transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hi everyone, Dhru Purohit here. A couple of months ago, I got a text message from one of my podcast listeners who's become a little bit of a friend, Glenn Muir. And Glenn said, there's a guy that I met recently, a doctor doing some groundbreaking stuff, and his work has made such an impact in my little circle that I'm connected to. You gotta have him on your podcast. And I'm excited to tell you a little bit about who this guest is. But first, when we think about mental trauma, we typically think that it lives inside the mind and it's there forever. Something that we relive through our thoughts over and over again. But what if that's not the full story? Today's guest presents a different theory. What if mental trauma is actually a physical injury to the body, one we could potentially treat with a specific tool and technique? Dr. Eugene Lipov is an anesthesiologist, physician, and a TEDx speaker who's one of the leading voices challenging how we think about trauma. He is a pioneer behind a controversial treatment called the Stellate Ganglion Block, which involves a targeted injection to a bundle of nerves in the neck to help reset the body's stress response. That's what we're going to be talking about today and how this shot works and how we came up with it. While many see this approach as a breakthrough, it's also sparked some significant debate. We talk about that debate in the podcast today with Dr. Eugene, and we talk about the ongoing research, the growing interest from many parts of the medical community and especially many members of the military and veteran community as well, who have found this shot to be a game changer. What I know is this. So many people I know are living with anxiety and trauma that's debilitating. The idea that there are tools that are out there that can build on the existing tools to help them live with a little bit more freedom is really exciting, which is why we wanted to do today's episode. If you or anyone you know has been impacted by trauma, you're going to want to tune in. We talk about what trauma really is, the impact on your life, and this controversial yet potentially life-changing therapy. All right, stay tuned. Eugene, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Speaker 2:
[02:06] Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:
[02:07] You're here today because you're challenging one of the deepest assumptions in modern medicine, which is that trauma isn't something that we just cope with, isn't something that just happens to us. Your proposal is that trauma is a physical injury, which actually has a location in the body. And just like a broken bone, that wound at that location can be fixed. Now, if what you're saying is true, and we're going to unpack it in today's podcast, it doesn't just change treatment, it changes how we understand human suffering. Give us the big picture on this idea.

Speaker 2:
[02:56] If I may, let's define trauma first of all. We're not talking about broken leg. We're talking about mental trauma, like PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. So to me, all psychiatric conditions or all psychological dysfunction is biologic. That's how I see it. If it's biologic, you should be able to diagnose it. One, and treat it biologically. The closest analogy I can make, which kind of makes sense, I think, think of a computer. So it's malfunctioning. So if you have a chip malfunction, you can put all the software you want to fix it, it won't work. So talk therapy is not going to work particularly well if you're hyped up. If you fix the chip, now the patches will work. So part of what I was able to come up with is how to fix the chip. The chip in this scenario is the brain. So if the brain is a problem, fix the brain and then talk to the person.

Speaker 1:
[03:55] Yeah. Let's take that analogy a little bit further.

Speaker 2:
[03:58] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[03:58] Before we go into your own story and where this came from and how this process works. So if the human body, just using the computer analogy, is there and you have a chip that has been malfunctioning, if that chip is malfunctioning, then all the improvements you try to make or the software updates, they don't take place in some conditions if the chip is off. Translate that to something like somebody who's dealing with a really traumatic experience from the past. What is the chip inside of their body?

Speaker 2:
[04:31] So if I may, I think what you're asking is, what's PTSD? And we'll talk about the term later. But let's say PTSD. So let me just walk you through the biology of it. So an event happens, be it military operation, being a sexual attack, being whatever, it doesn't matter what it is, it's irrelevant. Something bad happens, two things happen. Number one, your body produces something called norepinephrine. Norepinephrine is a brother of adrenaline. So if you're standing in front of the bus, it almost hits you. You feel hyped up, you're hypervigilant, you want to make sure the bus doesn't hit you. But if it's not bad enough, meaning you almost got hit but it wasn't that big of a deal, the next day you're okay, everything's gone. Second thing that happens, if the event is bad enough, let's say military trauma or other type of trauma or continuous bullying, something like that, the body produces something called NGF, nerve growth factor, that's produced in the brain and it's carried from the brain to the Stellate Ganglion, which is an axis between fight or flight nerves in the chest and the brain.

Speaker 1:
[05:39] A cluster of nerves.

Speaker 2:
[05:41] Cluster of nerves. So once NGF hits this ganglia called Stellate Ganglion, the nerves that go from the Stellate Ganglion to the brain, called sympathetic nerves, fight or flight nerves, start to sprout. Technical term. Basically, it looks like extra leaves. So, let's say normally it's four nerves, and now after this happened, NGF increased, we have now eight nerves. Each nerve reduces norepinephrine. So, but it stays like that. It could last like 50, 60, 100 years. As long as the NGF leaves in the ganglion, this extra nerves are there. Too much norepinephrine gives you all the symptoms of PTSD. Can't sleep, hypervigilance, sexual dysfunction, anxiety, all of that feeling of doom. That's all too much norepinephrine. In fact, there was a study done, if you take the fluid around the brain called CSF, cerebral spinal fluid, norepinephrine level is twice as high in the fluid, and the person has PTSD as opposed to somebody who doesn't. So, that state can persist for a very long time. But too much norepinephrine basically. But one of the questions people ask me, why can't I just snap out of PTSD? One day I get up, like, no PTSD for me. Well, you can because your brain has been rewired. So the chip is broken.

Speaker 1:
[07:12] Yeah, an actual physical rewiring. Correct.

Speaker 2:
[07:15] And that has been shown in the RAD experiment. It actually happened. It's not like this is just my guess. So the next level, once you understand that, too much norepinephrine in the brain activates amygdala. Amygdala is a part of the brain. It looks like almond. It's kind of in the middle of the brain. I can't show you what it is. And as long as that's active or overactive, all the symptoms I described is going to continue. What's interesting is if you have a brain scan using functional MRI or advanced scanners like a PET scan, you can actually see the overactivation of the amygdala. So when people tell me PTSD is an invisible wound, I heard that term in 2025. People are still using it. I think that's crazy. You have the wrong scanner, you won't see it. You got the right scanner, you can actually see PTSD. So it's biologic, it's real, it exists. So when people are not crazy, it's just a biological effect of severe trauma. That's all it is. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[08:16] So just to make sure that our audience is with us, right? The core idea here, which you also talk about in your new book, we have a link in the show notes, The God Shot, very strong title. We'll talk about the background. We'll talk about the background. It's one of the questions we get into.

Speaker 2:
[08:31] You know, spoiler alert, I'm not God.

Speaker 1:
[08:33] I'll tell that right now. So to set the foundation of what we're talking about today, traditional medicine, traditional psychiatry looks at trauma as a little bit more abstract. It's a real thing, but it can be invisible inside of the body in terms of where it exists. And a lot of people think of it that way, and they think of it as something that we just cope with. We try to do our best using the tools that are available in the current toolbox.

Speaker 2:
[09:03] To lifestyle.

Speaker 1:
[09:03] Lifestyle. And your vision and your theory and your proposal here today that you're putting out in your clinical experience through all these patients that you've worked with is that trauma is a physical injury which actually has a location. And just like a broken bone, that wound can be fixed. And you talked about it kind of quickly, but we'll just touch on it to make sure that everybody's on the same page. It's the stellate ganglion, that cluster of nerves that are there, that's part of this. Again, just reducing this down to make sure the basics are there. It's a lot deeper. This connection between the brain and the chemicals that are being produced, this cluster of nerves and the amygdala have this relationship. When this cluster of nerves sprouts, so to speak, and stays on forever, you are stuck in this loop of trauma that you can't shake out because physically, your body has actually changed from this trauma. Am I understanding that correctly?

Speaker 2:
[10:03] If I may, I'd like to add one more thing. So, fight and flight system, sympathetic nervous system, starts in the brain, goes down the spinal cord, comes out in the chest, thoracic spine, and goes up to stellate ganglion. Stellate ganglion is a nexus between fight and flight nerves and the brain. So, once stellate ganglion is activated by those NGF things we were talking about, there's actual rewiring of the brain. There's an increased number of fight and flight nerves, sympathetic nerves. That's the key. That is the whole key to this, to understand what trauma really does to the brain.

Speaker 1:
[10:45] There's a lot there about trauma before we go into it and how it can actually be passed down biologically, even in addition to the experiences and life experiences that somebody had. You've had many yourself. We'll get into that in your story. I think it's important for people to understand that this is something that you accidentally came upon based on an existing treatment for women who are going through menopause. Can we set that backstory that's there?

Speaker 2:
[11:17] You want me to tell you how it all happened? Yeah, sure. So I had a patient who was about, I think, 50 and she had severe half-flesh. She also had neck pain. I took care of her neck pain. So she said, I also have half-flesh. I said, I don't do half-flesh. That's not my thing. I sent her to my brother, who is a really brilliant physician. He tried to treat the half-flesh as using conventional methods, whatever those were. Everything failed. So he said, you do this procedure for hand sweats. And then this is the whole body is sweating. So the block should work for that. I was like, no, it won't work. He goes, how do you know? Nobody's done it. He says, yeah, try it. I did it and poof, half-flesh is what the way. She was able to sleep through the night first time in the last 15 years. She had severe half-flesh. That's kind of how it started. Then I kept treating it and I kept getting really good results. Then Chicago Tribune came by to interview me about it. I thought it would be another lovely discussion. It was a hit piece and the way they did it, like the first line, I knew I was in trouble when I read the slide. It said, Bianca Kennedy, this beautiful breast cancer survivor, 34 years old, was so desperate to get rid of half-fleshes, she let Dr. Lipov plunge a three-inch needle in her neck. It went downhill from there. I went to Northwestern when I went to medical school and they interviewed chief of gynecology. And he said, that's totally terrible, shouldn't do it, that's bad. Yes, it's working, but you don't know how it works with garbage. And it got worse. So the main concern was that it was working, but they said, you don't know how it works. So go away. So I got a little upset by that. I read about 3000 articles and I read articles in Finland where they were trying to treat hand sweats by putting a clip in the chest here, fight or flight nerves we were talking about. They found hand sweats went away and PTSD went away and anxiety went away. So I read that, I was like, why would that possibly happen? Because I don't understand that. So then I looked at the anatomy and it turns out those nerves in the chest go up to the neck and up to the brain. Once I figured that out, I called up my brother. He said, send me a PTSD patient and we'll treat him. We did that and he was on the way to be admitted to the psychiatric ward. His PTSD went away and here we sit today talking about it. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[13:48] And so just unpack a little bit of that. Your background is in anesthesiology, right? And so when you talk about treating it and we're talking about these nerve clusters, explain to our audience of what did that look like? You know, you've mentioned her neck. You've mentioned treating it, but just paint a picture.

Speaker 2:
[14:07] How is it done, actually?

Speaker 1:
[14:08] Yeah. Paint a picture since we're just in the beginning part of this conversation.

Speaker 2:
[14:11] Well, I started as an anesthesia. Well, first I started trauma surgeon. Then my mother took her life in my first year. So I left that. I went to anesthesia. Then I get pain medicine. So the pain medicine, our job is to numb up various nerves, to take care of pain and treat pain conditions, basically. So Stellate Ganglion Block, the first one I did, so basically numbing up the cluster we were talking about. The first one I did was 1987. So the way it works physically is we have a patient lying on a table, clean out the neck, numb up the skin. Now we use ultrasound, which is better than what we used to use before. And then we put a needle, I don't plunge any needles, pretty short amount of distance. What you need to do is go through the skin and numb up the nerves in the neck under ultrasound guidance. We put in some local anesthetic, just like going to a dentist, except we're numbing up this particular cluster of nerves. And there's no other drugs but the local anesthetic in that. That's how it works.

