Dr. Frueh, a psychologist, discusses his work with military populations, particularly focusing on "Operator Syndrome," a term he coined to describe the unique challenges special operations personnel face. He highlights common symptoms like traumatic brain injury, sleep disturbances, hormonal dysregulation, and cognitive impairments. Dr. Frueh emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to treatment, including lifestyle adaptations and medical interventions like stellate ganglion block therapy and ketamine infusions. He also stressed the importance of collaboration among foundations and the need for better support systems for operators and their families.
Ben Derrick 0:00
Music.
Welcome to the soldier fund podcast, the platform for untold stories from the National Guard Special Forces community join us as we delve into the lives of these elite warriors and the journey of our non profit dedicated to supporting their courageous mission to free the oppressed worldwide. I'm your host. Ben Derrick, let's dive in. Dr, free, thank you so much for joining us today. I think this is going to be a fascinating conversation, one that's going to add a lot of necessary, needed, longed for information inside of our community. So thanks for being with us.
Unknown Speaker 0:51
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Ben Derrick 0:53
Let's jump in there. And just so I know that, thankfully, you're on many podcasts explaining who you are and what you do. But just in case some of our audience is not aware of that. If you give us just a little bit of your background and the work that you've done with the military population, sure,
Speaker 1 1:08
sure, happy to so I'll start with the fact that I'm not a veteran. I've never served, but I come from a family with service. My father was a Vietnam veteran like yours. And my great grandfather, who I knew well until he died I was 14, was he was a veteran of the Spanish American War in Cuba. So I grew up with quite an awareness of the of the reality that war, going to war changes people, changes men and that we as a society do owe a debt of gratitude, but that, but it's more than gratitude we owe, we owe. We owe our warriors the health care and the support that they need to live with their best lives after after war.
Ben Derrick 1:58
So this led to the path for your career, correct? Yeah, that's
Speaker 1 2:01
right. So I went to so I decided to become a psychologist, and I went to graduate school and graduated with PhD in Clinical Psychology in 1992 and my first job well, my last year of training, and then my first job was at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Charleston, South Carolina. So I worked in the VA for 15 years, also faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina. And I was a full time clinician in the VA for seven years, and then a part time clinician and part time researcher for eight years with federal grants and such. I left VA in 2006 and moved to Hawaii. So I'm at the University of Hawaii. I've been here since oh six. But also along the way, I started to work with some friends of mine who came out of special operations, and that led to what I've been doing for the last decade, which has been just a focus of applied work with operators and their spouses and some of the some of the enablers and support person personnel around the operators. It's
Ben Derrick 3:13
interesting that it takes, you know, I appreciate what you're mentioning here, and that unless you know someone that's inside this community, it's very difficult to understand the type of job that an operator does and the effects that that Job has on the individual. So inside of our world, you've become famous for this term operator syndrome. I know you've released a book on it recently, earlier in the year. Could you do a little bit of explaining, kind of how you got to that name, what it encompasses, because it seems to make an instant connection to the people inside of our population, right?
Speaker 1 3:48
Well, so go back to the first half of my career. I was working in a PTSD Clinic at a VA hospital, and in the 90s, most of the patients that came through were Vietnam veterans, still some World War Two, some Korean veterans in the VA makes PTA. It makes it all about PTSD, in terms of the lasting psychological effects. What I saw at VA, and ultimately my frustration with the VA that led me to leave is the VAs approach is actually tragic in the sense of telling, telling men and women's you know, veterans, soldiers that they have PTSD. I would say the majority of the people I work with didn't have PTSD. The idea of PTSD being the easy button is something that's kind of, you know, come together in my mind for the last decade or so, just realizing that we needed a quick and fast way to acknowledge the pain and suffering that a veteran might be in, as well as a way to provide a safe financial. Safety net for them in the form of disability. So PTSD was very convenient for that when I was so go back about 10 years ago, 2014 ish, the community of people I knew in Houston. So I had a part time job in Houston. I spent a week in Houston every month working at Baylor College of Medicine, and just made some friends in the community, and those friends knew I had a background in veterans mental health. They knew I'd done the work with PTSD. So I was introduced to some some individuals from the Special Operations community who who thought maybe there's something that talking to me would help. So great. So meet a guy for a cup of coffee, or meet a group of guys here there for a pizza or something like that, starting to have these conversations, and very quickly learned that they didn't have PTSD, or if they did, that wasn't really the driving problem for them. And so what were they? What was the complaint? You know, in medicine, we always start with that. What's the complaint? What's the symptom, what's the impairment that's bringing somebody to have this conversation? And it was so vague. Guys were telling me something's wrong, but I don't know what. Jordan,
Unknown Speaker 6:17
absolutely I'm
Speaker 1 6:20
not the same guy I used to be. But I can't explain it. I can't put my finger on it. So I couldn't put my finger on it either. I didn't know. Working in the VA for 15 years, I never met a seal. I never had a patient who came from Special Forces. I didn't have any patients that were PJs, combat controllers, Marine Raiders. So I had many patients. Many people came in claiming to be those roles. But when you dug into it, you realize they were not telling the truth. So when I actually finally did meet and get to know some real world operators, former operators, they were and it was trial and error. It's like, holy cow, PTSD doesn't, doesn't fit. It doesn't explain. It doesn't, you know, they don't need Prozac. They don't need these guys don't need to talk to a social worker to, you know, kind of figure anything out. I mean, some of them probably would have benefited from that, but that wasn't the primary need. So trial and error time. Let's get some tests. Wow. I never did a horn. I never suggested a hormone test ever up until that time, but I kept seeing these guys come in with these low testosterone reports and these sleep study results showing sleep apnea. And I'm just scratching my head, like, wait a minute, this dude's 37 years old. He he was at a tier one unit. He highly accomplished, highly elite. You can look at him and see he's, he's, you know, he's got tactical athlete written all over him. Yet he's gained some weight. Clearly gained he's not at his fighting weight. What's going on? Why is his testosterone so low? Why is his Why does he have sleep apnea? Originally, because we had some protocols and some abilities to do neuroimaging. I was getting brain neuroimaging on some of the guys, you know, just kind of off, you know, just kind of after hours, getting getting their brain scanned, and then going through, not a neurologist, but working with a neurologist friend of mine, we just looked at them in the evenings. The very first one, I brought to him, I didn't tell him who, who it was, or what it was, and just said, this is a man, a male. Tell me what you think he's going through through the brain. If you ever have looked at an MRI image of a brain on a computer, you literally scroll through the brain, the different levels of the brain, and he said, Well, I don't see any, no sign of tumors, no sign of any, you know, massive brain damage. But holy cow, this guy's ventricles of his brain are quite atrophied. So probably an 8080, year old man, no 37 year old war hero and the neurologist, my neurologist friend Ben Weinstein, was just like, what like? That just shocked him. He couldn't like he almost couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that this soldier whose brain we were looking at, this veteran, was as young as he was, so now we're talking about helping these guys do these things. And as one guy got better, he started sending a friend, you know, Hey, would you talk to a friend of mine? He's got some of the similar issues. Hey, talk to my friend. Talk to my friend. So over time, just your word of mouth, you know, talk to consulted coach, whatever word you want to use. You know, hundreds of of of operators, many of whom are active duty, still many of whom are not active duty anymore. Longer, but then started seeing this pattern over and over and over again, traumatic brain injury, sleep disturbance with sleep apnea, hormonal dysregulations, especially low testosterone, chronic joint pain, headaches, cognitive impairments to memory, concentration, organization, impulsivity, the psychological things. Okay, so I am a psychologist, so I have to think about psycho psychological issues. So we have depression, anger, little PTSD and for many guys, addiction problems, I put depression and anger up their way at the top of that list of psychological issues. And then, of course, you start to see, wow, what else does black what else you know? Learning about blast exposures, obviously, learning about how they affect the brain. And in 2014 we didn't know much. It was three or four years later before I started to kind of read some of the very recent studies that that were coming out that were showing that blast exposures cause a different type of brain injury than impact forces do. So you hit your head, you get a bruise, a brain bruise, and we call that a concussion, but an impact but a blast exposure has a shearing effect. It goes through the soft tissue of the brain, and it damages the glial cells that hold the neurons together in place. So essentially, the scaffolding that that supports the neurons,
Ben Derrick 11:33
and in this population, we have both Right,
Speaker 1 11:36
yeah, both right, both and then some. And then you add in oxygen deprivation, Whiplash effects from tactical driving, all kinds of vectors of brain.
