The Team House - Is SOCOM Trying to Bury the Truth About TBI's? | Dr. Kate Rocklein | Ep. 343

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Dr. Kate Rocklein earned nursing degrees from Queen’s University, Loyola University, and Rush University, and holds a Certificate in Higher Education Teaching from Harvard. She is a Canadian Certified Nurse Educator and has served in both civilian and military health systems, including as Chief Nursing Officer of Columbia/Presbyterian’s COVID hospital during New York City's 2020 surge.Since 2010, Dr. Rocklein has advised presidential cabinets, the Senate Committee on Armed Services, and senior military leadership on combat polytrauma and neurotrauma-related suicide, contributing to bipartisan defense legislation. She has led over $13 million in federally funded interdisciplinary research on critical care innovations, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and suicidality among healthcare workers and veterans.An expert in curriculum design and accreditation, she has also promoted equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education. Dr. Rocklein serves on advisory boards addressing military-related brain injuries and suicides and has been recognized for excellence in clinical practice, research, teaching, and public service by institutions including the US Army, Rush University, and Queen’s University.To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early acces-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseNew merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.comSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:The Perfect Jean ⬇️http://theperfectjean.nyc/HOUSE15for 15% off!!___________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Covert Ops, espionage, the team house, with your hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. This camera? Yes. Episode 243 of the Team House. Kate Rockline is back in the studio. You were, I guess, our first in-person interview we did in the studio space, like, what, three years ago or something like that. exactly three years ago, yeah, in July. So, I mean, last time we walked through kind of like your personal story and then sort of your,

you know, both, well, the story that I wrote about Michael Frody, who's your ex-husband, and, you know, we went through that whole story for people who haven't, aren't aware. The article is on Yahoo News or you can watch the interview we did last time and learn more about that. But you also, in addition of going through all this in your own life, you also have this academic background with medical statistics, and you did your thesis paper on TBI, right? I did a master's thesis on TBI. My clinical doctor was on SF medics, and then my PhD was on soft suicide and resilience. So, yeah, this very unique situation of like you've lived it and also studied it, which is

like pretty intense. Well and Michael got his first big blast in Iraq in 2007 in the middle of my master's studying TBI in ground forces and then he died by suicide after neurotrauma in the middle of my dissertation on suicide and special operations. So art has followed life, has followed art. Kind of, it's kind of awful, but at the same time, there's really no way that I can wriggle out of handling this stuff because, I mean, it is my lane, right? And then you have this addition. life experience kind of street cred that gives me at least kind of an inside view on what these injuries actually do to families and due to service members, right? So let's, for like people who are kind of just joining us for the first time and jumping into

the middle of this, let's talk about what a traumatic brain injury actually is, particularly in the context of the military. Like how are soldiers afflicted with this injury? what does it do to them physiologically and psychologically? Yeah. So currently, so traumatic brain injury can be caused by like blunt head trauma. So you're in a car crash and you hit something or you have like a coup, contra coup injury. So we see that in CTE with professional athletes or lots of contact sports.

But CTE is different from repetitive blast exposure. So repetitive blast exposure isn't actually always blast. It can be overpressure. So it can be from like high caliber weaponry, which I know this is not. not now, thank you. So RPGs, I am not an artillery or weapons person, so help me out here. Artillery, recoiless rifles, motor systems, and explosive breaching. Right. So we're seeing this kind of neurotrauma syndrome. We're seeing it in pilots. We're seeing it in special operators, snipers because of the caliber of the weapon and how close their head is. We see it in

RSOs. And we, this is really where the genesis of the latest work came from is that mortarmen, right? So I'm coming from the special operation side in my research. And I wasn't really registering with me. But in late 2023, these articles from the New York Times from Dave Phillips started to come out about all these mortarmen. And because they have such sustained exposure and it's more easily measured than did you breach, you know, like how many rounds did you fire? They know exactly how much they fired off and how close they were. Didn't he do a piece? There's an artillery unit in Syria, I think,

and they came home and had like an ungodly number of suicides. Yeah, like statistically impossible rates of suicide. For it not to be correlated, yeah. Right. I mean, it could be correlated with anything, but we're looking at it statistically. Like the numbers almost, to me, would imply a little bit of causation. Okay?

Yeah, yeah. Because there's no other variable that was introduced before their deaths, beside that, right? They didn't all become alcoholics. They didn't all become, you know, they didn't all start to suck at life, which is sometimes the excuse that the DOD gives, right?

They had sustained exposure and then they had a constellation of symptoms that were pretty consistent. So clinically, like looking at this as a clinician scientist, you know, what are these symptom patterns that they're showing? How are they similar to each other?

And what exposures did they all? have. So even when you look at Mike and guys who have died, and I say guys, I know that there's women, but the gender, it hasn't hit me yet, right? This is the brokast. This is the brokast. Okay, thank you. So, well, you know, when presenting to professional, not that you're not professional, but when I'm talking to scientists, they're like, why don't you mention women? Because there weren't any, right? At least when I was doing the research. So when you're looking at these constellation of symptoms, they're so consistent because Mike you know he had repetitive neurotrauma repetitive blast exposure and then he died after about 90 days of

aberrant really odd symptoms right like paranoia like we spoke about last time like he completely forgot his tradecraft he was all of that right and then reading about these mortarmen and these artillery guys tankers too um they have only almost the same exact symptom patterns as Michael did. Okay? So if we look at the symptom patterns and we reverse engineer to the exposure, right? We can basically backtrack, whereas current efforts are to, let's measure all of this blast overpressure data with gauges.

We don't know the right gauge. We don't have the right gauge. But because that's what's coming out in legislation that the mandate from Congress is that these blast exposures have to be counted and measured. and thresholds have to be established, that signals to... National safety standards, basically. Right, but it also signals to the military industrial complex that this is where the money is. Okay, so if you want to develop a blast sensor, which are really important, they really are.

But we should not be basing the clinical side on waiting for those measurements, right? Because garbage in, garbage out. So it was a little bit longer of an answer than you were probably anticipating, but... Yeah, I mean, just to back to... track a little bit, like the nature of these blast injuries, right, like what it does to the human brain. Thank you. As I understand it, you know, the human body's made up mostly out of water when that blast wave

goes through them. There's like this expansion and contraction that creates micro lesions in the brain. Is that in the ballpark? Kind of. Okay. So in full disclosure, I'm not a neuroscientist. So I'm going to explain it in the layman's terms that I understand. So any kind of blast wave exposure, and there was really, really good talks on this,

a couple weeks ago at NATO and Toronto. So everybody came together to talk about blasts and really great science. So blast over pressure travels through your body, not in a nanosecond, but in a microsecond. Yeah. Okay. So it's just, it's immediate. And the easiest way for me to, you know, kind of conceptualize it is that when it goes through, it's pressure, right?

It's tiny, tiny, whatever pressure waves are made. of, right? Let's talk to a physicist about this. But when it hits your cells, for one, it can deregulate your mitochondria and the way that your DNA signals to each other. So I think maybe you've heard the term like operator syndrome. Okay. Not really a scientific syndrome, right? I understand that a bunch of clinicians saw these symptoms occurring in groups of special operators. And I agree that those symptoms are occurring. But the way that you develop and diagnose and have criteria for a syndrome is not how operator syndrome has been presented. I do think that those symptoms are real because I've seen it in my patients and I've seen it in guys that I know. But because the body is affected at a

cellular level from these blast overpressure waves, not only does it scramble DNA and it deregulates your mitochondria and then your cell like the powerhouse of the cell, right? Your cell doesn't have energy. It doesn't process it the right way. So in my opinion, or at least my theory is that the symptom patterns are too consistent across forces, across demographics within the military, to be a fluke. Okay? So for me, that says that this is a molecular problem. And when we have molecular clinical problems, we can start working on precision medicine. So if we know what your DNA is doing, then we can figure out what are the best medications,

can we try investigational drugs, can we try psychedelics, can we do a bunch of different things. So not only does it hit your brain and what they found, and this is since I was here last, so at Harvard, the Reblast study had 30, I think it was Navy SEALs, operators, living operators, right? They go to Boston, they get their brain scanned by this amazing machine. It's called a Tesla 7. And they found thickening in certain areas of the prefrontal cortex. And again, not a neuroscientist. I'm just regurgitating this from memory, right?