Speaker 1:
[15:14] So people are getting a shot in their neck under anesthesia using ultrasound to guide. And that procedure is called the SGB. It's the block for that nerve clusters that are there. And when that block happens, is it correct for us to understand that you see that as putting healing or putting a cast almost around a broken bone? What's a physical analogy that you would describe it as?

Speaker 2:
[15:43] The part of it that is, when I talk about broken bone analogy is like you can diagnose a broken bone, take an X, right? And you can put a cast on and fix it. So it's a biological, physical fixing it. The close analogy is a computer reboot. When your computer is not working right, what you first thing you do is control, I'll delete, you're rebooting it. So if you can turn over the computer, when it comes back, it works better. This is the same thing. When I put it to sleep for eight hours, and we could talk about what actually happens biologically, but it resets it to pre-traumatic state. So block that lasts eight hours, then the static lasts eight hours. Longest outlier is 17 years. So it can last much longer.

Speaker 1:
[16:26] So when it's reset, is that sprouting process now condensing? Explain physiologically what's happening with those clusters that's part of that reset.

Speaker 2:
[16:40] You already have the background, so you understand that. We are at the phase where somebody has PTSD. So instead of four nerves, now you got eight. Each one of those produce norepinephrine. So when I do the block, when we now mob the nerves in the neck, two things happen. Number one, norepinephrine drops like a rock. So a lot of times people go, oh my God, I could take a first deep breath in the last 20 years. It was always holding my chest, or I feel a feeling of doom is going. We talk about five, ten minutes after the procedure. The second thing that happens, it's really a very complicated mechanism which I won't bore you with. It reduces NGF. NGF is required to maintain those extra nerves that's in the brain. So when you take the NGF away, something called pruning occurs. You know, somebody, a scientist came up with those terms, this must be the Gardner, right? So you go from eight back to four. So now a block that lasts again eight hours, since you're actually rewiring the brain to what it should be, not as much fighting for light nerves can function much better.

Speaker 1:
[17:49] Talk to us about who seeks this procedure out. As we're starting to set the landscape for our audience and they're creating a mind map of, okay, I'm understanding a little bit of the background. I'm understanding what's happening in this procedure. I'm understanding what physiologically is going on inside the body. Connect the dots. You know, we talked about PTSD. Who are some of the people that you've treated? What are they dealing with? We spend so much time optimizing things like workouts, our diet or our supplements. But what about the clothes we wear, the sheets that we sleep in, the things that touch our body all day and all night? Those little details shape your nervous system more than you realize. That's what I appreciate about Cozy Earth. They focus on comfort in the details. Their bamboo pajamas made from viscose from bamboo are incredibly soft, lightweight and temperature regulating. My wife genuinely looks forward to putting them on at night. It's one of those small rituals that's a signal to your body that hey, we're winding down now and it's all good. When it comes to their other products, their comforters are breathable and cloud-like without feeling heavy or overheating. And even their essential socks are thoughtful, cushioned and designed to carry you from your first step in the morning to your last step at night. It's everyday comfort but built with real intention. And Cozy Earth stands behind everything they make. You get a 100 night sleep trial and a 10 year warranty. Returns are super easy but once you feel that level of comfort, you probably won't want to send anything back. Discover how care in everyday detail transforms simple routines into moments of true comfort and ease. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use my own personal code, Drup, as in Dhru Purohit, D-H-R-U-P, for up to 20% off. And if you get a post purchase survey, please mention you heard about Cozy Earth right here. It really helps support this show. That's cozyearth.com with the code D-H-R-U-P, my own personal code to save 20% off today. You spend time thinking about what goes in your food. Grass-fed meat, organic produce, high-quality oils. But there's another question worth asking. What are you cooking it in? Because most non-stick cookware still contains PFA's, these so-called forever chemicals. And studies have found that these coatings can leach into food. And one study even showed that a single scratch on a non-stick pan can release thousands, yes, thousands of plastic particles. That's one of the reasons I upgraded my kitchen to Our Place. The AlwaysPan 2.0 by Our Place lives up to the hype. Eggs glide out effortlessly, it heats evenly, and cleanup is super easy. And their Titanium Pro Cookware is the first zero-coating non-stick made from pure titanium for serious durability. I use it for all sorts of things, like stir-frying veggies or making a one-pan chicken or a salmon dish for dinner. And right now is actually the best time to try it if you're looking to upgrade your cookware. It's multifunctional, it saves space, and it actually makes you want to cook more at home. Stop cooking with toxic cookware and upgrade to Our Place today. Right now, Our Place is offering my community 10% off site-wide. Just go to fromourplace.com/drew and use the code Drew at checkout. That's from F-R-O-M Our Place, ourplace.com/d-h-r-u. And use the code Drew, D-H-R-U at checkout for 10% off site-wide. If you care about what goes on your plate, it's time to care about what's under it.

Speaker 2:
[21:26] Let's do several questions. So there is symptoms and the population that have them, right? So let's start with the symptoms. And they're all the same. So to me, it doesn't matter where the trauma came from. Bullying, military action, rape is the same. The effect on the brain is the same. So it doesn't really matter. The symptoms of PTSD are pretty universal, no matter what the cause of the trauma was. So most people think of PTSD as a military related issue. Turns out, that's not true. Most of the people who have PTSD are women who are abused by factors of magnitude. So we treat men, women, children, we go as young as eight years of age. There's no difference. If somebody has a trauma and they have symptoms of PTSD, finding a flight nervous system is overactive, we can reset it.

Speaker 1:
[22:21] You've worked with veterans, special forces, Canadian military members, United States military members, in addition to lay population of people that come and seek you out. I had a podcast listener, Glenn, who was the person that told me about your work and sent me some of the clips that were there. And I spoke to a few people whose family members have gotten the treatment to understand the difference that it made in their life. You've worked with people who were literally on the verge of telling you that they're about to commit suicide. I think it actually would be good to tell at least one of these stories right now. There's a very notable story about a sniper from the military who sought you out and begged you for this treatment. Can you talk about that story?

Speaker 2:
[23:06] Yeah, it was a pretty stressful story for me. So this gentleman was a sniper. I took care of his back. So he came back a year later. And I said, is your back hurting? He said, no, my back is great, but I'm suicidal. I'm going to take my life unless you fix me. I was like, his wife and he both come in. They're both crying. He was a sniper for the Marines. And I said, you should be in the hospital. And I still do not encourage people to do that to me. That was really problematic at many fronts. Somebody who was like actively suicidal, we prefer not to take care of that group because we need to calm people down and then we treat them. Was that preface. So he came in, he said, I'm suicidal. So I said, sorry, I can't take care of you. He said, well, too bad. You have to take care of me. So he kind of put me in an interesting position. Anyway, so I took him to the operating room. I did the procedure on him and he goes, I'm still thinking about doing the same thing. So this was like, so 40 minutes later, I did the second part of the procedure. So we did two level of procedures called DSR, Dual Resympathetic Reset. So we take him back to the operating room. I did the procedure on him. On the way out, five minutes later, he said, Doc, I feel great. I don't feel suicidal. Give me a high five. The following five years, he did great. Because it happens like that. The thing that's great about this procedure, the compliance is very high. Meaning if you're on, if you're with me, I'm going to do a procedure, your symptoms goes away about 80% of the time, rapidly. You don't have to keep taking the pills or wait for six months. When you're suicidal, you don't have that time of interest. Because people are miserable. In fact, there's a lot of papers written that suicide is associated with inflammation of the brain. So your brain is on fire, you feel terrible, you need to do something now. You don't have time to talk about or think about it.

Speaker 1:
[25:20] How long does that fix last for? You've mentioned a couple of things right now, that it works in your clinical experience and your team's clinical experience, that it works typically in 80% of the people. So it doesn't work for everybody. We'll get back to that. How long does this relief of the trauma last?

Speaker 2:
[25:42] It's variable. We don't know. Everybody's different. So the first military man we treated, we treated him 17 years ago. We did a procedure, then he's still doing great. It's pretty cool. It depends on three things. It depends on genetics. It depends what you do after the procedure. It depends what happens to you. For example, we took care of a Chicago policeman. He was doing great for a year. And then he was in the street and he had to kill somebody in the line of duty. He came back to see me. Right. So it depends.

Speaker 1:
[26:15] So an additional trauma reactivated?

Speaker 2:
[26:18] You can't. Doesn't always. A number of our special forces guys went back to military action and they were okay.

Speaker 1:
[26:24] In the case of the Chicago police officer, did he get the treatment again?

Speaker 2:
[26:29] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[26:29] And he got the relief again? Yes. Let's go into a little bit of the backstory, your personal story, which you write about in your book. You have known trauma yourself, starting from your early years in life.

Speaker 2:
[26:44] Before I was born.

Speaker 1:
[26:45] Before you were even born. Can you talk about that and how this touches on the themes of how trauma can sometimes even be passed down biologically and sort of these early life experiences that can shape people?

Speaker 2:
[26:57] Anyway, so the whole concept that DNA can change was experience. Not mutation of DNA, but you can turn the genes on and you can turn them off. It's a fascinating concept. It's called epigenetics transmission. So when somebody has trauma, you can transmit PTSD to three generations. That's been shown actually a number of times now. What's interesting is the gene that you can measure controls NGF. We're talking about NGF that makes things grow. That's the gene. You can actually track it down. There was a paper on that in 2017 from Walter Pete Hospital. I think that's just fascinating. So my particular story is my grandfather was living in Ukraine and there was horrible things happened. He gave those genes to my father, who was involved in World War II. He will enter the 17 years old dropping bombs on German ships. Out of 10,000 people in his squadron, 100 made it home. So that trauma got exacerbated. My mother was alive during the war, but she was not involved in military action. So when he came back from the war, he was not a charming man, unfortunately. He was not that easy to deal with. Dhru Purohit, I understand, but he was interesting later. So he induced PTSD in my mother. It's called secondary PTSD. Because if you have like a strange relationship or it's always intense, all of that, it leads to brain changes and DNA changes in the spouse and the children. I'm one of those children. So eventually my mother took her life with PTSD. There you go. I mean, that kind of tells you, where you can actually know what gene it is. I find that fascinating.

Speaker 1:
[28:50] If people have like their 23andMe data, do you think that you can upload it to AI and see if you have that gene that's there?

Speaker 2:
[28:59] They, as far as I know, they didn't do epigenetic analysis. That's a different analysis. You could do it potentially, but I don't know enough about that company. But for example, there's a whole Harvath Clock. You can measure biological aging. When people are going to die and from where they're going to die. It's beautiful. They look at 1100 alleles, which is part of DNA. We were able to demonstrate that stellate in special force from Canada, we were able to reverse aging by 2.5 years using Harvath Clock. So the point is DNA is much more pliable than you think.

Speaker 1:
[29:37] Well, I know it was a long time ago, but I'm very sorry about your mom, and everything that she went through, and I appreciate you telling your story, because so many families, without even them knowing it, have gone through this generational trauma that has impacted them. In addition to the generational trauma, you've had other major life experiences that really rocked your own world and contributed and stacked on to that trauma. When you were really young, you came across, you and your friends were playing, and there was a very unfortunate incident that happened. Can you talk about that?