Ben Derrick 11:51
Yeah, so to be able to be the guy that started putting these things together based on experience interaction with the population and Jordan, I'm listening to Doc here, and thinking, Man, these are just conversations we have over and over again. This matches absolutely in the living this life. Correct?
Speaker 2 12:12
No, absolutely. When we first started talking about these stuff with the guys, I can remember going to a cephalic which is our shooting school, essentially, and we would get back in the afternoons from it. And as a medic, everybody's like, Man, I drank plenty of water, and I have a headache. I don't feel good. I feel dehydrated, but I know I'm not. And so as a medic, we I start handing out IVs to guys, and not even thinking that this is blast wave exposure or TB eyes or anything like that. And what do we do with with good team culture, is we wash that IV down with some beers and then guys don't sleep well, which we know now that you know, we were just impairing everything that needed to the healing that needed to happen throughout the night, and then we get up the next day and do it again, repeat. And rents for what three weeks? I think?
Ben Derrick 13:09
Yeah, you're talking about one, one school, one little three,
Unknown Speaker 13:13
one school. Yeah,
Speaker 2 13:14
that's not a deployment. That's not anything. And the craziest thing now, now is we don't even keep record of it. We have no idea how many rounds we shot, how many doors were blown, like,
Unknown Speaker 13:26
right?
Ben Derrick 13:27
So for you, you come to this place of awareness and you're like, Okay, we have to completely change the way that we're thinking about this easy button diagnosis. And again, I appreciate what you're pointing out it did solve some things, and that it acknowledged that the soldier has been through something, and it opened up a gateway for compensation for those things. But you're the guy that said this isn't enough, right?
Unknown Speaker 13:52
Yeah,
Speaker 1 13:55
my view is we need to be understanding that there are certain professions operators being at the top of that list, but I would include many responders, law enforcement and firefighters in there as well. Of course, all combatants up to a point, are having physiological damage done to all of their systems in their body. So we can think of this. We can talk about allostatic load here, and allostatic load is this hypothetical burden that affects all of our physiological systems. And then we also have to realize and remember that all of our physiological systems are interconnected. So we're talking about injuries that are interconnected with each other. They don't exist separately. It's not like having a, you know, a pimple on your cheek and a cut on your knee, and they're completely, you know, caused by and separate from each other. Your traumatic brain injury hurts your ability to get good sleep, your inability to get good sleep makes it harder for your brain to heal. Ill, your inability to get good sleep makes it harder for your body to produce testosterone. Your TBI probably affected your pituitary gland, which is the master gland of the endocrine system, and so on and so on and so on. In modern medicine, we've forgotten this. We put everything in silos. So if we refer you to a psychologist or a psychiatrist, they have a they have a hammer, and your problems are all nails. They don't think, they don't think, oh, maybe we ought to get a sleep expert involved. Maybe we ought to get a urologist involved. Maybe we should have pain specialists involved. By keeping everything in silos and everybody in their lanes, we're not getting to the to the real approach. We need to be holistic in treating the human body. And so when I talk about operator syndrome, what I say to folks is, is it's a framework. It's not a specific diagnosis, but it's a framework to put all those, all those predictable injuries and impairments, you know, together, and to think about them together. The best treatment we can provide any operators or responders with with the syndrome is is to be thinking simultaneously about, about all of it, about the all of the systems in
Ben Derrick 16:23
the body. So this is actually new information for most guys that we talk to inside the National Guard, soft community, where they have something that's bothering bothering them. And first of all, they're not the quiet professional, the silent professional, and they're concerned about anything that's going on with them, compromising their team, right? So that's an incredibly honorable part of this population, right? It's also a huge blocker to getting them the resources that they need. But with this wide range of, and pardon the term here, but wide range of symptoms that these men are experiencing, there's usually one that is really bothering them. You know, it may be the sleep, it may be the pain, it may be the erectile dysfunction. It may be the fact that they're taking hormone therapy, or they've had double hip replacement at 31 you know, there's something there that's really bothering them. The only explanation though, that it feels and Jordan, you're welcome to disagree with this, but the only explanation that I usually hear is, I'm broke, you know, I'm just uniquely broke, and I don't know with that, except for, just keep on rolling, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2 17:28
yeah. And I think, I think with that, though it's, it's almost part of the community to to just accept it, to say, well, we're all broke, matter of fact, matter of fact, I've been on a team that said we were held together with duct tape. So it's, it's just the norm. You know, I mean, if you don't, if you're not educated about it, if you don't know about operator syndrome, if you don't know about this cascading effect of all these things going on inside your system, but we all experience it together, then it's, it's the norm inside our community, and we accept it as that,
Speaker 1 18:00
except that a lot of guys will tell you that they struggled thinking they were the only one that's that. That's a piece I hear. Maybe I don't hear it as much now as I used to, but early on, when I would say to a guy like might be five minutes into a conversation, and I'm saying, if you had your testosterone checked, have you had a sleep study? And they're like, holy cow, how do you how are you reading my mind? How do you know all this stuff? Like, well, because it's so common, it's, it's predictable, in that sense. And then they're like, Wait, you mean I'm, I'm normal? Yeah, that's normal to have these problems. And that that right there is often a relief to hear, agreed for guys that have been kind of struggling on their own, these
Ben Derrick 18:43
guys will say, it's, it's, we will say to them, it's normal, but it's not normal, right? And then they're able to back up and say, Okay, we're listening. And we'll sit in front of a room of guys, and Jordan will say, all right, how many energy drinks are out right now, and everybody else start looking around. And you know, we're using certain things to cope and those things, maybe you're helping for the day or for the moment, but the Adderall during the day, the Ambien at night, wash it down with a little bit of Woodford Reserve and then hit the monsters or the NOS during the day. This is not how we were intended to live, and it's certainly not making us better at our job.
