's healing the body is not necessarily going to put the mind at peace but it's a step in the right direction well there's i mean it's uh you have nothing to lose you do it and you try and if that's not really what's going on then you take the next step but correct you don't know if you don't look yeah you don't know you don't know and matthew came down we took a look and it's a simple blood test simple blood work okay so for the guy out there or the gal with ptsd with depression that's dealing with the thing they have some sort of traumatic brain injuries in their past it could be contributing to this. What's their step? What do they do? Well, they can go to the website, which is tbimedlegal.com.

tbimedlegal? tbimedlegal.com and put in an application. And those that are coming through and ask military and ask the type of injury you had and what medications you're on. And the military get put into a separate grouping and we're waiting for funding to come in so that we can start taking more of the people. And this is, the laboratory testing has always been 100% covered. The treatment wasn't. Matt paid for some of them, but I help in all their situations. And we're hoping to get someone who'll champion with some money. I had one patient offer a significant amount,

and that'll help to cover about 100 patients, so it'll cover everything for a year. And cost for treatment, I mean, the blended testosterone that we developed about 10 years ago is $100 for a six-month supply. Well, let's talk about doing something through this show, and let's talk about promoting something, like maybe through a Kickstarter or GoFundMe or something like that and I'll contribute to it and we'll try to get other people to contribute to it and

let's just try to get something where there's at least a point of a starting point for a lot of people be great let's do that on my end one thing you can anyone can reach out to me on Twitter Matthew Gosney to black dicks coming your way yes send it all to me. It's going to be awful. I'll send it right back. What is it again? Matthew Gosney, too.

Don't let me down, folks. You can send me a message. If you're a veteran and you're hesitant about this and you don't get it, you want to know more, contact me. I also have my own Kickstarter up right now. You can search it up. It's called Hidden Wounds. And what is this for? It's a two-part book I'm putting together. The first half is about TBI and just my experiences going through it. And the second half will be about PTSD and my search to kind of deal with that, which that's my journey right now is going on

that and figuring that out. And then once the book is done which i'm hoping by june 2015 um 25 will go into this um non-profit organization that we got going and when is american sniper coming out and who's in it and give me the and this is a clint eastwood directed film right clint eastwood directed it bradley cooper stars in it bradley studded out put on 44 pounds he looks good he's incredible yeah uh comes out christmas in a few places and wide january 16th beautiful thank you guys thank you very much thank you jason thank you matthew thank you mark uh this is uh i think this is a really important thing to talk about and i think um you know you guys coming in here and taking your time and matthew you especially expressing your story and and doing it so honest and openly it's huge it's huge i appreciate that thank you thank you everybody thank you anybody that's

tuning into this uh that is uh is benefiting from this please uh one more time go to the website mr gordon what is it t tbi med legal if they Google me and put TBI in it, it'll come up first. And to my friend MJ's buddy, Rob King, who I sent a video to yesterday, I want to give a shout-out to you because he's going through exactly what we're talking about. Thank you, everybody. We'll be back tomorrow with Matt Fultron. Love you. See you soon. Bye.

Thank you. See you soon. Bye. Thank you.