Speaker 2:
[30:08] The place where I was born was close to a large tank battle during World War II. So we had older friends, two, three years older than us, and they found this piece of metal, rusted piece of metal. So they showed it to my father, who was a vet, and he said that's like an anti-personnel mine or anti-personnel shell from a tank. So he took from them, hid it. They figured out where he hid it. They dug it out. So my father didn't let us play with those guys because he had the premonition. They threw it against a rock and it exploded. So one kid, and I was probably four or five at that time, one kid lost two arms and another one lost a leg. So that was a serious explosion. So let me just give you a quick story of my highlights of my trauma, shall we say. Let's walk through my trauma history. So that was interesting. Then we went to Moscow when I was six, which was a change, but nothing highly traumatic. Then from there, at 14, we came to the United States, which was, adolescence is not the best time to change countries. Then I went to medical school. When I finished medical school, or was about to finish, my parents gave me a trip to Porto Vallarta. I took a lovely snorkeling trip. And then we were swimming in this little alcove. So this gentleman, I used to turn loosely, was drunk in his boat, came across the buoys and hit me with a propeller blade. So I lost half my blood volume in about five minutes, give or take. So I had an auto body experience and all that. I crawled into the boat and I was able to stop the bleeding. Oh, the bleeding points. I had enough medical training to do that. So I survived that.

Speaker 1:
[32:10] You had to use your own hand as a tourniquet.

Speaker 2:
[32:12] No, no, no. He had towels and I used to put pressure. Yeah. But you know, I've had enough medical training. Next year, it got even more better. So my mother took her life when I just three months into my surgical training.

Speaker 1:
[32:29] So I had a little trauma, I would say. Well, where this is all leading up to, in addition to talking about the background of trauma and how it chases people in their lives, is that at some stage you also underwent the treatment as well.

Speaker 2:
[32:44] Yes. It was interesting. So what happened was we have a child, my wife and I, and he was tricking me all the time. I had a complex childhood, to put it very politely. And then I had this feeling of a hand holding my heart and squeezing my heart and I couldn't take a breath. I was very functional at work. I run a big pain clinic. I was totally useless at home. My wife said, you know what? Your kid is attacking me and you're not doing anything. What is wrong with you? And I'm very functional. I used to run trauma units.

Speaker 1:
[33:19] Your kid is attacking?

Speaker 2:
[33:21] He was attacking my wife.

Speaker 1:
[33:23] Like physically?

Speaker 2:
[33:23] Yeah, biting her and stuff.

Speaker 1:
[33:26] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[33:27] So it turns out I was having fugues. Fugues is when you're pretty much out of it, like walking in the days, shall we say. That's a very well-known side effect of severe trauma.

Speaker 1:
[33:38] Fugues.

Speaker 2:
[33:39] It's called a few. Yeah. So I talked to a friend of mine, Stephen Porges, which is an amazing physiologist. He said, you're having fugues, go get fixed. So I called up my chairman. I said, do my block. He did the block. The next day, I came back and I said, all right, here's the deal. All the **** is over. Now we're going to have like, now it's going to be for real, right? I mean, I wasn't being shot down. I was the normal function that I know I always had. But his behavior is really freaking me out. On a physiological base, I couldn't help myself. And this is somebody who's pretty resilient.

Speaker 1:
[34:21] Was your son's behavior a byproduct of some of the trauma that he inherited from you guys genetically?

Speaker 2:
[34:28] Well, he's adopted, so definitely not genetic. But I mean, he had his own cyber issues. But I couldn't really be a good parent at all. Because I was pretty useless. Wow.

Speaker 1:
[34:39] What did your family notice after you getting the procedure yourself?

Speaker 2:
[34:43] I wasn't walking around like a zombie. And I was like, I was a commander. Like, I should be. I was like, I told them, I said, hey, I'm a commander. Don't do bad things. There'll be consequences, and I will hold you to it. Before, I couldn't physically actually stick to it. The first thing I did is I started the borders. I said, you know, this is the borders that you will not cross. There's no violence in the house, none of this. Don't do this, don't do that. Before, my wife, unfortunately, had to do it, and that was very hard for her. She did the best she could. But then, you know, when you start with together, working together as a team, they did much better.

Speaker 1:
[35:22] You know, you're wearing a pin during our interview for those that are listening. They can't see it. Can you describe the pin and how this relates to the idea of naming and the difference between a disorder versus an injury?

Speaker 2:
[35:37] So, well, first of all, if you look at the term disorder, disorder is what's wrong with you. Injury is what happened to you. Pretty straightforward. So, as I was doing more and more procedures, I've had a lot of people trying to say, we don't understand how that could be. How could an injection in the neck do anything to mental condition? We don't understand that. In fact, if you look the first time I was on the doctor show, that was the first question there. I was like, I don't get it. So, one way or another, I was able to connect to Frank Huckburne, a famous psychiatrist who is still alive. Thank God, I talked to him last week. So, he came up with the term Stockholm Syndrome. You may have heard of it. So, he's well known. So, he was part of the committee in 1980 that named PTSD PTSD. That's when the term started being used. Through his experience, he believes term is antiquated and it's wrong because it's shaming and stigmatizing. It doesn't reflect what we know now that it's a biological condition. He and Pete Cirelli forced our journal from the Army whose job was to prevent suicides for the US Army, went together to American Psychiatric Station and said, please change the name from PTSD to PTSD, post-traumatic stress injury, meaning it's biologic. There will be a last stigma and you'd think the EPA would change it. They said no. This was 2013. Franklin was getting older, so he handed this hot potato to me. So I did the study in 2023, and it showed based on 3,000 people that if you change the name PTSD to PTSD, there will be a last stigma, there will be more hope and more treatment. I took that information to the EPA in 2024 and I said please change the name because stigmatizing causes harm. They said no, not enough information. So if you could propagate my new survey, which I'm trying to go 100,000 people, it's the website is ITSPTSI, it's ptsi.com. It's a 2-minute survey. But what I want to do is that the name needs to be changed. I truly believe if you change the name, the stigma will go away, a lot more people get treated successfully. Right? That's what I'm trying to do. I'm a clinician. I'm trying to help people. So that's why this is my term. I just did a TEDx talking about exactly that. That's how we met.

Speaker 1:
[38:15] So the idea that post-traumatic stress disorder, a disorder becomes an identity, and now you sort of step into this idea that it's just there, and it's who you are, and you're switching the conversation to injury, post-traumatic stress injury, and it's something that happened to you. It doesn't define you forever.

Speaker 2:
[38:35] Well, it's like, do you have a broken leg disorder? Does it define who you are? Or do you have an injury that needs a cast? I mean, I'm a biologic guy as the gets, right? I mean, when, you know, when someone comes in trauma, you fix their chest. It's not a trauma disorder. What does that even mean? Somebody's dying, you have to fix them. Okay, you fix them, and that's it, they're done. They're not, it's not the lifestyle. That's the whole thing. To me, lifestyle and the life sense is the same thing.

Speaker 1:
[39:04] I'm imagining that in traditional medicine, there could be a reluctance to see it as an injury because there's also not an acceptance or sort of openness to the fact that there are ways to address the injury. If you don't believe that there's a way to fix that injury, you may be less likely to want to call it an injury in the first place. Do you think that's part of it? This episode is brought to you by AquaTru, my favorite at home water filter. All right, here's a question for you. If you wouldn't eat plastic and all sorts of crazy chemicals, the question I have for you is, why are you drinking them? You know, the water you drink is just as important as the food you eat. You may have heard about the headlines featuring all the latest studies about the alarming levels of nanoplastics in bottled water and tap water isn't any better. It often contains prescription drug residue and toxic chemicals like Forever Chemicals, PFAs, and these microplastics that everybody's talking about. But the question that everybody asks is, how do you get quality water at home at affordable prices? That's where AquaTru comes in. AquaTru is a countertop-based reverse osmosis purifier with a four-stage filtration system that removes 15 times more contaminants than the best-selling water filters that are out there. And it's made with BPA and BPS-free plastics. Plus, it's simple to use and the purified water tastes amazing. Personally, I love their latest model, which features a glass container. It's incredible for people who are single or couples that are living without kids. But they also have a classic countertop filter for families. And if you want, I have an under-the-sink filter for larger homes for people who don't want to refill their water tank. If you care about what you're putting in your body, it starts with clean water. Right now, if you're interested in Aqua Tru, they're offering my community an amazing deal. Just go to dhrupurohit.com/filter. That's dhrupurohit.com/filter. And get $100 off when you try Aqua Tru for yourself today. Because clean water shouldn't be a luxury. It should be your every day.

Speaker 2:
[41:23] I think that's a small part of it. There are bigger forces in play. Because if you think about it, you know, there are always the call point. It's interesting. So I had a Colonel Sutherland came out. He was in charge of joint chiefs of staff, family relations. He looked, I said, you know, what do you think is Stellate Ganglion Block? I think it's going to save lives. He said, you have a big problem. You're being slow rolled. You're going to go very slowly. I said, why do you think? They said, do you have any problems? No, it works. I've seen people, my guys got better. No problem. You're asking people who are in charge to be in charge of second best thing.

Speaker 1:
[42:03] Sorry, let me make sure I heard that correctly. You're asking people in charge...

Speaker 2:
[42:07] Like psychiatrists? Yep.

Speaker 1:
[42:09] To be in charge of...

Speaker 2:
[42:10] Second best thing.

Speaker 1:
[42:11] Second best thing.

Speaker 2:
[42:12] Like pharmaceuticals are clearly not very effective.

Speaker 1:
[42:15] They have mixed results.

Speaker 2:
[42:16] Let me throw a stat at you and see what you think of that mixed result. So, there was a paper written by Njama, Dr. Hoag, H-O-G-E, from Walter Reed Psychiatrists. He knows something about psychiatry. He said, current therapeutics in the VA of psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals, due to lack of compliance, blah, blah, blah, and lack of advocacy, will have an impact on 40% of the people. Placebo 35. What do you think of that statistic?

Speaker 1:
[42:50] Yeah, it's wild.

Speaker 2:
[42:51] That's so good, right?

Speaker 1:
[42:52] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[42:53] Because you think when the medications take a long time to work, medications have a lot of side effects. We could talk about that forever.

Speaker 1:
[42:59] People develop resistance, have to change the medication.

Speaker 2:
[43:01] Well, let's talk about just that. So, number two drug in the VA that's used is atypical on psychotic. Sericone, things like that, the reservatone. One out of a thousand per year or two out of a thousand two years will have the heart stops that they die. Causes diabetes, impotence. That's not good. Increases suicide rate by a factor of three. That's not good. Causes anger. Besides that, it's a great drug. I mean, how can you even argue with something like that? So there was a paper, there was something written. I think it was New York Times, they call it toxic cocktail, that average number of different drugs that the veterans are taking in VA is seven. This one goes up, this one goes down, this one, they're all, it's an uncontrolled experiment. And it doesn't really work. If it worked, great, but it's not working. So the point is we need to do something different. And I think it's happening, they just, I wish it would happen sooner.

Speaker 1:
[44:07] And just to zoom out a little bit so that our audience can follow along, it's in your bio here, but part of your story is that you started with your clinic and these procedures and taking care of individuals, initially women who are dealing with these hot flashes, severe hot flashes as they navigate menopause. And then seeing that they were coming back to you and saying that, you know, I feel better, my anxiety is gone, which led to other patients, you know, seeking you out and more clinical experience. And then ultimately, through a series of just continuing that work, getting your fair share of criticism along the way. You've talked a little bit about that. We'll chat more about that later on. You ended up having someone who connected you with a group. And now you have a group of clinics that are out there right now in the US, but also coming overseas as well too, called Stellamental Health.

Speaker 2:
[45:00] Yes. So we have, I think, 24 sites in the United States. We have one site in Israel, and we have four in Australia. I'm very fortunate to have met a group of people, like-minded people who understood financial aspect of it and knew how to run a business. I am good at science, running a business. I'm not the best. But yes, so basically the idea is to have an available Stellate Ganglion Block and other modalities. We are a little more mature now than just one procedure. So the new thing, I believe the future of psychiatry is interventional psychiatry, which is ketamine, Stellate Ganglion Block and TMS, Transmogonucleic Stimulation. So combination of those and who knows what else happens? Maybe psilocybin, those kinds of things. But that's not a conventional approach because conventional approach is all the respect, which is not a defector. That's the key.