But the areas that they found of kind of scarring and thickening and damage, for one, your prefrontal cortex is where your resilience is housed, okay? Your emotional reactions, your ability to empathize, irritability, the way that you perceive reality is all here, all right? And there's specific areas of damage to what they call the RACC, where we're. within these bodies that are sustaining a lot of blast damage because it goes up through your orbits, right? It goes up through your eyes. So when you're hit, it hits your helmet, but it goes up here.

And part of the problem is that y'all still strap your helmets. Okay? So in World War II, it was just like a soup can, right? John Wayne in it? Right. But you got the strap hanging, and when something would blow up, your helmet would get blown off. It wouldn't trap all of that in there. right? So that's part of the problem is...

That's interesting. So the ballistic helmets are making it worse. The foam appears to be. Don't quote me, right? Because that's not my lane, right? I'm touching into other people's lane. Yeah, so some of the protective equipment that you have is making it worse. C3 Mortarman, Todd Schrader, and his partner, Tim Grossman, have developed helmet accessories, which is my girl way of describing it. But, but, But it goes on the helmet rails and it protects from the blast over pressure exposures and that shows a lot of promise. Interesting. Yeah, but the pressure waves seem to go in through your eye sockets and then right up to there.

And that's why it seems to be that, at least in my opinion or my estimation, that's where it shows promise. Like all of these weird behavioral issues, the suicidality, you know, guys getting blown up and then becoming completely different people, right? like I experienced. It's not PTSD. It's frontal cortex damage. It's actual brain damage. And what we've been hearing for years and years and years is that, well, we don't have a diagnostic test.

And we have no way to really know if this is blast over pressure or if it's this or if it's that. It's probably PTSD, whatever. Like until last year, Socom command in their statements to Congress or in their statements in general, they're still not saying TBI and suicide in the same. sentence. Why is that? I don't want to speak for them because I know the current so-com commander from back when he was in 04 and 05 and he's Brian Fenton. He's still a great guy. I mean, to my knowledge. He was always, in my opinion, concerned about his soldiers and still seems to be. But I think that,

you know, speaking a little extemporaneously, when you're able to diagnose something accurately, that creates counts, right? So when we get better can. cancer screening tools, we have a spike in cancer incidents because we're catching it better. Right, right. And when you finally develop a diagnostic tool and then you deploy it and you actually catch these injuries, then people have to pay for it. Then there have to be programs. Then there has to be some kind of treatment.

And it's far more cost effective to just turf y'all out of service. It makes people look bad because the line graph is gone up. And it's actually a good thing because like you said, now we're catching it. Yeah. But at that moment, it looks like, oh, why do you have a 150% increase in X? You know, what's wrong with you? Well, and as it stands now, there's probably over 450,000 GWAT veterans with this kind of blast exposure, TBI. And TBI is traumatic brain injury. It is trauma to your brain. And what we're realizing now is that areas of the brain control a lot more than we thought. It's not just behavior. We know that it controls a lot of different things. but these subtleties in really abnormal behavior and even some of the alcoholism and the substance abuse that these guys fall into who didn't have it before, you know, after these blast exposures,

the picture is starting to emerge, right? And because of all of this talk about, well, we don't have a diagnosis, we have no way to diagnose this. And that's also the party line, too, is we just don't know. We don't have enough data. How long was that war, Jack? 21 years. 21 years? Put a man on the moon and nine.

Yeah. Pretty sure we could have gotten a handle on this. Yeah, well, I mean, when you're dismissive like that, the question becomes like, okay, at what point in an undetermined future are we actually going to make it happen? They're not. Yeah. That's the short answer.

So it's going to be up to scientists who have some academic freedom and, some, you know, professional cover to say it. So let's get a little bit into, you know, deeper into the treatment and the diagnosis and sort of like, I'm also interested in like the trajectory institutionally of like where the Army was in like 2004 or five or whatever to kind of like where it is today. Are they like making baby steps getting where they need to be? I have a report from the Congressional Research Service, amazing resource and they have a whole table, a timeline from 2001, 2003, probably 0405 when we started to see these injuries emerging. And they have mapped out what the Department of Defense has done

over the last 20 years. And what is that? If there was something in there, I would tell you. A lot of it's rebranding, right? Well, we're going to call this the Center of Excellence and then we're going to do this. And there are some really great centers there. Like if you go to Walter Reed, it's like walking to a spaceship, right? Like, it's Star Trek. It's beautiful. But then you go down to Camp Lejeune and, you know, or Walter Reed, they have these, you know, walls of, like, movement and cognitive testing where you hit things on the wall and there's sensors. And then you go down to LaJune, and it's a poster board on the wall and, like, hit right, hit left. It's like playing twister to assess your cognitive speed. And so not all centers are created equal.

When we were on Capitol Hill last year, we happened to be, how much. We happened to be, having meetings with armed services legislators at the same time that the brain injury symposium was on the hill. And they didn't know who we were, the three of us, and I'll get into that. I mean, of course, they knew who Frank was, Frank Larkin, right? But Jane and I were just these anonymous scientists that were traveling with him. And we went up to whatever foundation is in charge of brain health for the DOD, whatever contract. And we're like, okay, so what do you have at Fort Campbell? Oh, we have this great center at Fort Campbell or whatever, Fort Knox, whatever.

It's a great brain health center. It's on this road and they have all this and they have all that. It was shut down a year ago. Or you know, or you can go to whatever, you know, BAMC or whatever it was. Like, yeah, that hospital's closed too. The similarities between this and the Havana syndrome, anonymous health incidents, whatever we're calling them now, is like so similar because the party line was like, oh, we're getting our people help. They're getting compensated, this and that. But then if you actually talk to the people who have been afflicted,

with this, they're like, no one's told me anything. I don't even know where to begin the process of that. Well, you know, in preparation for the Hill, so the background on that is that, you know, Frank Larkin, myself, Jane O'Massery Brooks, she's also a PhD, military health scientist who studies TBI and suicide. And so in preparation for this, like, okay, well, as a scientist, I have to look at all of the things, right? So pulled up GAO, DODIG, you know, all of these different reports. And it's not a pretty picture as far as, you know, what we've tried and what has worked, it's not much. But I need to bring me around to what you last said because I lost the threat on that. No, it's okay. We can go into the AHA stuff later. Oh, but, okay, on that note, a lot of the

authors and people who worked on the AHA study for Havana syndrome are part of the DOD TBI apparatus. So if you go down into the fine print and you look at who is helping, it's the same people who have been working on TBI. The same neurologists? The same staff, same kind of, like same usual suspects that I see on articles and, you know, research and whatnot.

And the Havana syndrome stuff as you were telling me, the lack of informed consent, the lack of human safety protections for the study seems to be very similar to the DOD's Warfighter Brain Health Initiative and the longitudinal medical study on blast overpressure, where informed consent and human safety was either not disclosed or it wasn't done. And the CIA has sent some people now to the TBI clinic at Walter Reed to be treated for, They're using some of the, like, the TBI treatment to treat Havana syndrome, which apparently they've had some success with. Okay. Great. Yeah. I'm...

So, it sounds like the military has, like struggled to wrap its head around this problem. I think that's a polite way of putting it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And you mentioned, you know, some of the legislation that was passed. I mean, let's talk a little bit about that and, like, why that was necessary. It was necessary because nothing was happening, especially over like the last 10, I'd say a good 10, 12 years. So the background on that is, and this was kind of a Forrest Gump situation, but I was working for a defense contractor back in 2012.

