Before I ever got in a life and death situation, I had already made the decision what I was
going to do when confronted with it.
You have to realize the stakes.
For me, the stakes were not just my life and my family's life, but all the men to the left
and to the right of me.
So knowing that they're dependent on me to do my job and to do that, that gets them back
to their home and allows them to accomplish the mission was all the purpose that I needed
to do that.
If there is an ID down the road, get out of my way, it's time to go to work.
That's my job.
I'm going to eliminate that, and we're going to keep moving.
I'm not going to allow that to be the factor that definitely these guys want.
Protect those men, mend their wounds, bring them back, pull them healthy to their families
and their friends and their team.
Yeah, Special Forces Marine Beret.
My specialty was being an engineer, which had me basically dealing with explosives most
of the time when we were deployed.
I was a specialist in explosives, so any type of entry that we needed to get into a place
that was denied for whatever reason, be it a door or whatever, I was the guy who would
place those charges to get us in those denied entry spots.
Well, at first I had no idea I was having brain issues.
Again, I was an elite performer capable of making life and death decisions and life and
death situations.
Going from being an elite performer, one day I woke up after my last deployment.
I was on 13 different medications.
I was alcoholic.
My wife was nine months pregnant, and who requested me for the day was if I couldn't
drink so much in case she went into labor, so she didn't have to drive herself to the
hospital.
I remember being in the hospital at my son's bedside, and it took the last lot that I ever
took.
I had an airplane whiskey, and I said to myself, you know, this is going to go one of two ways.
I'll continue on this path, and it's going to kill me, and it's going to ruin my family.
It's going to ruin everything I love, or I can make the decision to quit blaming my
circumstance and decide to act.
You know, I always come to the mindset of you don't like something to fix it, and so
at that point I said, you know what, I'm not going to accept this anymore, and we're going
to go out and we're going to find an answer.
And we were able to, and once I did that, and I was able to help myself, I said, my
God, how many people are in the same situation, and they don't know what to do?
You know what I mean?
And I think back to what my family was put through, and the solitary confinement sentence
that just didn't have to be, and I don't want another son going into his father's bedroom
to find his brain spotted all over the wall.
That's enough.
We can stop that, and we are stopping it.
Well, PTSD, I think it appears to me that people have had pure psychological trauma with
no physical component.
That's PTSD.
But the minute you incorporate one form or another of a physical trauma, that physical
trauma creates the same type of symptoms as PTSD does.
What we've been seeing when we start comparing from Vietnam on up to what's going on in
Afghanistan and Iraq and wherever in the world is that we're wearing body armor, so
it's protecting their body from the impact of trauma, but the head's still exposed.
Let's do linear first.
And linear is like being in a car accident at 10, 20 miles an hour.
You're driving and you rear end someone or someone rear ends you.
What happens is you have to remember that the brain's floating in water.
Cerebral spinal fluid.
So it's floating.
And this is the frontal lobe.
This is the frontal lobe.
And right under here, the skull has a ridge.
And so when it's thrown forward, the ridge hits this part of the brain, the frontal, and
then it goes back and hits the back of the brain.
So you get what they call coup, counter coup injury.
So you get the frontal and the occipital lobe, occipital for vision, frontal lobe for
sequential activities, for choosing the right things by being correct, socially correct,
personally correct, environmentally correct, and mood, stability of mood.
The pituitary is right here.
It's that little bean shaped thing.
And the pituitary has what, nine hormones in it.
And those nine hormones go to different organs, different glands throughout the body to turn
them on or to slow down.
But higher up in the hypothalamus is the control mechanism.
It's like a sensor that moment to moment, second to second, nanosecond to nanosecond
is asking the question, are the hormone levels that are circulating in the blood adequate
for right now?
And if they're adequate, it does nothing.
But if it's low, it increases the pituitary's release of stimulating hormones to tell the
testicles through something called luteinizing hormone LH, increased production of testosterone
or to the ovaries, increased testosterone estrogen.
So this is all based upon what we call homeostasis, a balance.
And as long as the receptor or the sensor is working and the pituitary is working and the glands
on the periphery are working, we'll always have optimal amounts of hormones.
You damage any one of them.
You damage the peripheral organ like someone who develops trauma to the testicle and loses
the testicle or has a cancer of the thyroid and loses the thyroid.
You need to replace those hormones.
And in blast trauma or head trauma or any kind of trauma whatsoever, you can lose the brain's
homeostasis or regulatory mechanism and you lose that hormone.
What the literature is full of is with certain hormone deficiencies like testosterone, a hot
topic, testosterone, if it's low can cause what we call dysthymia, which is like melancholy
or feeling blue or a very mild form of depression.
And as the testosterone deficiency becomes more and more and possibly an addition of
another hormone deficiency, you get full blown out depression with suicide ideation.
And it's in the literature right now that hormone deficiency and suicide are connected.
So the process how we do this when you're in the program is after you've been cleared
for funding, step one is to get your blood drawn.
So what we do is we make preparations with the lab that's closest to your geographical
location.
So you'll take the blood kit to the lab.
They'll draw your blood just like this.
Then the lab will send it to access labs, which is in Jupiter, Florida.
They then process these blood work and get the results.
They send those results to Dr. Gordon's office here at Millennium Health Centers.
Dr. Gordon will then write your detailed report and send it to you via FedEx as well as an
email.
And then we'll make considerations and planning to have Dr. Gordon Skype with you to go over
what the results have shown.
And through the Skype consultation, you guys will both come to an understanding and an
agreement of what your protocol should be.
And then after that, Dr. Gordon will send us the invoice.
We'll fund it.
And your protocols will be shipped out, if not that day, the next day.
So we brought world-class care to veterans anywhere without having to actually physically
go to a doctor's office.
And this is the process.
So when we get the lab results in, we put them into a template report format.
And based upon what the results are, we'll start a protocol.
And that is a package of treatment.
And the two limbs that we look at is, number one, you need to clear out the inflammation.
If you don't fix the inflammation, the brain will continue to be damaged.
So we use anti-inflammatory products.
And the anti-inflammatory products we use are all natural.
And once we have established a composite of anti-inflammatories, then we look at the
hormonal aspect.
And the hormones, based upon what they're deficient in, is what we'll replace them with.
With the supplementation, it's strictly about taking care of the inflammation and the free
radical damage.
That can lower the brain's ability.
With the testosterone, we try to give physiological dosing so that we don't shut off their own
system.
I think in the past six years, we found through the VA that there was a generic disregard for
the well-being of those people who put their lives out on the front line for us.
And, you know, fortunately, some headway has been made.
Is it to the level that I'd like to see it?
Of course not, because I'm sitting on a potential benefit to the veterans so they can get back
into real life instead of this artificial, you know, mystical world that's led by being
on a handful of drugs where they can get off the drugs and they can live a more productive
life, enjoying life, laughing, being with the family, wanting to be with the family instead
of in isolation, you know, in the bathroom with the windows shut and the door locked
and the lights off, just sitting there on the toilet, you know, not doing anything, but
just sitting there because you felt more sick.
So 10 years from now, I'd like to say that there are facilities throughout the United
States that are capable and able of delivering the protocols to not only to the veterans
but to civilians and have their quality of life goes from no quality of life to having
quality of life, whatever that is for the individual.
That's the key.
These effects, the silent effects of war have a damning effect on the family, on marriages
and everything else.
And we can help to turn the course on that.
And so every day that's a reminder to me to live through those experiences to say this
is what we're doing, this is what we're effecting, this is what we're saving, you know, and that's
the driving factor behind the War Rangers Foundation.