Speaker 1:
[45:57] Before we continue on, we talk about trauma in the body and its effects on the body and how trauma really shows up as something physical and has physical consequences. Just again, because our audience is getting familiar with this and we have some links to some videos they can watch online. Walk us through, somebody who's coming in for this block procedure, right? Walk us through what this looks like, right? And the step-by-step process, so they can kind of paint a picture in their head to just wrap their head around, okay, this is a treatment for a group of nerve clusters that then leads to all these positive benefits in 80% of the people that go through it based on your team's estimation. But what does it actually look like? How long does the procedure take? What are they going through? Paint that picture.

Speaker 2:
[46:42] Sure, sure, sure. Well, since I've had it done, I can tell you what happens. So first of all, we do an assessment. I mean, this is not a fly by night operation. Our nurse practitioners talk to the patients. We want to make sure that they're the right candidates to have it done. We also make sure physically they're healthy enough to go through it. So as far as mentally, if they're actually suicidal, we have to wait for them to be stable. If they're psychotics, we typically don't do it. Occasionally we do, but it's debatable. Physically, if people are too big, meaning it's 500 pounds and they have no neck, so my saying is no neck, no shot. Somebody comes in, but there's no place to put a needle, so we're not going to do it. Somebody has a bad heart, bad lung, bleeding disorder, we don't do a procedure. It's just normal kind of thing. Think if you go to a pain clinic for an epidural, the same process. Because I'm a pain guy, we follow the same process, it's simple. Assuming that's been okay, then about half of our patients want to be asleep when we do a procedure, have do not. The cool thing about it, we give people choices. Some people are completely freaked out by needles, and some are not. It's variable. We also do kids. So we go as young as eight. So if we have a anesthesiologist put a child asleep, so we can do it. So the point is somebody says, well, I kind of don't like the idea of needle in my neck. It's like, okay, if you want to go to sleep, we need to put an IV and do medicine. You wake up and you're done. It's a passive thing. You don't have to talk about horrible things that happen in your life. That's what I like about it. It doesn't really matter. I tell people, I don't care about your trauma. People try to describe it to me. It doesn't matter. Needle doesn't save the spot. So once we agree that we're going to do it, let's say we do it with or without sedation. The patient comes, lies down on the table. We use ultrasound to find where we need to go or we don't go. We see blood vessels, we see bones, all the usual things which are in the neck. Then I clean off the neck with a little sponge. Numb up the skin. It hurts less than tooth injections because it is less nerves in the neck. Then I put some towels on, and then I guide the needle under ultrasound. All things about five minutes. We put one needle at C6, one needle at C4. Done. Thank you. We observe the people. What happens is they will have a droopy eye for about four to eight hours. That means I'm in the right spot. When you numb up sympathetic nerves, the eye starts to droop. That means I hit the right spot. It doesn't mean it's going to work for psychological conditions, but I know I'm in the right spot. It's not a side effect, that's an effect of it. We want that to happen.

Speaker 1:
[49:35] This works in your clinical experience on 80 percent of the population that has come to see you. What separates out why you think it works for some people and then doesn't work for the 20 percent of the people?

Speaker 2:
[49:46] Well, that's a good question. We are getting closer to that all the time. There are a couple of reasons it can be. Some people can have other conditions, like infections of the brain, things like that. There's also cross-connection in the right side of the nerves on the right side, can go to the left side, and vice versa. Sometimes we need to do a procedure closer together to knock out both nerves. We can get some details of that. That's part of it. The other thing is I have a new body who is very big into figuring out immune aggressive attacks on dopamine receptors in the brain. So it could be autoimmune problems, which we don't know about. So we're talking about possibly testing for those autoimmune conditions and treat that. We don't really know.

Speaker 1:
[50:40] So there could be other pathways of insult that are ramping up their fight or flight system that are separate from or using different pathways to ramp up this whole process.

Speaker 2:
[50:56] That's not what I'm saying. Fight or flight system, I think we got it handled. Most of the time, but that could be other process going on, like brain toxicity or post-COVID brain. We use this for post-COVID, but COVID may have done too much brain damage for this to reverse. Or the autoimmune condition has now chewed up certain part of the brain. We cannot get it back. I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[51:21] In the case of, just because you mentioned it, post-COVID syndrome, are you talking about like long COVID as people describe it?

Speaker 2:
[51:28] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[51:30] So you guys are using it for that. What do you think is missing from the long COVID conversation that you've seen out there from individuals and why your treatment is getting to the root of it?

Speaker 2:
[51:39] I've seen big institutions. I'm not sure what they're actually, how they're actually treating it. There's no real good treatment. Our treatment looks at, so if the way to understand what Stellate does, there's a couple of things. One, if you put tracers into this, if you inject a tracer into Stellate, it connects to the thymus and bone marrow. Thymus produces T cells. Bone marrow produces B cells. Right, that's the immune thing. So, Stellate has been used to treat what are immune conditions. So it's been shown. In fact, when you do Stellate Ganglion Block, interleukin 6, which is marker for inflammation, goes down. So if you think of Stellate, not only does it affect the fight-or-flight system, it affects the immune system. So what kills a lot of times in COVID, at least killed people in the units, they have interleukin storm. Too much interleukin 6 and all that stuff. But persistent high levels are still making them drowsy. They can't sleep. All of those problems is related to, I think, autoimmune condition. Stellate seems to be very effective for autoimmune conditions. I think that's why it works. So it's a combination of interleukin 6 reduction or autoimmune activation as well as sympathetic nervous system or activation. So the immune system talks to the sympathetic system. They interact with each other. So if you can combine both of them going down, people can sleep. Sleep, if you have somebody abnormal sleep, it activates autonomic nervous system. So if you can calm it all down, have people get good night's sleep and reduce their inflammation, they can do much better.

Speaker 1:
[53:24] Is that one of the first things that people notice after getting this shot and procedure done? Is it their sleep? Besides the sense of feeling like the weight off their chest. I've seen some videos of some patients who pretty much immediately that day feel like a weight has been lifted off their chest.

Speaker 2:
[53:39] The other thing is it takes away the fog. I think when people describe brain fog, which is very common unfortunately in COVID, it's interleukin-6 attacking the brain. The brain on fire, I love that term. So I think that's true. It is the autoimmune effect on the brain, and that's all leads to depression and other things.

Speaker 1:
[53:59] Let's talk about this idea that trauma just doesn't affect the mind. It reshapes the entire body. This picks up on some of these themes that you've been talking about here, like interleukin-6 and inflammatory cascade that ends up happening, one inflammatory marker that's inside of the body. What are some other physical consequences of people living with trauma?

Speaker 2:
[54:19] There's a couple. One, there is a very clear progression that you can say that somebody has PTSD, the chance of heart attack is twice as high. That's a pretty big one.

Speaker 1:
[54:30] It's huge.

Speaker 2:
[54:31] Yeah. Infertility is another. We are able to reverse some infertility. I have to tell you a cute story about our first SGB baby, I call her. You can reverse infertility using Stellate. 85% of men have sexual dysfunction, even young men with PTSD, and that's reversible. It affects hormones, it affects immune system. There have been a number of studies showing that ulcerative colitis can be treated using Stellate. Why would I do that? The reason it does, it reduce interleukin 6, which is part of the inflammatory response and the part of the crown in the colon.

Speaker 1:
[55:08] Talk about the infertility case. I think there's one story that you talk about in the book, but I don't know if you have a different story in mind.

Speaker 2:
[55:13] I took care of this gentleman. I think he was from Seattle. He was a firefighter, or he still is, and we treated him and his wife. So a lot of times we tried to treat couples together, primary and secondary PTSD. Considering my mother's death, I'm very used to that. So we treated both of them. And he calls me back later. Two years later, he said, hey, I feel great, doc. Thank you so much. I said, great. Thank you very much. He said, you don't understand. We had a child. I said, congratulations. He said, no, you don't get it. We tried for 20 years to conceive. We conceived the day after the procedure. So that was a big deal for us. So thank you. I said, great. He sent me pictures. Guess what they called the child? Not Eugene. What do you think?

Speaker 1:
[55:54] Is it a boy or girl?

Speaker 2:
[55:56] Female.

Speaker 1:
[55:56] Stella? No.

Speaker 2:
[55:58] Jordan. They love Michael Jordan. So they called her Jordan. I was the cutest thing. So I called her first SGB baby. Wow.

Speaker 1:
[56:06] What do you think was going on there? Obviously, infertility is multifaceted. There's so many different things that play a role in it. There's biological components. We talk about in our modern life, like microplastics impacting, especially like the male body. There's updated, I'm an investor in a company called WeNatal, which looks at how deep nutritional issues on both even the male side for sperm quality play a role in infertility and miscarriages. What do you think was going on in this instance with the connection between trauma and infertility?

Speaker 2:
[56:38] Well, I've been interested in that for years. The reason I've been interested, I wrote a paper on that, how stellate can affect sexual function in men. But when I was doing my deep dive and anything stellate related, I found a paper from Italy from 1972. They show that the Stellate Ganglion Block changes hormones. LH, FSH, all of it. Actually, hormonal switch occurs, which is a big deal. Also, if you think about it, we also treated women who had severe pain during the periods or they had dysmenorrhea, which is periods of various times, it's inconsistent. What happens is, in order to conceive, you need to build up the endometrium or the lying of the uterus to 10 millimeters, it needs to be thick. But if the fight and flight nerves are overactive, it never gets thick. So it's 2-3 millimeters, so that's what causes spotting. So if you can readjust the hormonal status, one. Two, if you can reduce the sympathetic tone, then you can have a nice endometrial lining. So what happens is the block stabilizes everything and it also reduces stress. So if women have orgasm during sex, their chance of conception is significantly higher because you're just designed to suck the sperm back in, so you can get implanted.

Speaker 1:
[58:14] Wild.

Speaker 2:
[58:15] It's weird.

Speaker 1:
[58:16] Wild.

Speaker 2:
[58:16] So, but the point is they both had good mood, they're both relaxed, male function improves clearly. All of that leads to more successful conception.

Speaker 1:
[58:28] You also have this idea that trauma accelerates aging. So many conversations in this podcast are about longevity. And when people think about longevity, of course, they think about sleep and physical exercise. And they think about, you know, diet and reducing ultra processed foods and all the things that play into reducing inflammation, right? That's a turn that's come out over the years.

Speaker 2:
[58:52] That's a great turn.

Speaker 1:
[58:52] And there seems to be some connection with trauma as being a major inflammation in the body.

Speaker 2:
[59:01] So we do know that PTSD makes people age faster. I think it's pretty much a non debatable issue at this point. So if you look at grim age, which is my favorite epigenetic test for aging, that's what I had done on me.

Speaker 1:
[59:18] Grim age?

Speaker 2:
[59:20] G-M-H is what it's called. G-R-I-M age. It was developed by Dr. Harworth, amazing man from UCLA, not far from here. That's one of my partners I've done study with. So we know that trauma makes people age faster. I don't think there's debate of that. We know that in successful intervention for trauma, reverse aging has been shown using talk therapy, has been shown as ketamine. I've shown it using stellate. So if you go to my website drgudjudeleepov.com and look at my presentations, one of them, we were able to reverse aging. I was referring to about 3.5 years, I think, in Canadian Special Forces by doing stellate. So trauma leads to inflammation, you're right. So interleukin 6, back to that, the whole thing, you know, from your fly aging. So you can reverse it, because the problem is, if your body is always stressed, so sympathetic overreactivity, fight and flight overreactivity, dysregulates immune system. That's what this inflammation, that's what leads to aging. It potentially leads to cancer, because the reason not everybody has cancer, not everybody develops cancer cells, but the scavenging, which is the immune system, it goes up, so you need to develop some new cancer. So if you look at the cancer rates in military personnel and first responders, they're significant, which makes perfect sense. But that act is reversible. If you don't sleep, interleukin 6 goes up. All of those things work together.