And I was approached to write an executive order. In a truly blonde moment, I said to my boss, I'm like, what's an executive order? Like, me? Like, schoolhouse rock had completely left my brain, right? So after he explained what the three branches of government were, like, thanks. I feel really dumb now. He said an executive order is needed on TBI and mental health in the military, and you're a person who knows about that.

I'm like, okay. So I wrote it, right? And all of these things are ghostwritten. Like, you're never going to get credit for it. I know which parts of it I wrote, and it was most of it. And then I structured the national action or national action plan for all of the executive. agencies to get on board and treat TBI. This was back in 2012, 2013. So by the time that guy, and it was great, like, you know, was the Obama administration for better or for worse,

whatever you thought about them. They did have some serious commitments to service member health. And we were cooking with gas, right? Like, we got traction. It's 2013, 2014. The stuff is starting to go in. And then what happens in 2016? It's a whole new administration, right? So, you know, the government is not going to continue costly programs just out of the goodness of their heart. If they don't have to, they won't. So a lot of that traction was lost. And then you see over the last, you know, eight, ten years, this devolution in neurological health and brain health care for service members. And so that's why we started to write the legislation because there just was a vacuum. There's a doctrinal, there's still a doctrinal vacuum as well. But also because we were seeing these articles coming out of the New York Times,

we knew that Mortarmen are such an excellent comparative population that if they're showing these signs then we've been on the right track all along and so it was time to make hay while the sun shone, right? So we wrote this huge bill. I mean, it was like soup to nuts, it covered almost everything.

Like it covered down to making sure that you guys didn't lose special duty pay like special operations special duty pay if you had to go to treatment for X amount of months like we we drilled super all the way down like family care you know spouse care um obviously like the medical care the clinical care and then you know we handed over i think it was like 120 page document and then it gets whittled down it gets chopped down and then like some pieces get sent off to other legislators so they can claim that they're doing whatever and that's fine i don't care who claims it or as long as it gets done the one thing that really does is

did piss me off and it pissed everyone off is that originally the bill was named the Frody Larkin Blastover Pressure Act, right? And right before it was all the press releases went out, they took the names off. And in a meeting like that day, I said, why are the names off? Like, there's tons of legislation named after our service members. And we were told that it was because legitimate gold star families would be upset that a bill is named after two special operators who died by suicide. Also, no, they wouldn't. No, they wouldn't. I, no. So I called Gold Star Families, and I called the Wounded Warrior Project because they sponsored it, like they supported it. And yeah, nobody thought that. Yeah, of course. Nobody thought that. It just, that's politics, baby.

Yeah. So. What do you think the real reason was? Because then it wouldn't be theirs, right? Right, okay. If it had somebody else's name on it, then politicians can't claim it as theirs. And there's really only one. Like, we know who the culprit is, but whatever. You know what? We'll take that knock and we'll keep on going.

So what did get into the legislation? So what did get in is measuring, like creating a registry, right? So now it's almost like med pros, right? You go to the range, you get blast exposure. that data has to go somewhere. For instance, like two or three years ago, the entire Central Command didn't really measure or capture or assess for TBI

because the guidance was so unclear, right? So you have that kind of doctrinal confusion or you have that kind of legislative confusion or overlapping bills. That's why you need like a consolidated big bill. And I wasn't really aware of this at the time, But getting something into the NDAA apparently is like the policy Olympics. Yeah.

It used to me. Like I was like, oh, you all write that. But it was the same with like an executive order. What's an executive order? The NDAA, as I recall, is like it's basically the congressional authorized funding for everything in D&B. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so we watched the whole session. The sausage get made?

Yeah, like we had it, you know, had it on C-SPAN or whatever. And all three of us are kind of like on a. text group and like, oh my God, oh my God, here it comes, here comes. And it got in. Like, so it's a start, right? Yeah. It's not the end of anything, but it's a start. So I want to take a minute today to tell you guys about the perfect gene. I've been wearing them for a few weeks now and really enjoy them and I just want to share it with our audience. You know, sometimes genes have this problem where, you know, you guys all have seen these skinny jeans that they like crush your balls and, you know, it's just not comfortable to wear.

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the perfect gene dot nyc with promo code house 15 after you purchase they'll ask you where you heard about them please support our show and tell them we sent you so fuck your khakis and get the perfect gene so it mandates that the military has to track this much more seriously they have to track it um Now, so like Angus King and other members of armed services have pieces of it, right? So they have created their own that kind of touch on the stuff that didn't get in initially. So there are more iterations coming. I would have loved to see more of advanced clinical care, more progressive medications, but is a start. And that's, that was a lesson that I had to know, like, this is not one and done.

You can't just drop this on a legislator's desk and then say, okay, great. thanks we fix that right you have to go back and you have to go back and you have to establish relationships and you you can't stop because then it'll just go nowhere it'll just die um but what was interesting you know especially as a as a scientist um translating research like my research jana's research other people's research into policy first of all scientists don't usually get to do that right like we publish an article and hope it goes somewhere so that was an immensely rewarding because this is, and I'm not complaining, but this is not a fun subject to be a scientist in, right? Like, I published rarely, but I, it's impactful, but because it takes years to do

these studies and they're difficult for the team, like they're difficult for scientists, especially like after Mike died, it took me three years to publish, I think, after he, no, four. Like, it was, it's tough to wade into the subject when it personally, affects you. But getting actual research into legislation is rare. Having evidence-based legislation is rare because science and politics don't usually marry up very well. And it was, I mean, if you walked around, you know, the Senate building or Russell or any of those buildings, they're long hallways, there's a lot of doorways, there's a lot of people to talk to. And every single conversation started with hi i'm dr rockline i'm here to talk to so and so because my former

husband committed suicide and he was special operations and this is what like every it's just every single time you meet somebody you're telling them you're trauma dumping the entire time um but i think it also gives us some cachet right where tell me no tell me you're not going to support this right so i think maybe it was that nexus of having me and Frank and Janeo as well because her husband has sustained blast injuries. But having people with skin in the game who also had the academic credentials to just look people in the eye and be like, yeah, I am the expert in this. And we're going to talk about this and you're going to sign on. So how is the military going to track blast over pressure now? Because I mean, we've talked about in the past, you know, there's problems with the blast over.

pressure gauges that you can put on a person that it does accurately measure blast over pressure, but not the effect that it has on the human brain. So the problem with it, and I think one of the, I think one of the main issues is that we haven't used AI appropriately. Like, we haven't used machine learning models to figure this out because there's a lot of intellectual or scholarly debate about where do we put these sensors, do we put them on the chest, do we put them on the head? Do we, And I'm looking at presentations recently of, you know, like 60 sensors on poles with snipers like laying on the ground. And that's great. Like that's basic bench science.

We need that, right? We need that information. But it also feels like we're kind of whistling past the graveyard, right? Let's find a good sensor and go with it. And if it doesn't work great, let's try something different, right? This, you know, it's like a data fetish. instead of the no data, no problem. Now it's like, well, let's collect data.

Let's just make a library. Let's, yeah, let's collect so much data that we know exactly how much blast pressure is bad. Who cares, right? I mean, I mean, I care. People care. But is that really relevant? Or can we walk and chew gum at the same time? Because we know that there's, just historically, there's a certain amount of, you know,

kilo-Pascals or PSIs that are dangerous for the human body. Current DOD guidance, I believe, starts at 4PSI. That's about the approximate pressure of a bicycle tire exploding. So a real blast is probably going to be a lot bigger, I would assume. But hyper-focusing on the blast gauges is stealing resources, I think, in my opinion, from the clinical care. But it's also politically expedient to be like, well, no, we're doing tons of things. Look at all this, what we're doing on blast gauges. Look at what we're doing on overpressure data.