Speaker 1 19:23
Yeah, yeah. What I what, I guess I like what you just described there as powerful way of phrasing it. What I say is it's it's not normal to have a broken hand, but if you've put your hand on a block and had somebody hit it 10 times with with a large hammer, it's normal for that hand to be broken.
Ben Derrick 19:46
Well said.
Speaker 1 19:48
And so what, what guys are experiencing, and what families are experiencing, because I want to include the families in this conversation, is, is these are injuries and impairments that are inevitable. Going to occur over the course of a career, what we want to do and what, what are, what I think, what we're you're talking about today is, how can we, how can we do two things. One is, how can we mitigate these injuries and these impairments during the course of a career, to minimize them? And then what do we? What can we do, you know, later in a career, or after the career, in order to help really repair and heal and recover. The good news is, there's a lot we can do it. You know, on both both parts of that equation.
Ben Derrick 20:31
Do you have my attention?
Speaker 2 20:32
That really makes me think about our some of our guys, though, as far as being an operator, and then also, because they're National Guard, you mentioned earlier, first responders. So they're, you know, these guys are firefighters or law enforcement or contractors or whatever. So they're contractors, yeah, yeah. And they have families too. Most of them, a very large percentage of our guys, have family so well.
Speaker 1 20:59
So I didn't even get through the whole list of operator syndrome impairments, but we talked about it. You know, we talked about a bunch of them. But then you get into the merit, the effects on merit, marriages, on parenting, you get into concerns about intimacy, and that intimacy does, certainly does include physical and sexual intimacy, but also the emotional intimacy. I think it's really common for operators and law enforcement and firefighters to become habituated to human suffering, so your own so other people can perceive you, maybe as not being very empathic. You know, where did Ben's empathy go. Where did Jordan's empathy go? And and so that has a ripple effect on every relationship you have. And then you're going to put that into context of transitions, whether that's transition at retirement or transition at the end of the day or at the end of the of the training evolution. You know, our guard go and train and work, but then they go home, and they're home for a while, and if they're responders, then they're, then they're, then their transitions are happening daily or every other day, and those transition points are a challenge then and then. The other thing that let's put on to this is the existential concerns, whether we call that moral injury, guilt over something that was done or not done, loss, grief, survivor's guilt, that sense of loss of tribe or loss of mission when people are no longer in In the unit or in the in the department. It's a heavy it's a heavy burden. It's a heavy allostatic load. And of course, I don't consider this to be part of the operator syndrome itself, but we are looking at high rates of suicide in operators, in combatants, in veterans, in law enforcement, in firefighters, and so if we ignore these injuries, if we don't treat these injuries, we you know, we're looking at downstream effects of divorces and suicides and a lot of misery and unhappiness.
Ben Derrick 23:18
Yeah, Jordan, the description you give their Doc is just, I think, going to be so freeing for a lot of men who think, as you said, they're isolated in this, that they're the only guy, or one of the only guys this is happening to Jordan, the way you describe that, I think is awesome for the men to hear, the families to hear that are listening, is essentially invisible problems. It's different than a broken hand, right, right,
Speaker 2 23:41
right, that's right, yeah. And what's crazy too. It seems like our guys, for the most part, will show up to the team and still perform. And where it starts failing is their family or their home life, whatever that is, whether, if they don't have a family, it's it could be career outside, especially for guardsmen, outside of this uniform, and then, and when it starts imploding around them, that's that's when they reach for help and will call and
Speaker 1 24:11
by that time, there's often a precipitating moment that's hard to undo, whether That's shooting out the tires of a wife who's threatening to leave, or some DUI or something that involves law and for, you know, being on the receiving end of an arrest or and so, yeah, there's just, it's, I mean, it's really tragic that that's the point at which we start to become aware of somebody's struggles.
Ben Derrick 24:44
If we could interrupt that and just kind of swing the camera around just a little bit at this point in the conversation, and perhaps speak directly to family members of operators who may be hearing about this for the first time. Like this explains a. Lot. What do we say to those families? How do we help those spouses?
Speaker 1 25:06
Well, I don't know that there's a good one size fits all solution. I think part of part of that solution is awareness and education. So reading, listening to some of the podcasts, the book I wrote, titled operator syndrome is written directly for and to operators and their spouses. So I didn't write it for people with MDS or PhDs or whatever fancy degrees. I wrote it for people who are in the community, who are struggling. And so the advice in the book is intended to be educational and practical. And I think right now, there just isn't. There's not a lot of resources for for spouses or or or families, especially for Guard families that are spread all over and don't have a you know, they can't walk down the hall. They don't have that brick and mortar access and availability. So that that really makes it a challenge. When I when I speak with with couples, or when I speak with individuals who have a partner, part of what I always try to say is, you guys got to be in this together. And if you, if you're in it together, a it will, you know, you'll find those that health and healing and recovery more efficiently and more more you know, you're more likely to get there, and you're likely to do it. It's a, it's a you will build your partnership. It will help, help, help both of you be happy together. And so I think part of what a spouse has to understand is the operator's not just being a jerk, not just being some fucking asshole for the hell of it, they're injured. Their brain is injured. Their joints are injured, their immune system, their endocrine system, everything is affected. Their gut, the guts affected. And so first of all, trying to have a little understanding and compassion goes a long way. And understanding that it's ubiquitous. It's not just your your spouse, it's all of the it's all of them. And then for the operator to be able to put on a little bit of empathy, and to say, you know, my wife has been through it two My wife has has raised the kids, has been there for all the milestones that I missed, those holidays, those birthdays, those you know the first you know the first flag football game, or the first concert. You know band concert or whatever. And there's a certain loneliness that spouses live with. I think you're if you're this, especially for guard, because you're not in a military community necessarily. If your husband is is an operator, and you're living in you know, Peoria, who do you talk to? Who are your friends that you can offload on? And you probably don't have very many people that who can either understand or who you're even allowed to tell certain things to. So I think people live with secrets, and they live with a lot of burden that they hold close inside. And I think the husband, the operator, doesn't want to say certain things to their to their wife, because they don't want to put ideas in their head or images in their head. But I think the wives do that too. They don't want to burden the husband with stressors or issues going on with the children or finances or, you know, things with the house. So I think part of, part of what is, is a is a recipe. Is a winning recipe, is to have the couple support each other and go through the medical care together. And there are some foundations now that will provide services to the operator and to the spouse, and we can get into talking about treatments, but there are some foundations that will send spouses for psychedelic retreats, or that will provide stellate ganglion block treatments to both the operator and the wife.