Speaker 1:
[61:08] They're all connected. You have this quote from the book, Trauma floods the entire system, breaking you down from the inside out. And that's how we should think about it. If we care about aging, if we care about, you know, living our best life and even just day-to-day happiness, separate from healthspan and lifespan, trauma is that thing in the background that's always attacking your body and without having a plan.

Speaker 3:
[61:37] Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them, that's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

Speaker 1:
[61:46] I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow.

Speaker 2:
[61:52] Yeah, it wasn't.

Speaker 3:
[61:54] Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to linkedin.com/campaignterms and conditions apply.

Speaker 2:
[62:07] If I may, let me give you an analogy. Please, if you have a car and it's idling normally, 2000 RPMs, the engine is going to live X amount of time. If now you have a heavy foot and you're idling at 5,000 RPMs, the engine is not going to live as long, it's going to burn out. When your sympathetic system is on all the time, you're revving much faster. You're burning out the body faster for no good reason. That's the easiest way for me to look at it.

Speaker 1:
[62:39] You mentioned this about your mom's story, but I think it's worth touching on a little bit more here in this phase of the conversation. That trauma is, in a way, a social disease, and it can be spread through this idea of secondary trauma. You mentioned that earlier about your mom.

Speaker 2:
[62:59] Secondary PTSD.

Speaker 1:
[63:00] Secondary PTSD. I'm imagining a question from some of our listeners would be, can loving someone with trauma change their own brain and their own experience? Can being in close proximity with somebody who has this PTSD, PTSD, how does that impact their own brain and body?

Speaker 2:
[63:26] Badly. Let me give you more detail on that. So what happens is, so let's say if somebody comes home, so let's say it doesn't have to be a woman, but let's assume it's a female. The woman is at home with a child, let's say. The husband comes home, first responder, military, whatever, doesn't matter. And you don't know what kind of, are they in a good mood or in a bad mood? A lot of times, when people have PTSD, they don't want anything, they want absolute quiet, and they don't want any kind of thing, and they're angry. That's part of PTSD, in my experience with my father. So if let's say a child screams or a toy drops, whatever, it could trigger them, right? And you don't know if they could become violent, verbally, physically, whatever. So the best way to give PTSD to someone is to feel insecure and unpredictable. So it could be good, could be bad, could be at the same time, it could be flipping back and forth. So if you're walking on eggshells in your house, your body knows that. Oh, but it's not a big deal. It is a big deal. If you do it over years, it's a big deal. It changes your DNA, it changes your child's DNA. So for example, some special force from Canada, I love to treat them and their spouses, sometimes their children. Because to me, PTSD like STD. In a sense, you fix one, and that once he has it, he's going to come back. Because now you don't know how they're behaving, goes back and forth. So you want to treat both at the same time. And we've had some amazing stories along those lines, but one of my favorite stories was, I had this very successful man from Puerto Rico. Came in, we did treatment for him, we did his vibe, blah, blah, blah. So he sent me a video from his five-year-old child. She's a spunky kid. And he said, thanks for giving my daddy back. He's so nice now. Almost made me cry. Somebody would have done it for my family, I wouldn't have lost my mother. Right? But it was so sweet. And I asked the mother and she said, yeah, the temperature of the household is down. Think about high temperature. Like you don't know what's going to happen. People are cranky as opposed to everything's fine. Nothing to see here. Everything is good. That's a big difference. And the body knows that. That's the whole thing. You're always prepared. You're always prepared to run. You're always prepared to think of how do I avoid this? You spend 90% of your time avoiding another blowout. That's not healthy at all. That's a problem. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[66:16] And reading your book, I knew this, but really the strong connection that I was walking away from that I think about as you were just sharing is that even people who have gone through, like, deep bullying through, you know, maybe they were obese or there was this or that or whatever sort of reason that was there, that they went through this really tough time in their life, they could have gone through, you know, they can have PTSD from that, right? It doesn't have to always be this sexual abuse. Now you're walking away, you're walking around with that. You could have grown up with a parent that you have to constantly be on eggshells with or a caretaker or somebody that's there. You inherit that as part of your own survival mechanism. It's part of your injury response as well. And now you're spreading that inside of your own family where you're the person where everybody feels like they have to walk on eggshells around with and you don't want to be that way. And many of these individuals have an insight that, I don't want to be this way, but I don't know how to break out of it. I don't know how to snap out of this way of being. And they often have partners that love them, that see the best of them that's around and know that they're a deeply caring and an amazing person that's there.

Speaker 2:
[67:33] Until they don't. Well, if you think about it, when somebody wants to have, I think most of us, unless you're a psychopath, which is thankfully a small number of people, we want to be the right thing for the family. We want to show up the best part of us. When somebody says, I can't help it, our society says, why not? Snap out of it. Behave like this. Right? It's the same thing with somebody who has an NPT asking him to run a marathon. It's not going to happen. You can ask him to do it. He can't help it. And then it comes back to, is this the weakness of the soul? Is that because you're just a nasty human being? No. You just have extra nerves in your brain. Too much neurodipenephrone. That's how I see it. So blame, if you truly absorb that and truly believe the name, there's no blame. There's no shame. There's no blame. What's the difference? To me, and I've done many different medical things, I'm not going to ask an MPT to go up and down the mountain. That's stupid. Why would you do that? Nobody would do that. But somebody who has, if I show you the brain skin, say, oh, his amygdala is overactive. You ask him to be calm. He's not going to be able, he cannot do it. His neurocircuitry are hijacked by the trauma he experienced in the past. Why are you even asking that? Oh, and we're not talking about living with this forever. We're talking about thinking of fixing it. It's not a lifestyle. That's a whole thing. It's not a life. There's hope. Nobody kill themselves if they have hope. If there's no hope, you got problems.

Speaker 1:
[69:16] So far, we've been talking about your story, how you came up with this procedure, how you worked with a group of people to now make it available in clinics throughout the United States and the world. Give me the critical lens that you've dealt with over the years and that you are actively working on addressing. So the first thing that we've mentioned, and I mean that not from like the devil's advocate point of view, more from the sense of the limitations, what do people talk about, what is needed to further have people get on the train of this. So you've already mentioned one thing. This works in 80% of the people, 20% of the people. There's different theories as to why there could be different pathways that are impacting them that need to be addressed. Your team is working on getting better. What other criticisms are there that people should have a healthy view of any sort of procedure and understand? So let's start off with the data. You have a lot of clinical experience that's there. What data exists, what data doesn't exist on this procedure?

Speaker 2:
[70:23] Most of the studies that have been done have not been particularly good, in a sense, clinically. They've been good studies, but they're not rigorous. The other thing that's problematic, people in medicine are used to placebo studies, meaning you give somebody a sugar pill and a real pill and you can see which one works. Straightforward, you cannot do it with this. It's impossible, because if the eye droops, the patient knows there's eye droop, right? So there's no placebo. That's a problem because scientists don't really buy into that kind of approach. It's not used. They're not used to it.

Speaker 1:
[71:00] So nobody's even attempted it because they say, you can't even do a placebo control.

Speaker 2:
[71:03] Oh no, it's been done. We're getting to that. My point is you cannot do a real placebo in this space. It's impossible. Even though people have done it, it's still spunky. Let me tell you some of the studies that's available. Dr. Al-Kair did a study, Long Beach, California, not far, VA. He did PET scan before and after. PET scan demonstrates what's really going on in the brain. Amygdala over activation, if you do a stellate, it decreases the function of the amygdala. It was only a patient, so a small study. There was also a study done which really was very damaging and I'm very upset with them. I will always be upset with them because they spent years trying to discredit me and this whole thing. And whatever, we'll deal with that in a second. That came from San Diego Military Hospital.

Speaker 1:
[71:55] Yeah, so another military study.

Speaker 2:
[71:57] Right. That was a placebo done and they said it's no better than placebo. So people, every time I talk to anybody about this, they throw the study at me.

Speaker 1:
[72:06] That's one of the first things that comes up.

Speaker 2:
[72:07] Correct. They go, no, it's placebo. We'll recover problems with that study.

Speaker 1:
[72:13] Just set that study up, how many people was it?

Speaker 2:
[72:16] And of 42.

Speaker 1:
[72:17] Okay, so it's 42 people.

Speaker 2:
[72:19] Right.

Speaker 1:
[72:20] Done through the military hospital that was there.

Speaker 2:
[72:23] Through the Naval Hospital.

Speaker 1:
[72:24] Through the Naval Hospital in San Diego. You got a big naval outfit over there.

Speaker 2:
[72:27] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[72:28] When was it done?

Speaker 2:
[72:29] 2016, I believe it came out.

Speaker 1:
[72:32] 2016.

Speaker 2:
[72:33] Right.

Speaker 1:
[72:34] And anything else important to mention about the setup of the study that was there, the people that were part of it? I mean, these are all probably young military age men.

Speaker 2:
[72:42] Yeah, there's a lot of problems on that study. So that study was evaluated by the VA committee on Stellate. And they said that study is garbage.

Speaker 1:
[72:50] So the VA themselves said that this naval study...

Speaker 2:
[72:52] Useless...

Speaker 1:
[72:53] .said it's garbage. Is this public? Did they publicly say that it was garbage?

Speaker 2:
[72:56] It's on my website.

Speaker 1:
[72:57] It's on your website?

Speaker 2:
[72:58] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[72:58] So this was done through a position paper of their own review of the study?

Speaker 2:
[73:02] Correct.

Speaker 1:
[73:02] We'll link to that in the show notes so that people can see that.

Speaker 2:
[73:04] Yeah. It's on my website. 2017 VA position. So let me tell you what is wrong with the study. And I'll tell you how ugly it got. I knew it was happening. I knew it was happening in the study. Because I met a lovely woman who was a naval captain. And she was starting to do procedures in that hospital. And they did great. Great response. And then they did the study. And the people who did the study were interesting, shall we say. We won't get into who it was. But they select the patients. If they said it worked for them, they would lose $2,000 a month stipends.

Speaker 1:
[73:43] For disability.

Speaker 2:
[73:43] For disability. That's not the patient that should have been started for that study.

Speaker 1:
[73:47] How do you know that that was the case? Did you have patients that were telling you? Were they informed ahead of time?

Speaker 2:
[73:51] For the people who ran the study.

Speaker 1:
[73:54] Said?

Speaker 2:
[73:54] Told me that. That's a fact.

Speaker 1:
[73:56] And they had let the individuals know these 42 men that hey, if this works, you no longer are classified as depressed or PTSD or suicidal or whatever.

Speaker 2:
[74:07] It doesn't matter how they knew. It was known.

Speaker 1:
[74:09] It was known. Right. You know, just to set this up, just having seen this from like financial, different financial podcasts that are out there, if you are a military veteran that is disabled or you're active, right? But you cannot be sort of active because you're on disability.

Speaker 2:
[74:25] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[74:26] This is your livelihood. So you're saying that you're...

Speaker 2:
[74:28] This is a time of separation from the military. That's what they call it.

Speaker 1:
[74:30] Okay, there's separation from the military.

Speaker 2:
[74:32] Right.

Speaker 1:
[74:32] But they're still getting paid every month because they have some disability.