Well, what are you doing on clinical care, right? What's the clinical medicine plan here? Because what the DOD is offering is not clinical medicine. I mean, is there any clinical medical care as of now? Yeah. There's amazing things. I mean, go to the VAs here in New York City, right? Go to home base and Harvard and Mass General.

all. I mean, even UCLA has some, or not UCLA, UCSF, I can't remember which one, but out on the West Coast, like, we have amazing things going. Those programs are partnered with academic or civilian academia, right? And the DOD currently has outsourced most of its science. So when you're reading a study by the Department of Defense, it's usually done by a contractor. So it's probably the lowest bidder. I'm sure they have great scientists on staff, but they're not people like me or Jaina or people who have spent 15 years in the trenches with no funding or limited funding, you know, really gutting it out. And when you've been entrenched in this kind of data and these clinical situations or problems for it's almost 20 years now, right? Because I started studying this in 2006 or seven. So if you're contracting somebody from wherever, they don't have the same kind of skin in the game.

They don't have the same kind of institutional knowledge. You know, Jane and I can, like, we're texting back and forth. Like, we recommended that in 2009. We did that study in 2012. Like, we know the landscape. And so many other scientists like us know the landscape because we've been working on it for so long. But if you bring in hired guns, they don't, right? So, you know, I remember even the Army Stars study.

Remember that big, huge study on Army suicide? Yeah. Yes, I do remember that. Yeah, and they concluded that special operations is like 2017. that y'all had no risk of suicide. Or like statistically not above average. Yeah. Yeah. And as they're like publishing that,

Socom itself is putting out that suicide and soft tripled. So you have a DOD funded huge study, but they didn't understand that special forces had its own MOSs, right? They didn't understand that different elements within special operations might have different exposures or might have different like mental health issues because of the nature of their warfare.

And, you know, these are big, huge, very well-funded studies, but the contextual disconnect is obvious. And we're seeing the same kind of thing. So long way around the barn, AHA, right? Whomever was contracted out to do that, have they ever been? Like, have they, not have they ever been operational, but have they been studying these kind of syndromes

Are these kind of like, you know, weird exposures for years and years? Or is this a crew that they brought in? That's the question. Like the NIH study. NIH study. You know, the problem with Havana syndrome is that something that's like, at least on paper, we believe it's like a novel weapon system. That, you know, is like you're trying to deduce what that device is based on the injuries you're seeing without us having access to it.

But even that's kind of what I'm saying there is kind of BS because America does have microwave weapon systems. Like it's not a total mystery. So, and we should have been much more proactive about that. But I can see how, like, clinically or scientifically it's a little bit different than with TBIs, as we've been talking about. We know how these guys are getting those injuries. It's, like, very clear. And we can study that. But you're saying that there's, like, between the two subjects that, like, it's the same neurologists.

same people who are bouncing back and forth between these two topics. I don't know if it's the same, but I know that they were recognizable names. Again, though, you know, when you've been reading this research for 15 or 20 years, I mean, I can almost recite reference lists of stuff that I've written, right? And so just you actually sent me that study about Havana syndrome. And so looking at, you know, who is on the study, and I'm looking in the appendices, and I'm looking, and I'm looking up their CVs and stuff. Yeah, a lot of them are the same.

I recall you being underwhelmed by the academic credentials of some of the people in the study. Well, the study lead for Havana syndrome, no, it wasn't Havana syndrome. But yes, I was underwhelmed by the people leading Havana syndrome studies. First of all, because you need a clinical scientist. You need somebody with a PhD who also understands kind of the clinical side as well. but you need a study lead who's a really established rigorous scientist and that was not there. When we're looking at the longitudinal blast over pressure study that the DOD based their warfighter brain health program on, the research lead for that study has a master's in administration with no

research preparation. Yeah, with the NIH study on Havana, we should also point out that study has been shut down because of ethical concerns. Yep. There were all sorts of... Can I try it? Yeah, of course you can. There are all kinds of different problems with it. One of them is CIA personnel. We're told you have to participate in this study in order to get treatment.

It's the only way you can get treatment. That's illegal. Elegal is thought. Yeah, there's under Department of Labor laws, the government cannot direct care in that manner. They can't like coerce you into seeing certain doctors. If you need a knife, we have a bunch of laying around here. I'm sure you do, but I don't see a K-bar anywhere, so I'm just going to girl boss this. And what were some of the...

Oh, the other issue was with private medical information being shared. So they were sharing their information with the doctors for this study. That information seemed like it was being turned right over to the CIA. Yes, it was, yeah. Like, how is my boss at the CIA know all of my personal medical information? But they wonder why guys in special... operations won't go get to like evaluated. Yeah, exactly. I think one of the quotes I read that I quoted in my dissertation years ago was we're escorted like criminals for evaluation when we

show any kind of mental health problems, right? Yeah, nobody wants to be that guy. I mean, there's even like when you look at it, like looking back on it, I mean, it's like there's even like some social shaming that goes on where they'd make a guy who's suicidal wear a road guard vest and you'd have to be escorted around by two people at all times. Are you fucking kidding me? That was like an Army SOP. It may still be. Like you get blown up and now we're going to make you wear a Scarlet A.

Yeah. Basically. Yeah, you're a leper. Don't talk to that guy. Dehumanizing, you think? And that's a term that the Havana syndrome people told me they said we were treated like lepers. Yeah. So much for insulate versus isolate, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Um, geez. So it's, this is such an incredibly complicated subject and I'm, you're driving. It became, uh, you know, from speaking to you over the years, I've realized just how complicated it is. It's way above my head. Um, are there any facets of this that, you know, you'd like to bring people up to date on that we haven't discussed yet? Mm-hmm. I do. So for years and years and years and years. And so Frank, was on CBS a couple of weeks ago. I think you watched it or you texted me or something about that. But whether I'm listening to Frank on CBS or listening to the DOD talk, I hear all the time,

well, we don't have any way to capture this. We don't have any way to diagnose this. Like we have ways that we can, you know, diagnose somebody with exposures or with a, you know, signs and symptoms of a traumatic brain injury. We have screening tools for that. They're not great, but we have them like the mace the mace the mace too the anam which is not combat normed or um soft used to use impact right so different different methods but all of these symptom clusters that these guys are having seem to be just so elusive and nobody could capture them and this has kind of been my constant gut check through the last you know a decade or working on this I'm like has nobody thought of this because I created, we're my team, we created an evaluation tool for this syndrome of blast

exposures. And we sent it out to, well, we didn't send it out. We handed it off for what we called face validity. So you create, like, say you go into the doctor and they give you a questionnaire about anything, depression, prostate problems, you know, anything. You're going to be, like, checking boxes on a survey, right? So that's an instrument. That's a clinical instrument. We use it to assess a lot of different things. Glasgow coma scale. You know, almost anything that you experience clinically, we can assess it with like an observational tool. And so I was like, well, you know, let's create a tool based on all of these symptoms that they're telling us. And let's send it out for face validity, which is where I send it to you who knows nothing about medicine. And I'm like, hey, if you could look at this, you know, this and tell me, does this seem to be asking questions the right way? Like, do you understand the questions? Are they just, does it seem to be assessing blast exposure? And you come back to me and you say, yeah, okay? And then there's statistical ways that we can measure what we call instrument stability.

So I give it to you, you're a former Green Berrain Army Ranger. I'm going to go give it to a bunch of, you know, SWIP boat crew guys. Is it going to remain stable between different populations? So just testing the instrument's stability, not testing or not, because, you know, you need a whole research study and panel and ethics, all that, not actually measuring symptoms, but seeing, does this instrument assess this kind of blast exposure syndrome that we're seeing? And, you know, came back to me, I did the statistics on it, and it's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. It's stable. The reliability is high. So not reliability, but the, the, the, the, the, the, diagnostic accuracy, right? So it's in 90%, 95% territory. So if we give it to 100 people,

statistically, it looks like it's going to accurately capture everybody, but maybe 5%, which is pretty great because right now we're at worse than a coin toss, right? And so a lot of these symptoms that come in, you know, I'm having behavioral issues, my marriage is in the toilet, I'm drinking myself to death, whatever it is, those symptoms were in that scale, we're in that instrument. And so from the statistical analysis, what emerged is that there's three main symptom types that are prevalent. So you can have all of the symptoms, right? You can have all of the things, but there's going to be what we predict or project. There's going to be three main archetypes. So one of them is going, you know, seems to be focused on pain. Like there's a lot of,

all of you have a lot of musculoskeletal pain for sure. But this is like contractable. pain and pain that's not explained. And then another domain seems to be more of the behavioral cognitive. And then another domain seems to be something else. So what that tells me is that if I give this to a thousand patients and, you know, a third of them show this kind of issues of pain control, I can prioritize that, right? I can send you right to pain management as I'm ordering the MRI and the this and the that, right? So we can start targeting your worst symptoms first based on this assessment scale. So it shows promise. And I think that kind of like, I think that kind of blows it out of the water like, oh, we just don't have any way to capture this. Yes, we do. Okay.