Ben Derrick 29:07
Yeah, this is one of the best parts about this awareness spreading, right? Is that, first of all, we're even having conversations about these things. When you when you talk to people who joined up in the community pre gwat, you know, it's like this. This language is who's talking about this? Nobody. So we're kind of breaking new ground here in in without being disrespectful to the National Guard at all. Certainly have a lot of respect for that organization. It is often last to process or receive certain resources with the trickle down effect, and that makes sense. I don't think anybody's upset about that, but it is a realistic part of this community in that when the National Guardsman looked at his looks at his active duty counterpart, and understands, you know, you've got the PT, you've got P. Who understand everything that your life entails, and you don't have to burn all these appointments just explaining it, and then have kind of a general civilian solution layered on top of it. That's a different thing, you know, and I think this isolation that you're describing both outside of the marital relationship and inside of the marital relationship, the irony here is that we're trying to save burden from the other part of the couple, and really we're burdening the other part of the couple, right, right? So it feels like a solution in the beginning, I'm being sacrificial here by being quiet about this, not passing along this burden, just swallowing this as it were, both parties in the marriage are doing that, and as a result, we're going nowhere or backwards, right?
Speaker 2 30:46
And we're going and we're going apart. Yeah, that's what I was about to say, man, I've lived this, this, and and my wife, as she was sitting here, would say it, that's 100% accurate. And at first you're you're protecting each other, and then over 10 years, 15 years, it almost, or certainly does, become resentment
Unknown Speaker 31:07
of,
Speaker 2 31:08
I'm burying all of this, and you don't even see me for what I'm doing over here. And then, you know, both parties are thinking the same thing, and next thing you know, you're you're separate and you're lonely in your own house, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 31:20
yeah, which is almost worse than being being with somebody and feeling lonely is worse than being by yourself and feeling lonely absolutely,
Ben Derrick 31:32
yeah, it doesn't make sense, right? And
Speaker 1 31:34
we can break it, you know? We don't even have to be talking about responders or soldiers. I mean, we could just talk about men and women of all stripes. It's very well known that men do better with their health when they're married a and b, when their wife is involved in their health care. I mean, I'll raise my hand on that one. My health, my wife has been an important part of my wellness just because things I would ignore or not attend to, she will say, hey, wait a minute. Why aren't you doing this? Or where is that going on? Or, Hey, you got an appointment with your doctor. Let's make sure you tell them about A, B and C and sometimes, and we've both had some significant health care challenges in recent years, we go to those we go to those appointments together. She's hearing what the doctor says to me, and I'm hearing what her doctors say to her, and then that's really that's really helped us both with health and our connection to each other.
Ben Derrick 32:36
It's a very interesting to me. I have not thought about it this way before, but some of the effects of operator syndrome rolling down and multiplying because there is separation between what ideally would be your closest trusted agent over these issues. But when you incorporate anger, depression and intimate intimacy disorder, we've got a pretty dangerous cocktail that's that's severing that relationship, building resentment. And the thing that I see most often is it's breaking the heart of both parties, but they just don't know how to bridge that gap after such a protracted career, right? Or even how to talk about it.
Speaker 2 33:16
Yeah, I think not, not to make light of it, but it's almost she probably needs to be there with you, because you're going to forget what was said by the time you get home and try to explain it, and then you're frustrated about it, and she's trying to get information that you just cannot recall. I don't know he said something's wrong with me. I have another appointment,
Speaker 1 33:39
right, right? Well, and that's true for, I mean, with the TBI, you're going to have those, you know, you're going to have those, those those those cognitive lapses, but, but that's also true for, again, for all of us, we get out of her we, you know, my wife and I get out of one of her medical appointments, or my medical appointments, and we compare notes, and we've each heard some different things, or interpret things a little differently. So
Ben Derrick 34:07
let's, let's make a shift here a little bit, because we always want to deliver where we can good news about this, as far as like treatments or mitigation strategies, because I think we've been done a good job explaining it, and that leads to the question, so what do we do now, now that we know more, now that we're talking more, what do we actually do for this population? Right?
Speaker 1 34:33
So I break it down into sort of three categories, and there's probably, probably, maybe even a fourth category. But one category is, what can be done different in training? How can we train differently to reduce the injuries? And I'm going to, I want to just say right off the mark, I don't know. I don't have an answer to there, and it's not that's not within my scope of expertise. Even to really suggest anything. So I won't, I'll leave that to other people to figure out. Could we do less breaching? Could we do safer, shorter fire rockets? You know that that that's outside my scope. The other two categories that I that I will speak to, one is lifestyle, things that we can all do on our own in terms of our habits, our daily habits, of how we live our lives. And then the second are treatments, formal medical treatments and strategies. So let's start with the lifestyle. And you guys, you know you're teaching this, so you you know all of this, this probably as well or better than I do, but I put lifestyle really into two categories. And if you do, if you really crush both of these two categories, you're hitting, you're hitting most of the targets. So one is, you could even break it down into one category. I'll go with two, because sleep is so important. So sleep hygiene is one getting your sleep hygiene dialed in, which it's a terrible word hygiene. I don't know why, who came up with that, or why we why we describe it that way, but the idea that there are do's and don'ts, there are protocols for good sleep and strategies for sleep that don't work at all. So you can learn the protocols for good sleep. Most of us aren't using them, but you can learn them, and you can, you can implement them in your life. Mean, some of it's really basic. Go to bed at the same time every night, get up at the same time in the morning, your bedroom should be a sanctuary. It should be dark, quiet, cool, morning, sunlight is good. I go sit on my porch in the morning, you know, just let the sun reach my face for about 10 minutes in the morning. Going to bed sober is a huge is a huge sleep benefit that we forget about. Alcohol fragments our sleep. It changes our cardiac functioning. It interrupt we our sleep gets broken up throughout the night due to probably a variety of things, but sleep is sleep is so critically important. If you do everything to prioritize your sleep, you're going to be well. You're doing a lot of things healthy for yourself. The other, the other lifestyle adaptation that I talk about is living an anti inflammatory lifestyle. So modern living has created or caused a phenomena of chronic, systemic inflammation throughout our bodies in ways that our ancestors didn't experience. You know, we all know that inflammation, if you cut yourself, that inflammation that goes to the site of that injury helps protect it's an immune response to help that injury heal and to prevent it from becoming infected. But when we have every cell in our body inflamed. That's a whole other problem, and this chronic inflammation contributes very directly to all of our chronic illnesses in society, cancer, obesity, depression, autoimmune disorders, cardiac problems. So anything you can do to reduce that inflammation is going you're going to be much better off. And of course, with the TBI, you have neuro inflammation. Your neurons are inflamed. So how do we reduce that inflammation? Well, we eat whole foods, which is really hard. That means forgoing or skipping, sweets, sodas, energy drinks, MREs,
Speaker 1 38:42
MREs, food snackers, bars, most snack foods, anything that's processed, frozen dinners, canned, most canned foods. So changing our diet is a huge part of it. And man, you like that's a challenge for Americans, but especially for people working shifts and working in austere environments, and especially, you know, without easy access to, you know, to quality home cooked food right then and there. What else other parts of an anti inflammatory lifestyle? So cutting out, you know, eating well, prioritizing good sleep, prioritizing quality exercise. And let's remember that the performance equation to good to good. Good performance certainly is hard work. You have to work hard in order to perform well, but you also have to, and you have to have the right mindset, but you also have to have the recovery piece of that in place. And I think too often we forget about recovery. We say, I'm going to work hard, and I'll have to never quit mindset, and that will make me a high performer forever. And. And it might make you a high performer for a while, but if you don't use, if you don't focus and prioritize the recovery as an as an important part of that equation, then then you're, you know, then you're hurting yourself.