Speaker 2:
[74:35] And they will be until they're 70.

Speaker 1:
[74:37] Until they're 70.

Speaker 2:
[74:37] Right.

Speaker 1:
[74:38] So you are threatening somebody's livelihood.

Speaker 2:
[74:40] Right.

Speaker 1:
[74:40] If they say that this ends up working for them.

Speaker 2:
[74:42] Correct. That was a bad group of people to be picked for that study. Which, and also some of the technical stuff, the woman who ran it was great. They transferred to Okinawa and they put somebody else in charge who was not as good.

Speaker 1:
[74:58] If the woman who did it was great, wouldn't they have thought of the fact that it would have been, you know, a complete disadvantage to people to say that it would have worked? Like the study design. Like the study design was flawed from the beginning. If people are disincentivized through losing their livelihood. What are your thoughts about that? If the woman was great, wouldn't they have seen that in the study design?

Speaker 2:
[75:22] To me, they had a secondary agenda. They wanted to sing this whole concept, in my opinion. That's what they were trying to do.

Speaker 1:
[75:29] The higher ups.

Speaker 2:
[75:30] The higher ups. Whichever way they wanted to do it, that's what they were doing. That's how they explain it. It got more interesting. So the study comes out and I wrote, so in medicine, when you publish something, all the physicians who read the study have the right and the responsibility to comment on anything that's wrong or a lie about the study. That's how it works. It's called letter to the editor, right? So I wrote the letter to the editor and they told me, no, we're not going to publish it. Why? No. It's not going to do it. That has never happened to me before. I've written...

Speaker 1:
[76:05] What was the reason why? Did they say it's a conflict of interest or...?

Speaker 2:
[76:09] Oh, here's what they said. No. That was it. That was the explanation. No. That was it. That was the extent of the discussion. Pretty big organization. No.

Speaker 1:
[76:21] It sounds like you have individual people that are part of the military or retired or veterans, some that are active, that are strong advocates for you. They could have other groups like the VA wrote out this position paper that you're mentioning. We'll find it. We'll link to it in the show notes, is saying that, hey, this study was not done correctly or is garbage in whatever way that they were saying that. And then you have other groups, the Navy, the higher ups that you're alluding to. It sounds like you don't want to mention any names that for some reason your belief is allegedly that they were trying to discredit you, was designed to sort of discredit you from the beginning.

Speaker 2:
[76:58] Not me using Stellate to save lives. That's what they were trying to do.

Speaker 1:
[77:02] You're trying to discredit the whole idea.

Speaker 2:
[77:04] Oh yeah, not me. They didn't care about me.

Speaker 1:
[77:05] So you have almost like a complex body. You have some things that are working for you and some things that are sort of autoimmune that are working against you.

Speaker 2:
[77:12] Oh, you better believe it. That's true. That is a true statement.

Speaker 1:
[77:14] What did you learn from this study's publication in terms of your mission and vision of getting this treatment out there to the world?

Speaker 2:
[77:23] When you're faced with something like that, it's just basically a decision has to be made. Are you going to pursue it or are you going to just fold up and go home? And you find out who you are. I'm the most resilient SOB you'll find. My brother called me BB, brother bulldog. I just don't let go. If it's something that's really important, and keep in mind this is a personal thing for me because my mother is dead. So I was like, if I wasn't going to fight it, nobody else would go to fight it. So fortunately, I had some other champions who were doing it as well. But the reason I really would not let go because I could see all the people who could help and if those guys study really changed a lot of minds. This is, I've killed tons of people. But that genius decision to do the study, the way they did it.

Speaker 1:
[78:10] You believe that they have contributed to the deaths of people because people look at that and say that this shot isn't worth it.

Speaker 2:
[78:17] Yes. So that's my position. And I may be putting a little motion into it, but I feel very strong. They worked very hard for five years to describe this whole concept.

Speaker 1:
[78:28] Do you ever feel like you have to throw in the word allegedly so that people don't come after you or, you know?

Speaker 2:
[78:34] I said it's my opinion.

Speaker 1:
[78:35] It's your opinion.

Speaker 2:
[78:36] What's the difference allegedly in that? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[78:38] So it's your opinion.

Speaker 2:
[78:38] And they kind of laughed at me. I'll just say, OK, here's a study. Here's what it says. Nobody's arguing that, right? It's published. Yeah. Here's what the VA said. All the other stuff, do I believe there was a conspiracy? I don't know. That's true or not.

Speaker 1:
[78:52] No, but your belief is, your opinion is, that you were being actively discredited.

Speaker 2:
[78:58] SGB.

Speaker 1:
[78:59] SGB as a treatment option. Yes. That is available to people. And there could be a multitude of different reasons why.

Speaker 2:
[79:06] That's totally fair.

Speaker 1:
[79:08] What is your main belief that the reason that somebody would want to discredit, separate from, let's say, ideas that the pharmaceutical industry, which is an establishment, may not love additional new options that are coming unless they can control it. What would be the reason that somebody would want to discredit it, especially when it comes to saving the lives of...

Speaker 2:
[79:26] To quote the guy I was talking about, Colonel Sadler, like he said, you're asking people in charge currently to be in charge of second best thing. You lose prestige and finance.

Speaker 1:
[79:36] You know, there's a German physicist and Nobel Prize winner. A lot of people quote him. Many, many years ago. Plank.

Speaker 2:
[79:43] He's my man.

Speaker 1:
[79:45] Do you want to share our audience about his very famous quote that applies to so many different aspects of health and wealth?

Speaker 2:
[79:51] He's a guy, 1920s, playing constant, for those of you who are geeks or nerds, which I am. I'm very proud to be one. He said, science move ahead at funerals. Basically, you need people who are in charge of other things to die before new ideas can come to light.

Speaker 1:
[80:10] Yeah, it's hard to get an old dog to admit that the way that they've been doing things in any sort of field, and, you know, his field was physics, math, everything like that. But whether this be in medicine, technology, whatever it might be, all the sciences that are out there, it's hard to get people who have been doing things one way to all of a sudden wake up and say, hey, we got it wrong. This is a different approach that we should explore.

Speaker 2:
[80:35] There was another study done from Fort Bragg. So that was study was well designed. It was Special Forces.

Speaker 1:
[80:43] What year, how many people?

Speaker 2:
[80:45] It was 2019, 112 people, I believe.

Speaker 1:
[80:48] So a larger study than the 42.

Speaker 2:
[80:49] Larger study. The other part is none of them were separating from the military. So they took into account what was wrong with the study. So they found that, and it was done in three sides. So Naval side was on one side, this was done in three sides. It was done in Fort Bragg, Special Forces, Hawaii, Triple Hospital, and Langeheim in Germany. And they found Stellate worked twice as good as Placebo, which is not a surprise, which is great. But it's still ignored to this day. I believe part of it was, and it was a little small, the response were okay, but there's no, you can still say, I think this is all Placebo effect. You can argue that back and forth. So in the interim, I ran into an amazing lady and her husband, Linda Grunberg and Glenn Grunberg. They have been philanthropists for a long time, and she's knew a number of seals who lies got better. So she said, I would like to, the team told us that they would like to prove that Stellate works. What would it take? So they gave us significant amount of money. I designed a study, and then NYU took it on and did the right study. It's been done for three years.

Speaker 1:
[82:15] Placebo-controlled study, the same way?

Speaker 2:
[82:17] Yes, placebo-controlled. But, this is N. We were going to do 150. I think they did 90. That's all they needed. But they did FMR. They did functional MRI before and after. So there's no argument of placebo. That's the key to this study. We always need FMR. VA in their position paper in 2017 always said, oh, we agree with Dr. Lipov because I was one of the consultants of that paper that a functional MRI study should be done. But they never paid for it. Here, we are able to do it. So that should be out in September. I think at that point, people just go, aha, I guess it's the right thing to do.

Speaker 1:
[82:58] So it's not out yet. The trial's finished and they're working on...

Speaker 2:
[83:01] They're analyzing the data.

Speaker 1:
[83:03] They're analyzing the data. And then eventually, it will be published in some journal.

Speaker 2:
[83:06] It's going to be in a big journal. You know, in medicine, the study, you want to be involved in this landmark study. Meaning, like, from here, it changed medicine. You don't have to wait for anybody to die. God bless everybody. But that's going to be much less debate. Because if you have big study, large number of people, functional MRI, big institution, NYU is an amazing institution in so many ways. But they did the right psychologists. They had functional MRI. They had everything, everything, everything. That is an unimpeachable study. And I wasn't involved in it. I helped start that. But I was like, here's the money, here's the design, do what everything is right. And they did everything.

Speaker 1:
[83:49] Yes. You don't know the results right now, but you have a, you know, you feel just based on the way that it was set up and that it's going to be positive.

Speaker 2:
[83:57] I believe it's going to be positive. But we will get in details of that.

Speaker 1:
[84:00] Sure, sure. Well, that will be out in September. And we'll update our show notes so our audience can take a look at that. What was the motivation behind these benefactors of why they wanted to get behind this and spend serious, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not, you know, a couple million dollars to do a study like this?

Speaker 2:
[84:14] It was north of that. The motivation was, so Linda was a foreign correspondent. So she was an anchor for NBC News. So she's been embedded with a lot of military personnel. She's seen all types of horrors in her life. And then, so eventually I got to treat her, actually, which helped her. But she was sitting around the campfire with some seals and they said, Stellate is really helping me, us and our people. So she called me up and she said, it's like, if it works for me, I'd like to sponsor you actually treating people and maybe studying it. That was a motivation. That was this, they're an amazing family. That really, they helped us do research. They have support. There are not for profit. Our not for profit is called Erase PTSD Now. So if people want to donate to it, that'd be amazing. So eraseptsdnow.com or.org, one of those. But the point is they have helped us so much. And they helped, I mean, this is one, without their support, we would not be where we are today by any measure. And the amount of lives that we have saved, I mean, it may sound like exaggeration, but I get like every two, three weeks, I guess, I think you save my life, you save my marriage, you save this, my children are different. But it's like, oh my God, that just, I could not be more thankful to that couple.

Speaker 1:
[85:53] Give us the background story of the title of the book, God Shot.

Speaker 2:
[85:57] I love that title.

Speaker 1:
[85:59] There's a patient that received the treatment and he plays into this. But yeah, tell the story.

Speaker 2:
[86:07] Yeah, so it was funny. So one guy came in, he was a Marine, and he said, I'd like to have the God Shot. I was like, I don't know that. What do you mean by that? He said, well, in our unit, it's called the God Shot. So one of his friends had Stellate Ganglion Block by somebody else, not me. And it changed his life. So the only entity can change life is God. So that's why they called it the God Shot, because it changes lives. So I was taking care of this guy, his name is Matt. So Matt was a very good writer, and he was a lieutenant in Iraq. So he was asked by Playboy to write an article about his experience in having a Stellate Ganglion Block. So if you want to read that article in Playboy in 2016, it's on my website. It's pretty funny. That's why he called it the God Shot, and we really loved that. So when I met with my writer, and she looked at the paper that's hanging on my wall, and she said, let's call the book that, the God Shot, makes perfect sense.

Speaker 1:
[87:10] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[87:11] Because it changes lives. I mean, it changed my life. It changed so many people's lives. It changed my son's life, my wife's life, because I became a more normal person.

Speaker 1:
[87:19] Are you religious yourself? Do you believe that, do you have any belief of higher power and their involvement in our lives?