If I can come up with it in a couple months, I'm pretty sure that somebody could have come up with it a couple years ago. So it shows promise. And there are not the, not the Americans, but there are foreign militaries who are interested in it. Because, you know, in this area of blast exposure and traumatic brain injury, the United States is doctrinally inferior, right? We do not have good clinical medical programs. We don't have consistent ones. We don't have what other countries are doing. And so in terms of this doctrinal vacuum, you saw that was sent com, right?

If you don't have doctrine, you've got nothing. So, yeah. What countries are going to use this? I can't tell you. Why, it's classified? I could tell you, Jack, but I'd have to kill you. No, I just don't have clearance to do it. I don't have authorization to mention it.

But it's promising, right? So we have a lot of allies around the world who deploy with us, and they sustain exactly the same injuries, and they have exactly the same outcomes, and their governments are very concerned about doing it right. And so let's work with them, right? Interesting. Yeah.

And is there going to be a push on the next NDAA to get more language included and whatever? Well, the next NDA is going in in June, so that ship sailed. And there's a change in administration, politics aside, it's been a chaotic start to this administration. And when you're trying to get money to care for people who have not traditionally been a priority to care for, within that chaos is very difficult. And I do, in my opinion, I believe that legislators and politicians right now are just trying to keep their head above water.

Right. Well, I mean, you don't know where the next disaster's coming from, right? So even if we had like a really good line on getting more stuff into the NDAA, you know, you would probably know better than I because I haven't read the executive order, but, you know, hidden within some of these, a little out there executive orders

are statements like mental health issues and suicidal ideation are not compatible with military service. That's coming from the head shed. Yeah. So to me that says, okay, we're going to injure you. And warfare is injurious, okay?

Right. Warfare is going to fuck you up. Nobody goes into combat better, usually, than they came out. I mean, is there any follow-up to that statement? They said, like, what does that actually mean? Because, I mean, yeah, it sounds like we're going to break these people and tell them the fuck off. Jesus.

I don't know. But I can imagine how demoralizing that was to hear for guys with RBE with repletive blast exposure. It's interesting. I mean, as much as we all talk shit about Congress, it seems like it does take Congress getting involved to really move things, move the needle on this. and Havana syndrome as well, like, no one was taking that shit seriously until Congress, like, made the intelligence community take it seriously. Yeah. I'm a registered independent.

Like, I have no dog in this fight politically. People I thought would be really, really concerned and really gung-ho to support brain health for you guys. Nope. We're not. Did not care at all. people that I never thought I could ever work with because they just seemed like anyway I'm just going to let discretion be to the better part of valor on that one um but people who I you know apologize is that I never thought would care um totally did so is that because of like ideological

stuff or I think it's because the cameras are off right okay um so you see a lot of the political theater and then you meet the people behind it and yeah they are actually really good people. The leads on this bill were Johnny Ernst, who, oh my God, her staff is phenomenal. She's very pro-military, pro-s soldier. Yeah, but I mean, she's human and an amazing one at that, right? I don't agree with her ideologically. She's gotten a lot of opportunities to meet with the troops over the years and knows them on a personal level. Yeah, I mean, ideology doesn't matter. I mean, ideology doesn't matter. because it's shared values, right? She was amazing.

Elizabeth Warren, who is on armed services, and you wouldn't really think, like, Elizabeth Warren would, but she's such a bulldog, right? Where, you know, there are politicians who are trying to preserve their relationships with the DOD, and then there's politicians who can just carry the big stick, right? So you need the big stick, and you need the diplomats. And it was, honestly,

have restored a lot of my faith in humanity, especially dealing with Senator Ernstaff, because from her military liaisons, like her entire team that we were working with were all either recently active duty retired or active duty defense fellows. And they knew what they were talking about and they worked their asses off. So 100% like of love to Joni Ernst and her crew. But also, I mean, there are some people on armed services who just, you know, I mean, I don't think they voted against it. But if something is affecting at least 30 to 40% of your armed services from the global war on terror, then perhaps you should take it seriously because it's your job, right?

Instead of attributing malice to it, I mean, there is quite a bit of like Grandpa Simpson type people. Was I attributing malice? That's serving Congress. I mean, you seem like when they like, especially it comes out when they have to. shouting at the cloud. When they have to talk about technology or like they're interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. It becomes very clear that these people are not living on the same planet as we are.

You know, there was one politician who kept saying, can we measure this like a Dexcom, right? Like diabetes. And I'm listening to this. I'm like, this is not diabetes. What are they talking about? And then I realized he was right. Because there are, I mean, and it wasn't even registering with me.

this guy's not a scientist, but I am, so I felt kind of dumb. But there are actual biomarkers that emerge from blast injuries. And so, yeah, yeah, that is a possible technological solution. The issue is, does the Department of Defense have the political will to do the right thing with that data? Or are we still going to be fetishizing data and couching or, you know, cloaking human performance programs under the guise of clinical medicine? because what we're doing now is not clinical medicine, right? It's human performance. I came across the biomarkers thing with Havana also that the way it was described to me

was that when you get a, let's use a term like a concussion, that there are certain fluids that secrete from your brain into your body that normally would not. And you can detect those if you take a blood sample within the first, you know, what four hours or whatever after the injury. I told you that, I think. Did you? Yeah, because in the Havana syndrome stuff, they were measuring the right biomarkers,

but they were measuring it at the wrong time. So they would measure it, like, you know, there's certain biomarkers from these injuries that disappear after 72 hours. And then they would take the people affected, or they thought were affected by Havana syndrome, measure the same biomarkers, you know, seven weeks out, and say, it's not there, you're good.

Yeah, that was a huge issue that some of them, did get to like the day of, but then there were others who were tested like a year and a half afterwards. Exactly. Yeah. And the biomarker is probably only there for a matter of hours. Well, there's different ones, right? So some of them are there immediately and then they disappear.

And then some of them that are reparative that are, you know, excreted or present post-injury are there. But it's, I don't want to, the easiest way I can put it, it feels to me, it's like scientific gas lighting, right? Yeah, we measured those. Those people are fine. There's none there. But when you dig down and you look at when they measured it or how they measured it,

of course it's not going to be there. Right. And I don't have all the words for the subterfuge that seems to be appearing. Yeah, that they're measuring something and saying the results or the conclusions or something completely unrelated. Yeah, like the DOD still uses the mace to assess TBI. I mean, 2010, you know, I was quoted in media saying this is a garbage test. Statistically, it doesn't capture what it's supposed to capture.

It's easy to game. It's easy to memorize. So then they made the Mace 2. Like, I mean, you can't win for losing, right? And to be fair and to be kind to the Warfighter Brain Health initiative, they have to fight for resources, right? They have to fight or this funding has to be allocated to treat this. And it's one thing to say, okay, we're going to do all these things,

but you have to have the appropriations behind it to do it. And, you know, from my last conversation with somebody working, you know, on the inside, I think that Warfighter brain has four full-time employees. Okay. Okay, they might be contracting out everything else. I can't run a hospital with four employees. Like, I can't run, I mean, I can't run anything with four employees. But you're proposing that you're going to treat hundreds of thousands of people with a brain injury program.