Ben Derrick 40:12
So this is a tough sell of I'll be the guy to say it. What we're saying to operators through this podcast is, hey, you need to prioritize sleep and go to bed, even though you've got tons of pain going on and all these problems inside your marriage, potentially, you need to watch what you're putting into your body, and you need to make sure that you've got proper recovery going on between training, you know, we might as well be asking them to, you know, climb a ladder to the moon, right? That's what it sounds like. However you are mentioning things that are completely what I appreciate so much about your approach is that you're mentioning things that are completely within the soldiers control a large majority of the time, certainly when we're deployed or when we are training, those things we cannot control, but those things are not the majority of our year, right? I just kind of want to drop that into the conversation a little bit. First of all, to join the listener and say, Hey, these things are a little bit of a difficult ask. But then also to hold the listener accountable to say yes and no, correct,
Speaker 1 41:18
right? Yeah, and and I would, I would even put into the equation, or put into this discussion, that part of the challenge is the culture of, you know, of of performers, of folks we're talking about, what happens in the team room, what happens in the in the station house, what happens in The, you know, in the squad cars, what is normal might not be. What is is is optimal. And there is this, there is a reality. And part of the challenges is when, when, when high performers, when operators are away from home, what are they doing in their off hours, if there are off hours. And I think part of the, part of what we have to, have to really, you know, just, just be very blunt about, is there is this rock star lifestyle that is highly tempting, and it's part of the culture the team goes out for drinks. Yeah, we worked hard all night, but we're not going straight to bed, where we worked well into the evening. And now we worked hard all day, and we're going to we're going to play all night. You can't do that forever, and eventually it catches up with you, so putting those temptations of the rock star lifestyle aside and saying, I'm not going to be that guy. Is hard. It's really hard, and I don't have an easy solution for that, other than that gets into tapping into the culture of of teams, and how do they hold themselves accountable as teams?
Speaker 2 42:57
I would say that that's that's something that the guard does have because of the age of our guys. And Team sergeants are a little bit more seasoned. They've been. They came from active duty over and so when Ben and I walk into a team room and we we do an educational piece, we've been received very well. I would, I would say, wouldn't you, Ben, these team sergeants are saying, Hey, listen to these guys. I'm living this life right now. And if there's new guys sitting in the room, they're saying this, this guy they're talking about with all these symptoms, he is me. I am him. You don't want to be this guy. And and what they're saying makes sense. And so it's nice to hear you say the same things, which I know you do on every podcast and in your book and in your paper, but it's nice to have it said once again, so that guys understand it's it's real,
Unknown Speaker 43:50
right? It's real.
Ben Derrick 43:51
Culture is changing, I would say too. I mean, even up the chain of command, literally, the conversation is changing. You know, old guard, new guard. We've got to change this culture, because it is very disturbing, heartbreaking to see a soldier's career end prematurely because of these things that we're discussing today. They've dedicated a huge portion of their adult life to be able to do this job and for that to stop before it actually should have, you know, motivating soldiers to talk to other soldiers and say, Hey, you're going to be leaving a lot of your career on the table for the as you termed it, the rock star lifestyle. I love that because it is the choice. You know, most often though we convince ourselves that we can do both, we can handle both, and the most dangerous part of what you're pointing out today is that, yeah, you can for 15 years, 12 years, eight years depends. It depends on your physiology, how that blast wave exposure has affected you, or what you were exposed to on your time's down range. You know, there's lots of different things that come into play here. But what we can say is that, because the conversation is picked up, because we've normalized a lot of these things we're trying to mitigate, I feel that a crowd is gathering around these, these new things. We've just completed a study that is going to be peer reviewed on Brainwave Entrainment and using technology that uses particular hurts to get soldiers into a mindset where they're more prepared to sleep and to get deeper sleep. And we're seeing benefits from that. And as soon as one soldier started saying, I'm sleeping better than we had 15 more outside the door. How do I get to be a part? I
Unknown Speaker 45:40
like it? Yeah.
Speaker 2 45:41
I mean, the craziest thing was the guys come into my office, and as a medic, you know, they're far more comfortable telling me everything about their lives. Come in and say, Hey, man, I had this really weird thing. And I was like, Okay, what's going on? Man, I'm dreaming. And I was like, What do you mean? You're dreaming? And they're like, I haven't dreamed in years. And so then I start paying attention to it. I'm like, You know what? I haven't, haven't dreamed either, probably in I mean, if I have, I don't remember it. You know, 510, years and and through this, what would you call it? Ben protocol? Sure, I'm dreaming, dreaming again, and almost nightly, I'm going into not just deep sleep, but REM sleep. So yeah, these open things with the
Ben Derrick 46:30
Go ahead, yeah, pursuing these biohacking methodologies. But again, we would layer on top of that. You can do all the brainwave and train that you want, but if you're drunk, when you go to sleep, it's not going to achieve what it needs to achieve, right? So we're even layering on top of that, these wearables with the garments or the whoops to say, All right, let's actually look at how much is this bourbon actually hurting you when you compare it to unis that you don't have the bourbon, right? So I guess the point is we're just getting very curious about this these days, because all three of us here today believe that the soldier deserves that curiosity and deserves as much help as we can throw at them, because the job is going to be the job, right? I really appreciate doc you bringing up well, training is a place where we can kind of turn the dial here, looking at over pressure, looking at length of training, those sorts of things. But war is going to be war, right? And that is even becoming more psychological as we advance in technology with drones and those sorts of things in the political theaters. But there are places where we can make an impact. And just to say on Mike, I know we're running short on time today, unfortunately, but just to say on Mike, Doc, your way of thinking and your way of talking about this is doing a tremendous amount of good for the Special Forces community, especially the National Guardsmen. And so we certainly want to give you a thank you for that. On Mike,
Speaker 1 48:00
thank you. Well, that's, that's, that's really nice to hear. And it's been, it's really been, for me, this last decade has just been kind of an amazing, I would say, late career privilege. I don't know any other way to say it an honor and a privilege to be able to play a small role in helping, helping some folks who, who have done so much for, for our whole country. Could we take a few minutes more and just talk a little bit about some of the treatments? Please? Do we have
Unknown Speaker 48:33
absolutely yes, absolutely so.