Speaker 2:
[87:25] Well, I was born in Ukraine. I lived in Moscow. So in Russia, at that time, I don't know now, religion was all came from the masses, right? So they're not big into religion. That's not the thing. But the thing they were in, I had an out-of-body experience when I got hit by a propeller blade. So I was in a tunnel, talking to people in a tunnel. It was an amazing experience. I can tell you about that. But I believe there's definitely a higher power. So I thank God every day for everything I have. It's an amazing, it could be, people could say, whatever, a shining feeling, we could talk about all of that. I don't know. I don't know from that. But I do know that being in a tunnel made me a much better person and appreciate what I have and my family and everything around me. And I pretend to do this. This is just an amazing gift.

Speaker 1:
[88:17] You know, I'm thinking about, especially in the context of trauma for people who are religious or are open-minded or at least have some belief of a higher power, whatever that might be, the universe, whatever. There's often this feeling that when people go through very traumatic things of, why would God or this higher power allow this to happen? Right? That's a question that religions have struggled with and answered over the years. There's many more people that are way more smarter and qualified than me that have explored this conversation that's there. But I'm thinking about your story and one of the things that stands out, and I'd like to phrase it as a question to you, is that do you think that the higher power that you believe in, a part of some of the challenging experiences that you had in life, it almost feels like reading your story in your book, that you wouldn't have ended up coming up with this idea, that there's this procedure, there's this shot that could help people, if it wasn't for the extremely tough times you went through.

Speaker 2:
[89:26] So one of my favorite terms is hermesis. I don't know if you've heard that term.

Speaker 1:
[89:29] Very much so.

Speaker 2:
[89:30] Yeah. Hermesis, for the audience, is basically what doesn't kill you makes it stronger. So that is a term that was initiated in the 19th century, where an experimenter was working with fungi. He gave fungicide, not at the level that would kill the fungus, but close to it. So the fungi that survived the attack of the fungicide turned out to be stronger. So now we know there's actually, it activates certain genes. When somebody almost dies or gets injured, either it can break you or it can make you. In my case, it didn't break me, it made me, in the sense that it activated my genes or whatever. So if it wasn't my mother's death, I would never have, first of all, I would have been a surgeon. I would not have been a sociologist, a profession I really never liked very much. I would never have had the opportunity to figure this out. Also without her death, even if I would have become a sociologist, I would never have fought and everybody I had to fight with and argue and spent a large amount of money trying to survive through all of this because I felt like this is really helpful. So if it wasn't for her being my guiding star and that, I would never have done that. I would not recommend fighting with powers that be on a continuous basis for years when people try to dismantle things we try to put together. I did not recommend for fun. Did not recommend that. So to give you a direct answer, I'm not sure how much higher power had to do with that. To me, God helps those help themselves. In the sense that if you have a direction, if you have focus and you have a reason why you're doing it. Like I work very hard to exercise, take stuff for longevity, all of this. I went up right into my 90s. Because I think somebody like me, I'm training people, I'm writing textbooks, I'm publishing, I'm very active in everything. I think it's important to do that. It gives me so much joy to do it frankly. But I also see the results. If there's no results, there's no reason to do any of this.

Speaker 1:
[91:46] You talked about your near-death experience. I'd love to just go on a quick tangent because it's one of those things that we've explored on this podcast before. I don't know if you know, but University of Virginia actually has a department that's there that looks at near-death experiences.

Speaker 2:
[92:00] I read about it.

Speaker 1:
[92:00] They've published on it. They've written about it. We've had one of their primary teachers, and he's a physician himself who had a near-death experience that not himself, but he was the recipient of somebody who had a near-death experience. His name is Bruce Greyson, and we've done a podcast with him. I think we can link to it in the show notes. Tell me about your near-death experience. You talked about this tunnel and this white light. What was going on, and what sort of lasting impact has it had on you?

Speaker 2:
[92:33] Oh, my God. I think it completely changed my mind. So first of all, let me give you a background. So I was always very introverted. Like, you know, I couldn't really do... I was very introverted, shall we say, and very inhibited. After the experience, you know, I don't strike you as a introvert at this point.

Speaker 1:
[92:53] No, in fact, one of our common friends said, he loves to talk a lot, so make sure you guide him in the process.

Speaker 2:
[93:02] Well, that is my problem. There's no doubt about it. But you're asking questions. Anyway, so I was snorkeling. I got hit by a propeller and I was in a white tunnel. So I remember being very comfortable. So it was the most comfortable at peace place I've ever been, which is most commonly described like that, I think by a lot of people. And then, so I never saw God, but I saw angels and some of my ancestors talking to me, it's like, how are you doing? You know, it was more of a, it wasn't really a specific conversation, but I was kind of floating in this tunnel, probably a minute, because I was drowning. At that time, I was bleeding and drowning. Not a good thing, obviously. And then the part that was really interesting. So I was like, oh, this is a great place to be. This is, I hope I can stay here. So I heard this voice, it's like, it's not your time. And poof, I woke up and I was a seal of blood. And since I did trauma surgery as a medical student, I had training in it. I looked around, I examined myself and I looked at the wounds. I was like, this is gonna be a problem to fix. I remember that. And I crawled in the boat and I grabbed the towel, put it in the bleeding points and I survived.

Speaker 1:
[94:18] It's interesting you've talked about that because we've had, we interviewed a past podcast guest who had her own near death experience that led to a whole revolution of her helping people through her methodology. I'm blanking on her name, it'll come back to me, but we'll link to in the show notes. But she described a very interesting intersection as well. Her dad who had passed away previously, who she had a very challenging relationship with. In fact, he was the source of a lot of trauma that was there, very tough on her, forced her to get married to somebody that she didn't want to get married to and she ended up running away and then broke free of that pattern. In India, but in the father's passing and in the field of consciousness where everybody now has dropped their layers, their trauma, other stuff, her dad spoke to her and said, it's not your time, you're needed and you have a very important message. So please go back. She was dealing with, I believe it was cancer she was dealing with and she was hospitalized for a period of time where she had this near death experience. And I think even she died and was resuscitated, right? She was medically diagnosed as being dead and she was resuscitated and was told to come back and then she came back and that was part of her story of what helped her bring the information back that she had to share with people.

Speaker 2:
[95:48] Well, I heard that voice. It's like, it's not your time. And it's like the abrupt change was like that. Boom. Intense.

Speaker 1:
[95:55] Are there other people outside of this group of clinics that you've set up, Stellamenta Health, that also are doing this procedure? And is that one of your hopes that you see more anesthesiologists, institutions, individuals that are doing this procedure? So are other anesthesiologists doing this procedure that are unaffiliated with you, but have been inspired by your work, convinced, or arrive there through their own? And is that part of your goal is to have this procedure more widely available through other institutions, hospitals, clinics?

Speaker 2:
[96:30] Yes and yes. So a number of physicians are doing it. Some very good clinicians are doing it. One of the great things about Stella is everybody who works with us, I had a chance to vet them. There are some really good docs out there. Not everybody is a cesiologist. So here's my advice to people who would like to have it done, outside Stella, make sure they're trained. Number one, the people who should be doing this procedure are pain board certified, meaning they did, let's say they're a physiatrist and a cesiologist, but they are pain doctors, meaning they know how to treat pain conditions and they train an ultrasound guide procedures. Some do it with X-ray. To me, that's second rate. It's not as good. Ultrasound is better. But you want to make sure they're doing it. Somebody showed me a video of a chiropractic physician doing it blind. Scared me to death. I reported him to the state. It's like, first of all, chiropractic should not be doing it, number one. Number two, he wasn't using any guidance. That's not good. That's wrong. Absolutely not. Ask how many procedures have that person done. What kind of problems have they had? But make sure they have ultrasound guidance. Make sure they're pain board certified. That's crucial. Yeah, my hope, absolutely. That's why we're doing the study. When the study comes out, I think institutions, there's going to be much more of it available.

Speaker 1:
[98:07] When you think about other adjunct things that people are exploring and some of them that you are rolling into your offerings at your clinic. And just to go on the record, I have no relationship at all with your clinics. Sometimes different testing facilities will offer, me or a family member to come in and get a procedure done. I deny those. I don't accept any of those. You guys haven't offered. We have no financial ties. I have no connection. It's literally because I have a podcast listener that I've befriended who knows people who have gone through this that said that you have to dig into this and then mention your book. That's why we're having this conversation. I have no other relationship to you.

Speaker 2:
[98:50] I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:
[98:51] But with your offerings at Stella Mental Health, and some things that people have independently done, like psychedelics, you've mentioned psychedelics. Some of the benefits that people have gotten from psychedelics, it almost sounds similar that I've heard stories of people that have felt like this weight that was on my chest, not everybody, right?

Speaker 2:
[99:09] And nothing works for everyone.

Speaker 1:
[99:11] Nothing works for everybody. But similarly, you hear these stories of people who have gone through psychedelics or other procedures that might be there, transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a service that you guys offer as well, too, TMS, that they've gotten these benefits. Do you think that where people have experienced these things, that it's also potentially working on the same nerve cluster, or that they have different ways that they're arriving to the same conclusions when they work?

Speaker 2:
[99:41] They're very different ways. So let's compare and contrast, if you don't mind. I had a psychedelic experience. I had psilocybin, for example. So it was interesting. So the way that works, psilocybin, I think, is a really excellent drug. It will probably be available relatively soon, we hope, or it's well for depression. It grows near tissue back. So in order to understand what's happening, it's pretty straightforward. So you need to know, let's say, three structures in the brain, simplified. PFC, prefrontal cortex, right here, amygdala, that's the bad one.

Speaker 1:
[100:18] The lizard brain, ancestral brain.

Speaker 2:
[100:22] Exactly. Emotional brain, limbic system, right. And then hippocampus. Hippocampus is memory. Or state, not emotional memory, but regular memory. So if PFC is active, it can suppress amygdala. If you can suppress amygdala, you are not going to be anxious. Hippocampus, if you can, hippocampus suppress amygdala as well. So if you think about it, from those three organs you need to know about. Psychedelics, glycylocybin, will activate PFC and can suppress amygdala, right? Playing Tetris game will activate hippocampus, will help PTSD by suppressing the amygdala.

Speaker 1:
[101:12] Tetris, the video game that was invented in Russia.

Speaker 2:
[101:15] That's the one. And then ketamine grows PFC as well. Transmitting the stimulation grows PFC as well. All that suppresses amygdala. But does the effect of amygdala directly? Not really, that I'm aware of. Stellate affects amygdala directly. So either raise the bridge or lower the water. Right. So what we found, I came up with the term SOF method, combination of ketamine and stellate. SOF method, special operative force method. Because ketamine does some very good things, like grows neurocuticid back and forth. It's used for depression quite often. But it also activates fight and flight nerve growth. That's not good. So combination of the two seems to work better. It's an agistic effect. That makes sense?

Speaker 1:
[102:06] Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 2:
[102:07] So that's why, I mean, if you look at those three structures, it's way oversimplification, there's no question about it. But that kind of gives you a feel. But the great thing about Stellate for me, I can isolate just the sympathetic nervous system, just to the brain. Because if I give you a pill to do what my blood does, you're not going to be able to walk, your blood pressure will drop. Other places, sympathetic should be working. But Stellate is a separate place.

Speaker 1:
[102:33] Anytime somebody thinks about a shot in the neck, which you guys have demonstrated is very safe, every medical intervention has some risks that are there. That's why you mentioned earlier that if somebody has really challenging heart problem or other severe issues, lung breathing issues no different than getting an epidural, you would say this is not for you. This is not for you.

Speaker 2:
[102:55] True.

Speaker 1:
[102:56] How do you guys measure essentially things going wrong, adverse reactions? Is that something that you track? Is there the possibility? Is there any sort of history? Just as you're mentioning, if you're interviewing somebody that was separate from your clinic, not trained from you guys, are they pain board certified? How many procedures have they done? And has anything gone wrong? Right? What are examples of things going wrong? And how would somebody ask that even for your own operation?