And your lead on it is a pediatrician? Like, what are we doing here? Right? We're the experts. And I think, um, a lot of them have left. You know, there's a lot of people who will not do research with the doctor. Department of Defense anymore. I can't. I mean, because even, you know, the first two studies that I tried to do with the military under command supervision, they told me flat out, what are you going to do

with unflattering results? Obviously, I'm going to publish them. Nope, no, you're not. You know, they yank that approval. That sounds familiar. Yeah, exactly. So, um, yeah, there needs to be a lot of ethical oversight. So, I mean, I appreciate you walking us through this very, like, kind of convoluted story in the sense, you know, like one step forward, two steps back with this issue that you guys have fought for really hard and made progress, but it's a still, it's a work in progress, right? Very. Yeah. Very. And we need help. Is there anything else you want to tell people about that we haven't covered yet? Yeah.

I just need a minute. What questions do you have? I don't know. I'm running, I'm running out of questions. I feel like we've kind of like walked through the topic. Terrible journalist, Jack. Updated the topic since the last time we discussed it. Um, okay, I will say this. There are amazing people working on this worldwide. And like, you know, every, and this is what I do need to say is that everybody working on this is very well-intentioned. You know, people have committed their entire careers to this inside and outside. of the Department of Defense. And I've met them and I like these people and they're good people. I think what the main issue is is the, there's a bureaucratic bottleneck, right? There are a few

people at the top who are very, very committed to making sure that we don't get accurate diagnoses and counts on this because counts and diagnoses create claims, right? Not only in the military, they would have to treat it with active duty soldiers, but they would also have to that the VA would also have a burden of that as well. But my argument to that is that we already have that burden. We're just calling it a bunch of other crap. You know, like we're already paying for it. We're just not calling it what it is, right?

And another thing too, and I asked this question of one of the DOD leads in a recent symposium, the DOD is hyper-focused on cognitive processing speeds. It's like, how fast can you do things? How fast do you read? How fast do you get information together? And again, like, I don't want to attribute malice where idiocy will explain everything, right? So I'm not trying to infer that anybody's being malicious. But even in the instrument research that I did, the diagnostics that data that just came out,

cognition and cognitive processing is a very one slice of that pie. But it's really, it has a lot of you. in weeding people out to be med-boarded. And so my question to a DOD lead at the latest symposium was, what kind of ethical analyses have you done to ensure that you're not just going to turf people whose cognitive processing might be low, and mine is low before a cup of coffee, right? I mean, I understand that brain injuries do it too, but it could be the wrong time of day.

It could be a bad day. You know, somebody could be, they could be a poor tester. They could be not be paying attention, right? It could be a clinician error. So we're going to evaluate people for brain health based on one aspect of brain health, which is cognitive processing. And then if they screw it up or they score too low, what are we doing with them? Right. And my point to the DOD lead was, this is how you push attrition of our most seasoned and experienced operators.

Like, they're not slow, okay? You can't kick him out because they're slower. Like, we all get a little slower as we age. But this is just one piece of the puzzle. And also, if you have appropriate rehabilitation and you have appropriate medications and you stop trying to treat this like PTSD, people will get better. And the thing about brain injuries is that they morph over time, right? So you need different kinds of treatments over time.

And you also have to treat the systemic stuff, like the gut and the musculoskeletal. and tell me how all of you are hyper-fit and y'all have sleep apnea, right? I mean, guys that look like you that I've known for years, who are super fit and winning judo tournaments, have to go home and put on this sexy snorkel. Yeah, yeah. That doesn't make any sense, right? So there's a lot of different aspects of these blast exposure injuries

that have not been duly investigated, and this is actually what I would like to say to everybody, is that when I sent this program out that the DOD is proposing, and I sent it to, you know, experts and people that I trust to take a look at it and give me a good read on it. One of the military clinicians came back with the Warfighter brain health program looks like we are going to prescribe CrossFit for Alzheimer's. Okay? But they're right. And I don't want to sanitize that because when you look at neurologically or anatomically what's happening after these blast exposures, it looks like an advanced dementia.

Okay? So we're treating these guys like they're assholes who have PTSD who just suddenly couldn't handle, you know, the immense responsibility and, you know, the millions of dollars of training that they have, they just fell apart. No, no, no, no, no. Let's look at this for what it might be. If we're seeing this kind of damage to your neurological structures and we're seeing this kind of degeneration within your brain tissue itself, let's call it what it is. That's neurodegeneration. Yeah. Alzheimer's, Louis body dementia, regular dementia, they all share very classic characteristics.

And I think part of the issue is that guys look like you. They're walking around healthy. They're killing it at the gym. They're deploying on time regularly. And that's the thing. I mean, there's this attitude that like if the dude shows up for work, he's good to go. And some of them are and some of them are not. And they need some treatment. When I look back now at Mike's symptoms leading up to his death. He showed up for work, right? He showed up for work. Yeah.

He didn't know who his co-rookers were anymore, but he showed up. But if Mike had been in his 70s and his daughter had brought him in and said, hey, my dad is getting paranoid and he's unscrewing the light bulbs, we would have assessed him for dementia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm not saying all of you guys are getting dementia, but I'm saying it's, looks kind of similar. It looks something like that. And if that's what's happening to your brains, then we need to catch it really, really early. But also, if you do have these kind of injuries and issues and you're an incredibly healthy population, and I don't want to sound like I'm going to use

and abuse it, if we have an incredibly healthy exposed population with some kind of advanced neurodegeneration that's occurring because of these injuries, think of the things. Think of the kind of research that could come out of that that can help the millions of civilians with advanced dementia and early onset Alzheimer's, right? Because not only do you guys have blast exposures, you have toxic exposures, you have uranium exposures, you have diesel exposures. And so there's so much good that could come out of this if we could get a weaponized bureaucracy out of the way. Well, so while we are working on getting rid of the weaponized bureaucracy, I'd like to ask you if you have any advice to share with any of the team sergeants, the squad

leaders out there, like what can they do on their level, whether there's something tactically that could be done or just awareness of a certain program that either on the military or civilian side that you can refer your soldiers to? Like what would you tell those like small unit tactical leaders? Okay, so for one, statistically, a female spouse is. are as accurate as clinician. No, no, no, I read up, I'm serious. Like when people say, oh, I did the research. No, you read research, okay?

I'm telling you. I did my own research and found out that the spouse is always right about her husband. Maybe not, but we're incredibly good historians. So listen to them, okay? Because we know, we know the subtleties, and we see the shit that never makes it into the team room. Yeah, okay?

Yeah, yeah. And also to these senior NCOs and officers who know their guys, you know these guys. You know, and I understand lots of marriages fall apart in special operations. It's kind of par for the course. But it's also not. It's a huge flag. So if you, you know, you're a guy, like, you know, maybe he and his wife had, yeah, whatever, some friction here and there.

But now things are going sideways. That's a flag, right? any kind of aberrant behavior that just ain't right. I mean, you're going to know it in your gut. And when you take them to, so I'm not, I'm not as concerned with special operations medicine. You were the one that pointed out to me that got me thinking about things differently

that the soldier isn't fucked up because he got divorced. They got divorced because he was fucked up beforehand. I mean, there's a sort of different way of looking at why the relationships fail. Yeah, I mean, there's always, you know, the stripper at Bragg. that nobody should have married, but aside from that...

No. What? Who does that? Nobody. But aside from that, yeah, if the marriage is falling apart, that's usually the first big flag. Because guys will let that go before they ever let the career go. Yeah, that's true. No, but it's true.

I mean, in my own research, I found that too, is that they'll, like, they'll get divorced four times before they're like, oh, maybe this job is killing me. maybe this job is killing all of my relationships or maybe I just you know anyway um I digress so yes listen to the spouses okay and I'm not so worried about special operations medicine um because they've generally been at the tip of the spear clinically um and they do socom does have a a good humanitarian kind of commander right Brian Benton um so I know I I know that they're going to do the right thing. I do truly believe that.