Speaker 1 48:38
So we talked about the the lifestyle adaptations, but there's, there's things that the so called medical profession can and should be providing. And so let's, let's talk about that a little bit, and let's start with what, what they're doing currently. Mental health care right now, for pretty much all of us, is two, two pieces. It's psychotherapy and or psychiatric medications. And as I think we all can relate, it's really easy for a veteran or a soldier to end up with a, you know, a bucket of daily medications. My you know, here's here's an antidepressant to help you feel better. Here's something to help you wake up in the morning and concentrate during the day. Here's something to help you sleep. Here's here's a couple of things for the pain, oh, side effects. Well, here's some medication for the side effects, and here's some medication for the side effects, for the side effects. And it's not long before, and I don't mean this is not an exaggeration to say there are guys out there with 20 different prescription pills daily, and I don't know how any of those guys can function, and probably they're not some of the best psychiatrists and neurologists. I know part of what they do is they talk to an individual and see all those medications and they say, Okay, our goal is to cut it from 20. Me down to one or two, and to really reduce that, I am a fan. I am a believer that antidepressant medications can be helpful for many people with depression or anxiety, but they're not going to be. They're not going to treat a root cause, if that root cause is low testosterone or or many of the other lifestyle issues that we've injuries and impairments that we've talked about, so psychiatric medications, up to a limited point. Same with psychotherapy. I think psychotherapy is a very powerful tool. If you have a therapist who understands you, who knows what it means to have been in special forces, who understands something about the National Guard and what that means. And that's hard to find those people. It's really hard to find those therapists. The other piece of of of the struggle is to find a therapist who doesn't just talk about talking and talk talk, talk, without setting goals, without having a broader awareness of, hey, we are talking but there's other things we should be doing. We should be getting a sleep study. We should be getting your hormone panels checked. We should be sending you for Stella ganglion Block Therapy. And I think modern mental health care right now is just way too myopic. It's way too there's a tunnel vision there. Everybody is tightly staying in this lane. There's one treatment that I pretty much recommend to folks right off the bat, including spouses, and that's the stellate ganglion
Ben Derrick 51:32
Yeah. Say more about that? Yeah. So,
Speaker 1 51:35
so Stella ganglion block. It's very simple. It's an outpatient procedure, and it involves injecting a little medicine into the sympathetic nervous system. And what that does is it brings down the baseline level of anxiety, of physiological arousal. So what? So what that means is is individuals are less angry, they're more relaxed, they're more present with their family, and they sleep better because they're they're more relaxed. Stellic ganglion block is scary to some people because we access the sympathetic nervous system at the side of the neck. So it is. It does mean receiving a needle into the side of your neck right around c6 c7 but what I tell people is, we've been doing this treatment in medicine for 100 years. It's not a new treatment. What is new is our understanding that it actually treats not just headaches, which is what we've been using it for, but also the physiological arousal. So it takes that fight or flight response that's kind of floating at a high level for a lot of operators, and just brings it down. So it just alters the baseline. Another way of thinking about it is it resets the nervous system. It has virtually no lasting side effects, and it's so it's safe. It doesn't dope you up. It doesn't affect your ability to think clear. In fact, it improves your ability to think clear because it takes that physiological arousal off. It doesn't last forever, but if it lasts for six months, two months, 12 months, that relief is is profound in and of itself, but it also opens the door to establish different sleep patterns, different behavioral patterns. It opens the door to be having different conversations with your therapist, and if the husband and the wife do it together, you know, maybe instead of a couple's massage, a couple's SGB, and now you have to maybe, maybe there's conflict and tension in the home. Now you've brought the the arousal down for both, both halves of a marriage. That can be profoundly beneficial, and
Speaker 2 53:51
it gives time, some time, for coping mechanisms to be developed. Yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah. I
Speaker 1 53:58
think of it as you're essentially creating a window of opportunity, that's what it does. And you can go and you can repeat it, so if, when the medicine wears off, you could go back and have it done again. It's not, it's not really super expensive. It's about $1,500 for a procedure takes probably less than an hour. I mean, you're probably literally in and out of the clinic in an hour, and most psychologists don't even know of this treatment. They don't refer people to it. They don't talk about it. Psychiatrists generally don't know about it, don't refer people to it. So this is a powerful mental health treatment that is provided by people who aren't part of the mental health industry. They're neurologists, they're pain specialists or anesthesiologists.
Speaker 2 54:44
Well, what if somebody's listening and they have no idea how to even begin that process or where to go, and they're in our community, yeah. What do these guys do? Yellow Pages, that's it. First of all,
Ben Derrick 54:57
I'm not going to be able to spell it much less repeated.
Speaker 1 55:01
Okay, I'll spell it. It's really easy, and it's stellate, S, T, E, L, L, A, T, E, that's the first word stellate, and the second word is ganglion G, A N, G, l, i, o n, so it's a block. You're blocking the stellate ganglion. Stellate ganglion block.
Ben Derrick 55:20
Yeah, that's pretty maddening to think that this is something that a treatment that's so old that is being overlooked for most likely monetary reasons and pharmaceutical reasons to not, not to overstep my bounds. There's probably a lot of there, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 55:35
I mean, nobody gets rich off this is maybe the way to say it. Since nobody's getting rich. It's not being widely disseminated. I don't know of any VAs that provide it as a matter of course. I've heard a veteran say they ask for it at their vas, and some say, well, they just said they don't do it. A few have been able to get permission to get it done outside the VA. You know, so in community care. But it's not hard to find it. If you're in a reasonably small, you know, medium sized city is going to have practitioners that provide it.
Ben Derrick 56:08
Fascinating, yeah, yeah, because we do face that a lot. I mean, there are a lot of national guardsmen in what would be considered rural communities. You
Speaker 1 56:16
might have to take a road trip, you might have to, you might have to, you might have to go to a bigger city to find it.
Ben Derrick 56:23
Well, what you're saying here, though, is that, if I could just translate briefly, you've done a great job explaining it, but you give me opportunity or room to come out of that fight, fight or freeze, you know, or fawn, however you want to term it, way up there, we're able to just tone that down enough to have a reasonable conversation where, you know, tires aren't being shot out, right, or plates aren't being or remotes being thrown or, I think maybe even just as appropriate to discuss is we're able to come out of Our corners where we have isolated. You know, isolation spreads. If it's happening at home, it is eventually going to show up in career. And we do, unfortunately, see that, that there are operators at times that get in this pattern of isolation, and it's difficult, especially at the National Guard level, when you show up and it's time to get to work, there's that transition that you're mentioning, we could do an entire other episode on this of handling transitions between lives, basically, but showing up for work and having to kick into that gear of well, I can't just isolate this way of life that has helped me cope outside of my job. Can't overlap into my job because it's time to get work done, and these soldiers rally like a boss, but it does take a significant amount of effort. When you layer on top of that, they're spending a significant amount of effort every day just managing physical pain. One of the number one questions I ask to the soldiers, how much of your energy each day? What percentage of your energy each day goes towards managing physical pain. It's a huge amount. Yeah, so this is fascinating. This is some the first time I'm hearing of this. And I imagine most of our listening audience the first time they're hearing of it as well.
Speaker 1 58:12
I think stellate ganglion Block Therapy is part of the low hanging fruit that's just there to be grabbed if you're, if you if you have, if you think you have, you know, operator syndrome, if you're, if you have high anxiety, if you have insomnia related to being kind of just worked up and amped up, stellic ganglion block treatment. Is, is, is, is, low hanging fruit, because it's inexpensive, it's easy, it's quick, and it works right away.
Ben Derrick 58:44
That's awesome. So, and this leads me to ask another question, like, what other tricks do you have up your sleeve? Doc, this is great. You have more? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 58:51
Well, I'm a big fan of ketamine infusions, infusions done at a clinic, not, you know, not from your friend at the gym who has a bad, you know, gym bag full of goodies, but ketamine infusion done properly, very powerful. Some of us believe there's, this is a hypothesis, not a scientific fact, but, but I'm part of this hypothesis that doing stellate ganglion and ketamine together in the same week or the same month that they that there's a synergy there, that they actually amplify the benefits. And even better, we're starting to think there's a hypothesis with some signal data, and now they're doing some clinical trials actually test this hypothesis. We think that stellic ganglion individually, ketamine, their infusion individually, but especially the two together, that they not only treat the anxiety, but they they they stimulate neurogenerativity. So they literally are, are sort of sparking your our neurons to grow and heal and recover. So this
Ben Derrick 59:59
leads me. Ask a question, and this is a little bit on the nose. We've spun up a nonprofit for this population, specifically for the National Guard Green Berets, which is 19th and 20th group. My question for you is, as a person who has spent a significant amount of time studying this population, what do you believe the role is for nonprofits in this space? And you've alluded, I think, to a few already inside of this interview. So well,
Speaker 1 1:00:25
yeah, thank you for asking that question. I love it. I mean, I'm very cynical about what the VA is doing. I don't see the VA making an effort even to understand or get it. And then when you then when you think about who the VA serves and how they work, you know they're they're bureaucratic, political organization. Most veterans are not combatants. So and then when you go to special operations, you're talking about fewer than 1% I think so they are. The VA doesn't exist for you know, they're not set up to serve everybody. They're set up to serve the majority of people who they view as theirs. So I'm very cynical about the VAs willingness or ability to kind of turn that great big aircraft carrier around and provide quality care for operators or patents in general. So foundations play a role that the VA won't, won't play, doesn't play. Foundations serve a role that the DoD medicine won't and can't and doesn't fill. I think they also, I think foundations also can do things that just general health insurance doesn't do or can't do, won't do. At the moment, again, this fragmentation of care is is really problematic in medicine. And we're going to treat an operator by sending them to a specialist who only treats one condition and doesn't even think about the other conditions. That's a problem. I think that's a problem. So foundations can, can, can be part of the solution, partly by advocacy and education and raising awareness, but also partly by, I mean, there are foundations out there that all they do is they pay for cell like ganglion blocks, and they send individuals or couples to get those blocks. There are foundations that help warriors with hormones, and that's all they do. You call the warrior Health Foundation. They work on hormones. If you call the seal Future Foundation, if you're a seal, they will talk with you, and they will try to come up with a comprehensive menu of of treatment options for you that they will have a referral network for, and they will pay for. And I think there are now coast, coast, coast, coast to coast or coast by coast. There's other foundations now. There's the operator Syndrome Foundation. There are other foundations now that are trying to provide health care solutions. You've got groups like vets Inc that provide and heroic carts that provide psychedelic medicine for veterans and responders. You've got America's mighty warriors, which provides, all they do is they provide hyperbaric oxygen therapy for for special operators. So I think solutions are being searched for by the foundations. And if I were to choose one foundation, and full disclosure, I work closely with seal Future Foundation, they've developed what I think could and should be a model health program for other foundations there, if a seal calls their number. They're going to talk to another seal who has a, most of them having, you know, the 18 Delta training or or some kind of experiences as medics, combat medics. And they have a, we have a large we have a 15 member board of health advisors that cover wide range of medical specialties, and we backstop that that health program on a volunteer basis, but, but those, those seals, are getting help, and what, one of the things that we've seen is, over the last three years, the number of seals going in to their health program is like doubling each year. Wow. So word of mouth suggests that, holy cow, there are some solutions out here, and these guys have found a way to tap into it that
Ben Derrick 1:04:30
mirrors so closely what the the experience we've had. Greg Jordan, of like once aggregator you open up this resource that is outside of the government and outside of the insurance apparatus. When you open that up, then, you know, Jordan, I have seen that. It's like three guys, but then those three guys turn into 12 guys, and those 12 turned 36 Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 1:04:54
yeah,
Speaker 2 1:04:55
yeah. You get vetted. It's the vetting process,
Speaker 1 1:04:58
and that's how. How, that's how it should work. That's how it works everywhere, you know, I said to one guy early on we were talking about something. I said, Should we write this down? Should we, you know, should there be a, you know, should we formalize this anyway? And he just laughed. He said, Dude, I made, you know, overseas, I've made life and death decisions based on a handshake with some guy you know, just met who was first right,
Unknown Speaker 1:05:21
got
Speaker 1 1:05:22
it. Got it. You know, that's that is how it works. I mean, and who you're going to trust? You to trust your own, your own community of problem solvers. Are you going to trust? You know, a bureaucrat who's taking a paycheck from from some government agency.
Ben Derrick 1:05:38
You do see Matt at your base, having just met you a problem solver. Which leads me to ask this question, if you have just a few more minutes for us to stay together, what are the problems that are still bothering you? What's still keeping you awake at night as a problem solver over this population that perhaps isn't getting enough attention at the moment.
Speaker 1 1:06:01
Thank you for, thank you for granting me the title of a problem solver. That's that's about as that's about as good a that's about as good a compliment as I could get. And that's actually what I tell people who don't know operators. I said, forget all the stuff you see on TV, all the tough guy shit. These guys are highly intelligent, highly emotionally intelligent, and they're problem solvers. First and foremost, give them a problem set, and they're going to solve it. That's what most people don't understand about operators. Man, I think, I think the big problem right now is scale. The seal Future Foundation, I think in the last three years has helped about 3000 seals. And there's probably, I don't know, 12, 12,000 15,000 total, alive on the planet. So they're making a they're making a significant impact on a very small community. But what do we who's there's just, you know, there's, there's 10s of 1000s, there's hundreds of 1000s. Maybe we're even up in the millions when we talk about firefighters and and law enforcement and combatants in general, plus operators, plus people who support the operators, who who are, who are there by their side. Much of the time, I just we don't have to scale. I don't know how to I don't know how to scale what we can do. I know how to advise you on some things that would be helpful, but I don't know how to say here's how we can get this out to all 2 million or 3 million people that that need it now.
Ben Derrick 1:07:36
Absolutely and Jordan, I'd love for you to chime in on this, because this decentralization is one of our largest problems. As people who are trying to help the National Guard, just getting next to them is a problem, right?