But if you are a team sergeant, go with your guys. If you have a guy getting evaluated for whatever bullshit is bringing him in or behaviors or if you're screwing up, go with them to the dock. Do not let that clinician gaslight them. Do not let that clinician stamp them with PTSD. Make sure that they get. Now, not every center is going to have a Tesla 7 MRI. Yeah. But there's a couple different.

ways that you can scan patients, it's almost like Swiss cheese, right? You get one piece that's got big holes in it. You can kind of stack the scans of MRIs so that there's one, two, three, four, five, six, and it covers everything that a big expensive machine would do, right? So make sure that they get the lab panels, the MRIs, and everything else that they could possibly need and do not put them on psychotropic medications until they've been cleared of a blast exposure brain injury because Mike was on medications

for paranoia or whatever seriously screwed him up I heard that if I've heard it once I've heard it 50 times you know I had all these symptoms I went to my doc they gave me a bunch of medications

and then the guy kills himself made things way worse yeah you can't treat organic brain injuries like you would treat PTSD you can't do it I mean, the neural systems are completely, yeah, it's a misdiagnosis. Very much. And so, you know, if this, you know, syndromes that we're seeing, you know, that we've been able to kind of show proof of concept utility of measuring.

And then there is a syndrome that we've named associated with it that we've called crowns, which is combat-related overpressure, wave neurotrauma and sequela. So sequela just means kind of everything else. We've got the neurotrauma. and we know that happens, what's the sequence that happens after with that, right? And so we have now, at least proof of concept of a syndrome called crowns that is related to blast overpressure where I would like to thank the people who coined operator syndrome initially, and I'm not trying to take anything from them, but that's not the whole picture, right? you know those are kind of emergent symptoms that we saw in cohorts of special operators but we can't

couldn't really connect that to their exposures right and they were calling it allostatic load okay that's you know that's different branch of clinical science you can call it what you want to in research science we're going to investigate it more rigorously and so the syndrome that has come out of what we the three of us have been doing for the last couple years that we've termed crowns um for one crowns it's your head, right? Makes sense because this goes through your head. But also, it encapsulates, you know, a pretty wide spectrum of symptoms that a lot of special operators have. I mean, I'm sure you could think of your four or five best friends in special operations and guaranteed you guys all have. If you have 10 symptoms, most of you have five or six the same, right? Yeah, I mean, I told a friend of

mine recently, like, we kind of reconnected after like 15 years. And I was like, dude, don't wait another 15 years because those burn pits are going to get one of us. I was at the trade center in 2001, and I'm the only one from my team who is not popped hot for some kind of weird cancer. I was there for a month. From all the inhaling like aluminum dust and all that other stuff. I was also one of the only people on my team who wore a respirator. Well, yeah. But I mean, but it's true. We had a guy on this show, Jason, who works for a company that they're trying to get the military to start use respirators because of the, you know, shooting guns and weapons and other carcinogens, sperm pits. So that's another work in progress.

Not only that were you all deployed to, your AOs, the farm animals, okay? I'm not talking about eating them, but just enhance, like the way that they farm in some areas that you were deployed to, the way that they farm and the particular in the air, you guys pop hot with weird bacterial infections come in back from deployment. I mean, there's so many different exposures and that's the not sexy stuff, right? That's the preventive medicine. That's, you know, getting test tubes full of like goat shit and determining when it dries and it's in the air, what are you guys going to be inhaling, right? That's all stuff that requires money and it's not sexy and it's not cool, but that is the basis of determining good occupational health. I remember having dinner. I just at the child hall happened to sit with a guy,

who was an army veterinarian. And I was talking... It was named Lee. I cannot remember. This was back in like 2004 or five. Okay. That winter. And I had this conversation with him,

sort of about this topic. And he's talking about, you know, the agriculture and the bacterias that are present and that we don't have back home. And so you guys are being exposed to this bacteria that you don't have immunities to, et cetera, et cetera. And I asked him, like,

what do you think is going to be like the long-term exposure or like the long-term result for soldiers being exposed to these things and he was like, we'll probably never know. Okay. Yeah. I know that's not very helpful.

I don't know. As a scientist, I hate to hear that. We probably never know. Yeah, but I mean... Yes, we will. There's... But I mean, if you don't make a concerted effort to try to understand it, you know, we won't. You know, like Gulf War Syndrome or something like that.

But that also took veterans and their spouse and clinicians and scientists, you know, the grandpa Simpson yelling at the cloud eventually, you know, you'd get some traction. But, you know, it's certainly not happening from inside that house, right? You know, it's far more palatable, I think, politically and bureaucratically to just keep on, keeping on, right? And I wish that it was just my opinion. I wish that it wasn't this way.

But unfortunately, I have years and years of congressional research and DODIG and GAO looking at these programs. And the interesting part, like the PTSD program for the Department of Defense, it's not perfect, right? Like, there's definitely areas to improve. But they're not getting dinged every 18 months on wasting $80 million a year. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, they're not getting congressional inquiries from armed services saying, what the hell are you doing with the $3 billion that we've given you over the last couple years? Like some of the money, okay, you ready?

A couple million dollars, I think it was $3.4 million, was spent on reading The Odyssey and the Iliad, I think. What? Yeah. Uh-huh. So TBI care or mental health care, somebody on high decided that it would be a good idea, and improve morale and reduce suicide or mental health issues by reading great classics to soldiers. That was definitely an 0-4 looking to get some promotion points

that came up with that brilliant idea. You know what, 0-4's, I don't know. That seems like a war college. I'm sorry, that's such an few. Well, these things aren't mutually exclusive. Fair enough. Another one, which was really great. I remember when this came out,

they did the Sesame Street thing about combat injuries for military kids. That was amazing. I remember because Gwen was little when that came out. I didn't know at the time that that was money that was allocated for mental health and brain injury programs. Let's do a Sesame Street skit for military children about the injuries. We're not going to treat the injuries. But we are definitely going to spend a couple million dollars to... Yeah, it's a strange approach.

We're going to spread awareness. Yeah, and I mean, I hope I'm wrong, and I hope I'm misquoting this, but I think over the last four years, one of the reports said that there was $400 million allocated for research, okay? So I'm a career academic scientist, you know, I'm a tenured professor. I'm always looking for money, right? Always looking for research money to pay my staff. I don't get any money out of it, but, you know, it pays for the research to be done. And $400 million, I think within four or five years, there were 13 studies. that's yeah okay they could have funded 400 one million dollar research studies with that do you know how much a professor can do or you know an academic scientist could do with one million dollars like look at what we've done with nothing right the DOD won't fund the kind of research that i'm doing or that other people are doing where we're getting unflattering results results, right? In fact, from what I heard, not from the principal investigator, because he's way too professional to ever say this, but through the great fine, I heard that the reblast study at Harvard with the 30 Navy SEALs that found all of that specific brain damage, that was a pilot. That was a pilot study of 30 operators. And they were promised second phase, third phase, right? We're going to bring in more guys. We're going to scan more guys. We're going to get to the bottom of

this, guess what happened after they had initial unflattering results that showed blast exposure is linked to brain damage? Squashed it. You think? So, I mean, not even from the guy's perspective, right? I'm not even touching on that yet. Just from a scientist's perspective, our job is to tell the truth. We spend years studying methods so that the results that we have are unassailable,

And they're the truth. And people can replicate them and they can, you know, tear them apart. This sort of like perversion of the medical authority, I think, is what leads some, at least partially responsible for people out there to support someone like RFK Jr. That has all kinds of insane anti-scientific ideas. But we have to like also acknowledge, you know, as insane as that is that there is this real erosion of scientific authority, medical authority in this country for some legitimate. reasons. I mean, we have psychologists who participated in enhanced interrogation and torture down in Guantanamo. I'm not aware of any of them being disciplined for that. Well, and the people who advised enhanced interrogation at that time are part of the team, from what I remember, I could be wrong,

they are part of the team that developed the master of resilience training for the United States military. Wow. Yeah. Uh-huh. from waterboarding to think happy thoughts, right? Thanks, bro. Thanks, bud. Like, thanks for regressing, you know, a decade of research. But, yeah, I do agree with you that there's some erosion. But I think that if you are able to speak to people at their level,

and, okay, so for instance, like my research with, special operators is was based you know at the time that I did those studies that was based on 10 years of relationship building just as a clinician and a scientist you know they knew me as like an annoying doctoral student asking all these questions and then they knew me as a researcher and then they knew me as a person and so they would talk to me right um so I didn't really face that in my own research um I do think that there's a general distrust of science I would completely understand anybody in the military not trusting clinical science, right? Or trusting their doc.