Speaker 2 1:07:49
Yeah, we kind of talked about that earlier with us being in three states, and that's just second battalion that doesn't include 19th and 20th group collectively, I think, is across 14, maybe 15 states. And then if you do find those guys, they're living in all 50 states, if you identify the problem, how do I get that guy to the care? How do I get him there? Or how do I get the care to him? And then how do you pay for it? That's right, because, and how do I keep him, you know? And I'm not saying there's not a process in place to try to get certain things done, but I talk to guys over and over again that are saying, hey, I need to go to physical therapy. Well, the process to go to physical therapy is to go to your general practitioner and make sure you get a referral, and then you get to refer it out to a physical therapist and and are you going to get a physical therapist that understands your lifestyle and everything or and even if you do convince them of what you do for a living, do they know how to treat you as a high performance athlete, if you will? That's I mean. Guys don't say that openly, but that's yeah, that's what they are. They're tactical athletes. That's right. So it's it. This Logistics is a mess. It
Speaker 1 1:09:07
is. And even if we, even if we had the money, you know, even if, uh Elon Musk, you know, gave the money right up front to treat everybody, finding the finding the expert, you know, clinicians who could do that. I mean, we could train we could ramp up, but that'll take, you know, that takes time. That's right, and there's so much resistance. That's the other piece. There's a lot of resistance. The VA doesn't want to hear it. The admirals in generals, many of them don't want to hear it. DOD medicine. You know, I've talked with doctors, physicians, MDS, other care providers. They don't want, many of them don't want to hear it. They're like, Well, we already do what we do. We know what we're doing. We're good.
Ben Derrick 1:09:48
Yeah, we've definitely experienced that run into that it is, it is changing inside of our world. Thankfully, you know, the National Guard, in a lot of ways. Is pretty tight knit in its structure, as disparate as they are, as spread out as they are, their structure is pretty tight knit and almost familial, you know, because of the size of it. So I think we can certainly leverage that. And I think, you know, just to put this in the episode as well, there can be among foundations and nonprofits a sense of territorialism.
Unknown Speaker 1:10:24
Sometimes, there is, we're
Ben Derrick 1:10:25
doing what we're doing. You're doing what you're doing. And you know, for me, that's heartbreaking, because we're all trying to serve this population that is that is certainly underserved and nearly invisible in the American economy. Speaking as a civilian, my understanding, before I got involved with this conversation, was your special forces. I mean, you're top of the top right, and they're looking after you. They're handing you your food, they're handing you your workout plan. And it just, it doesn't work that way, humans
Unknown Speaker 1:10:54
before hardware. Yeah, right.
Ben Derrick 1:10:58
That's right. That's right. So it feels to me, You know what part of the question that we're asking here is, what is the future we we've identified it, or more correctly put, you have identified it in such this immaculate way that leads to these conversations over and over again. But what does the future look like? I think the future looks like the civilian population coming around the Special Forces community and saying, how do we leverage everything we know to help these people, even at a local level, how do we make sure that if a Green Beret comes into a clinic, that they go to the front of the line, they're not sitting in line with everyone else, they're going to the front of the line, and they're seeing quickly, because that's what's needed. And there's education going on inside the medical community. This is what a Special Forces person does so that you don't have to ask this question and burn an appointment that this soldier waited three months to get. Just being curious. Let's inform you, you know. So I feel, the longer that we're in this work, I feel that there are so many foundations. They're operating at a niche level. If we could start talking to one another more, we could probably resource a lot more people a lot faster.
Speaker 1 1:12:08
Yeah, I think that. I think there would be more value to having more collaboration and cross exchange, cross exchange of information within foundations. The scale of the problem is, is a huge part of the challenge. But so is the resistance of the systems and of the individual, even medicine, you know, I have, I have, you know, I've encountered quite a bit of resistance from from many places of organized medicine. But also, I also want to go back, I just, I want to give it just a shout out. There are a lot of clinicians out there, a lot of medical scientists who I know, who work with me, who I work with them. And so it isn't just me. There are. There are many others out there, and I won't, I won't give a list of names, but there are, there are really good people out there doing really good, good work. If we, if we just look at medicine in general, what does it take to bring change a paradigm, change in medicine? It takes 10 to 15 to 20 years.
Ben Derrick 1:13:05
Oh, tell me better news.
Speaker 1 1:13:07
I know. Well, that's the point. Is, we can't wait. We have, we have families that are being destroyed now. We have, we have men and women dying, dying by suicide every day. And you know, we don't have, we don't have time to wait. And this is something I've had people. I've had some people from established medicine and including a stat and as well as established flag officers, who have said to me, Well, you guys are getting way ahead of the research. Why don't you, you know, stop and spend 10 more years studying this before you start trying to talk about solutions. It's like, no, no, sir. We don't have we can't wait.
Speaker 2 1:13:44
Ben has a saying for that, building the airplane in the air. You
Ben Derrick 1:13:47
got two options, build this plane or crash to the ground, right? That's it. I
Speaker 1 1:13:52
was gonna say it's out of necessity. Yeah, that's right. We have to do it this way, exactly.
Ben Derrick 1:13:56
Well, we, we consider you a forerunner, sir and a pioneer, and we are deeply grateful for the time you spent discussing this with us today. I would imagine that the soldier and family members who are listening would love to connect with you more, to learn more about your work. What is the best way to do that? Obviously, picking up the book would be a great start.
Speaker 1 1:14:19
I would say the paper, the operator syndrome, medical paper, which published in a peer review medical journal, easy to find. You can just Google it and download it off the internet, PDF. It's easy to read. It's not complicated. What I often say to people is, read this together, read it as a couple. Go through it with a highlighter, mark up the peak, the parts of it that resonate for you, and then take that to your primary care. Doc, train up your primary care. Doc, a little bit, educate them. Show them that page, show them the paper with your markings on it, your your highlighter things, and use that as a as a way of saying. Doc, okay, I need to get the I need to get the blood tests. I need to get the sleep study. Can I get a referral to Stella ganglion block treatment, and whatever else is going to be needed out of that? So that's a piece of it. Yeah, I would encourage people to read the book. There's a lot of podcasts out there in terms of reaching me personally, that's I don't I no longer have capacity, really, to respond to everybody that reaches out to me. Understandable. I am chronically, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of emails, you know, behind so, you know, I apologize. I just can't, I just can't speak to or meet with everybody that that requests. And I think for now we have, we, you, you guys have to be the solution for your communities and help supporting and do what I can, as best I can, to play a support role there, but I don't think it's going to come from the government. I don't think anybody's coming to save you. It's got to come from within. Yeah,
Ben Derrick 1:15:57
well, we'll stop there for today again. Doc, thanks so much for your time. It's been an incredibly valuable conversation.
Speaker 1 1:16:04
Thank you for having me, and I'll be happy to come back anytime.
Ben Derrick 1:16:08
We'll take you up on it. Thanks again. Thanks, doc, bye, guys, thank you for tuning in to the soldier fund podcast. If you're inspired by the stories of these elite citizen warriors and want to support their mission. Visit us at the soldier fund.org your contributions help us to continue to back the Special Forces soldiers of the National Guard as they fight around the world until next time, stay committed to stand with those who serve.