And I've worked among them, and I've been one. I was a DOD civilian clinician. But I would understand the mistrust because... The military keeps lying about shit. I mean, you said it, right? Yeah, I mean, you go in with legitimate complaints. Your life is falling apart. You can't trust your own brain.

and somebody looks at you and kind of was like, well, and, okay? I mean, that needs somebody, you go to your physician or you go to your doctor for that, that needs to be jumped on. Yeah. The response that these guys should be getting is, oh, my God, okay, tomorrow you're going for an MRI, go to the lab right now, we're going to put you on this medication, we're going to get you this neuro rehab. Like, and that's part of the issue is that we need a standard,

protocol for somebody coming and saying, hey, I have these blast exposures on it, right? Somebody's having a heart attack. They're going to get an EKG within 10 minutes. I'm going to draw tropin. I'm going to, you know, give them oxygen and nitrates and aspirin and morphine and all this shit coming in. I'm not going to stand over them and be like, how many hamburgers have you eaten last year? Right? And I'm not going to say, well, you know what? I know you have these symptoms and I know they're really awful and you want to kill yourself. But we've got a like 100,000 other people that were getting their troponin levels from and we're not going to treat you until we know everybody else's level. That's not clinical medicine. That's kicking the can.

Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we can measure blast gauge data and we can measure overpressure levels, but we have to be treating people in a gold standard way at the same time. And I do remember the days when military medicine was like the pinnacle. Right. Right? That's where all of my trauma training, my advanced trauma training, came from Vietnam and all of that. I mean, military medicine, I mean, it still is. It's absolutely honorable and it's an amazing profession. But I think that the way the military has handled brain injuries has really diminished our standing as defense clinicians. You know, it used to be where I could say, oh, I'm a defense health scientist, or I study military trauma, or I study combat trauma. And that was my, like, entree, right?

People trusted that. And now there's been so many scandals and so much poor care that the good clinicians, it's not the clinicians, really. It's the system, right? If you have a poor system, people are going to get poor care. Yeah. So I agree with you. Before we get going, any final thoughts? Anything I didn't ask that you'd really like to get out there for folks?

I really want to sound like I have all that in my brain. It's been a wild two years or a year and a half of doing this. Like we just started at the end of 2023. Probably have a million things to tell you after we're done. But enough's enough. I mean, we know the symptoms. We can't be the only people. advocating. Like there has to be a groundswell. Yeah. Call your congressman. Yeah. And this doesn't get better with

time, right? Even if these guys have blast exposures and there's no symptoms now, just wait. Yeah. Yeah, there's like social repercussions down the line. Yeah, get it into your records now. Get all of your toxic exposures into your records now while your active duty. Um, and demand it. You know, clinicians are not your chain of command. And they should not be communicating with your chain of command about your medical issues. I mean, unless there's some kind of agreement going on here. But like, as a soldier, you can go in and say, this is unacceptable levels of care. Let me speak to your chief physician.

Let me speak to the chief medical officer. Because I'm telling you, I've had X amount of blast exposures or I'm a sniper and I'm having all of these weird symptoms and you're writing me off. sit in that office until the MPs remove you. Honestly, because that's the only way that we're going to have some kind of accountability, because it's going to have to start at the grassroots. And, I mean, I've been at the grassroots, and, you know, now I'm walking around Capitol Hill, but I'm still walking around that grassroots knowledge.

Like, I've still sat in the rooms with families crying and guys losing their minds because they don't understand what has happened to their brains. So, yes, you have to start advocating for yourself at the ground level. and yes, you have to call your Congress people. And that's the, remember, I mean, I'm sure you've heard it in the military, like when you were in the military, like, oh, it's a congressional. Oh, they called her a congressperson. So that's what they're there for, right?

That is what they're supposed to be doing. So raise them hell, I would say. Congressional inquiries. Well, thank you for coming on here and bringing us up to date I'm sharing some of this. You brought the whiskey, not. Oh, that's right. I'm drinking the whiskey I brought.

Is it good? Yeah, you want to try some? Yes. Okay. If our producer will let me after last night's a bottle. Did you tie one on? Yeah. Yeah.

We had a- Go ahead, Jack. You're an adult. We had a Morsak guy here last night and me and him stayed here until like two in the morning, just bullshit and then drinking bourbon. Sounds like a good night. Oh, yeah, that's smooth. It's nice, right?

Yeah. What is it called? Natterjack. Oh, Natterjack. That's a new nickname for you. Natterjack, Irish whiskey. All right. Cool.

Got a good one. Yeah, so again, I mean, thanks for sharing this information with everyone. I hope these videos kind of make the rounds a little bit, you know, in the special ops or other military communities. And, yeah, call your congressman. Oh, and also, what's today? April 24th? Yes. Ryan Larkin.

died eight years ago yesterday. Sorry to hear that. Yeah, it sucks. But from that, well, I don't know if there's really anything from that that can like even make his death, even a tiny bit palatable.

But I just wanted to remember the reason that we're here. Because Ryan died and then two years later, Mike died. And I started studying this because Ryan died. And I don't know. Making lemonade out of lemons?

Well, yeah, one last thing. I'll just direct people towards that Yahoo News piece that I wrote years ago. Okay, so yeah, there would be a link down in description, thanks, Steve. For folks that want to go out there and read that, it's not an easy story to read. It wasn't an easy story to write, but it's important and is the lead-in to this entire topic that we've been talking about. You worked on that for what? Eight months? That was a while.

Something was that wall? Maybe it was a while, though. Yeah, because it was the summer and it came out in February of 22. Yeah. So you did a really huge deep dive on that. And then the, I don't know if you read the Havana syndrome thing I wrote with Sean Naylor. Yeah, I did. Oh, you did.

Okay. That took like two years to like put all that together. That was a heavy one. But. Well, like I said, I mean, these are heavy subjects, right? You write about heavy stuff. I research heavy stuff. It's, I mean, you know, it's hard.

But it's harder to live through it. So the work continues. And I'm sure we'll have you back again in another few years to tell us about what the next update is on this medical journey. How many of the other more right people did I piss off? I don't think so. No, I mean, but that's what science is supposed to do. I mean, research and science is supposed to piss off all the right people, right? It's supposed to be grating and annoying and upturn in the apple cart.

That's what new evidence does. We have better evidence now, so let's have better care. Yeah, people are too obsessed with wanting to be well-liked nowadays. I mean, sometimes your job is to tell people shit they don't want to hear. Seems to be my lot in life. When you do that, they're not going to like that boot in their ass. Too bad. No, they're not, but you know what?

Let them go kneel at Mike's gravestone. Yeah. Go ahead. Go find his gravestone in Section 60. Go ahead. Kneel at it. Sit down in front of it. Tell me I'm wrong.

Right? Yeah. I may not be right 100%, but I'm on the right track, and so are my colleagues. We know what we're doing, and we know where this needs to go. And people are listening, so that's a good thing. Good. Make it some progress.

Well, you help. and this podcast helps too. Good. No, I'm glad. So we will see all you guys out there next time. Thank you, Kate, for joining us in studio. And we'll see you guys next time. Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show.

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