Speaker 2:
[103:24] Sure. I mean, that's totally, I think that's reasonable. So I've done 5,000 procedures. I can tell you that. I had no fatalities. I have not had any permanent complications. No, I quit. Just to be sure, we'll do two of them. I mean, that's my stats currently. So that's a very commonly asked question. What are the possible side effects? How often does it really happen? And what can you do about it? Right? That's a fair question. So, when I gave a testimony in Congress, if you want to see that, by the way, they called me interesting names in Congress in 2010. Here's what I told them. I said, Stellate Ganglion Block has been around since 1925. My father was born in 1925. It will not cause a tail. It will not cause any weird complications. It's like when you have a new drug, you don't know long term what it's going to do. Bupivicaine has been used. That's what drug we use. It has been clinically used since 1970s.

Speaker 1:
[104:23] Yeah, that's actually what you're injecting in the nerve clusters.

Speaker 2:
[104:25] That's what's injected, right. And this is a drug that's used for pregnant women. You know, it's going to be pretty safe. You're not going to give spunky stuff to pregnant women. So the drug itself we know is safe. The needle can go in the wrong areas and can cause problems. So there was only one big study done on complications. 1992, in Germany, the country of Germany did 45,000 Stellate Ganglion Blocks that year. Now, this is before X-ray, before ultrasound, right? So before we used to do it, before we had the equipment, we would palpate, we would feel where we were at and stick a needle. So you know it's safer now because we can see where we're going. That's why I insist on people using guidance. Anyway, 45,000 Stellates, nobody died. They had 11 seizures, which they were able to deal with. Seizures happen if you hit a blood vessel, inject inside the blood vessel. It will cause a seizure. Then we can talk about how to treat it and all of that. Two, they had nine people who had pneumothorax. So standard Stellate Ganglion Block is done at the bottom of the neck, it's called C7, which is the lowest vertebra. That's why it's seven. I do that C6 and everybody pretty much now does C6. So you're away from the lung because there's a lung right here. You're staying away. Plus you could see there's ultrasound. And they, so again, out of 45,000, they had, I think, 11 seizures, nine pneumothorax, and three allergic reactions to whatever. That was the experience. I mean, it is possible to do really bad things with that needle if you really don't know what you're doing. But you have to work pretty hard because it's a safe area. It's pretty close to the skin. If you know what you're doing, it's the same. I mean, it's been done since 925 for various pain conditions like headaches, CRPS, which is burning in the hand. Can it go wrong? Yes. But part of what I do as a CMO of Estella, mental health, is make sure you have the equipment. For example, respiration equipment, intubation equipment, that kind of stuff. Also, if the drug, Bupivacaine, goes into an artery or vein, and somebody starts to seize, there is a substance called interlipids you can inject and just sucks it out of the blood. It's really cool. You didn't know about it in the 90s. It's such a cool thing. I didn't ever go. I was in Columbia two weeks ago. I said, I'm not going there unless I can bring my interlipids. I brought my interlipids. It made me very happy. Happy interlipids.

Speaker 1:
[107:10] Have you guys had to use that ever?

Speaker 2:
[107:13] We used it twice where people were a little confused. I wasn't sure.

Speaker 1:
[107:17] You weren't sure if they were getting a seizure?

Speaker 2:
[107:20] Well, they didn't have a seizure seizure, but they were not behaving the way I wanted them to behave. Yeah. So, we watched them, and then if they're not behaving quite right, it's like, because the interlipids have no downside. It's nothing. It's just fat. So, I'd rather give it than not give it. And they got better. Was it because they were a little confused? I don't know. But the point is, if you think of it, do it. That's why I didn't train everybody. I had somebody who had a pre-seizure episode and I was doing a different procedure, Lumbar Sympathetic Block. And he was like, he didn't speak English, I wasn't sure, and he was like completely confused. I gave him interlipids, came right back. No problems.

Speaker 1:
[108:06] Now, going back to this, you were talking about this German study that was done, that was like in the 90s, you said?

Speaker 2:
[108:10] In 92.

Speaker 1:
[108:11] 92. In Germany, they had done 45,000 of these procedures that were there. You know, with this shot having been around so long, were there other people in the literature, case studies journal, you know, conferences that were proposing that, hey, you know, you treat 45,000 people for pain. Many of them probably have, you know, some version of trauma or PTSD or something like that. You know, were there other people that were hypothesizing that, hey, this should actually be a first line approach for, you know, for helping with this injury in the way that you came to that conclusion.

Speaker 2:
[108:53] You mean mental condition.

Speaker 1:
[108:55] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[108:56] That's a tremendous, nuanced question. Let me give you a complete answer to that. So first of all, pain physicians are not psychiatrists. They care of pain, goodbye. They're not just in your mental state. I'd stick a needle in your go-away. So 1947, in Cleveland Clinic, there was a publication using Stellate Ganglion Block to treat depression. 1947, forgotten. 1955, there was an article that was written, I don't know where, but mental disorders, oh, it was climasteric psychosis. Climasteric is another term for saying menopausal psychosis. They treated with Stellate, 1955, forgotten. There was a paper written in 1992 where they did Stellate for burning of the hand and PTSD. Burning of the hand went away and PTSD went away, I thought, well, because the hand doesn't burn, they don't have PTSD, they felt better, right? And the question, many, many, you're asking, I think one of the questions that we had to commonly asked of me, especially my colleagues, like, okay, you're not that smart. Let's start with that.

Speaker 1:
[110:15] That wasn't my question.

Speaker 2:
[110:16] No, but I'm telling you, without asking, but I'll get to it.

Speaker 1:
[110:18] I actually came to a different conclusion, but I'll get to that in a second.

Speaker 2:
[110:21] Their point was like, you're not that smart. All the doctors, they came from 1925 to now. Why you? Anybody else that has done Stellate? I said, well, smarter than you, just for entertainment. But number two, I came at it from perspective that it will work. I was prepared to treat mental condition because of the finished paper when I did the clipping. I was trying to treat that because I understood that anatomy. In medicine, if you don't understand it, it will have nothing to do with that. I understood the biology and I was looking for that in isolated group just PTSD, no pain. Because if you take your pain away and people's depression gets better, what's surprising in that? Your back pain doesn't hurt anymore, you can walk normally and have sex normally, you're not depressed. What do you think it's working? Because the pain is gone. But what made the first case publication 2008 unique, he was purely for PTSD. No pain condition at all. I wasn't trying to treat any pain.

Speaker 1:
[111:31] You were divorcing the two, which gave you the momentum to say that, hey, there's an opportunity to double down on this, to actually help people who are not dealing with pain, who are just, quote, unquote, having this trauma-based injury to the body.

Speaker 2:
[111:47] That's exactly right. That's precisely right. Hopkins did a great review in 2016, and they were looking at when, how long has Stellate been used for psychiatric conditions, and for what? So the first paper was 1947, Cleveland Clinic. Then there was 1955 about climasteric psychosis and things like that. Occasional. There was a paper in 2003, for example, for schizophrenia, that accidentally helped schizophrenia. Then there was a paper by me in 2008. Then all the other papers talking about using Stellate for 2010, 2011, 2012, and so on. So it started with my 2008 paper, and then went from there. In fact, there was, I'm not going to use the name of the person, but he's worked very hard to discredit that I was the one who came up with that. And then eventually I had to write a letter to the editor saying he's wrong. This is the effects. This is how it is. No, the guy who did Lipinski was the name of the guy in 1992, about the hand burning and the PTSD together. He was saying that's what caused, that's what started it. My point to them, his partner, he replicated my work in 2010 after I published 2008. So, no debate, no discussion. In fact, there was going to be a paper, there was a chapter in the book that was excluded based on other recommendations, shall we say, that addressed that. So, just to make it more interesting. So, in Amazon, in Amazon, there is a review, all the reviews are great except for one. And they were saying, this is written by AII. So, the lady who wrote the book, I said, does your husband know that you're AI? What? She's a great writer. And then, they clearly didn't read the book because some of the quotes from it were just wrong. And they said, the only person that I would let do the procedure would be this other person who's been trying to downgrade me for years. And she's quoting his name in the review on Amazon. I've asked Amazon, I said, take that down. That's clearly prejudicial. It violates you. Nah, they don't care about it. And they're just like, sad.

Speaker 1:
[114:02] Well, you know, I think that in this day and age, people love hearing all the sides, even if people are motivated by their own intentions. And I think what's healthy is somebody like yourself just talking about it head on. People are allowed to have their opinions, they're allowed to have their beliefs, they're allowed to do their own advocacy. They think they're doing their own version of God's work by shutting down people who are grifters or this or that. And then we present all that information, including the criticism. And it goes back to this idea that, you know, human beings are smart. And the ones who have been suffering or no family members that have been, they understand risk reward and they can navigate it, ask people, get opinions from people, listen to patient testimonials, talk to people, understand the valid criticisms that are out there, ask very tough questions to providers. And it's great, right? That's like the beauty of this modern day and age. And, you know, one of the benefits that have come from, you know, long format podcast conversations that are out there is that, hey, let's just talk about it all, right? And let's be...

Speaker 2:
[115:10] Exactly. And there's detail by people who actually know what they're talking about. People who actually like, who started something. I can give you detail, endless detail about it, because this is, I've been focusing on it for years. It's been 20 years, actually. So the first time I did the block, it was 2006. It's 2026, which is kind of interesting. So the paper came out two years later, but it's been, this is 20 years anniversary. So I think this is going to be the year for Breakthrough, finally.

Speaker 1:
[115:39] Yeah. Fascinating. Very fascinating. You know, at the deepest level, as we're winding down here, you know, people are asking themselves this big picture question, is this idea of like, can trauma truly be healed or are we just learning to live with it? And you've painted the picture today that there is this possibility that if we see it through the lens of injury, that there's an opportunity, it may not work for everyone, but that there are strong signals and medicine, if you look through the history of medicine, you're looking for, everything starts off with case studies.

Speaker 2:
[116:18] All right.

Speaker 1:
[116:18] Even hand washing, you know, if people look at the history of hand washing, there was outrage at the idea from the early surgeons and people in delivery.

Speaker 2:
[116:30] That story gave me a lot of hope. Yeah. I'll tell you why. So, Shamirovich was the name of the guy. He was from Hungary. He went to medical school in Austria, which was the place to be in his day. He got there and he looked around and he found that when women gave birth at home, by nurse practitioners, as opposed to doctors in hospitals, the death rate was three times higher in the hospital. So he was like, why would that be? But you need to know at that time, we're talking about circa 1873, something like that. And this was bad humors. Basically, if it smelled bad, it transmitted disease. That was the thinking in his day. And then, so he started studying it. He published on that, he wrote a book about it. He went lecturing and he went to the doctor's this. He said, wash your hands, you're transmitting something. I don't know what it is, but you're doing something. You think that embrace it, but they said, no. They said, you're calling us dirty. So they kind of, he kind of lost it a little bit. And he got placed in the psych ward. He was beaten to death a month after he was admitted. Twenty years later though, which is kind of interesting, 20 years now, 20 years later, germ theory came out line by Lister in France. And they go, oh yeah, of course, you're transmitting germs from here to the mother. What turns out is the surgeons used to dissect dead bodies, autopsies and walk over and deliver babies. So they carried stuff from dead bodies and that's what mothers got fever, childhood fever. And that's what killed them, infections. So he was celebrated 20 years later as saver of babies. He was 20 years dead.

Speaker 1:
[118:32] And beaten.

Speaker 2:
[118:33] And beaten and he died. But I'm here still talking about it, it's still making a difference. So I to be, yay, I'm ahead.

Speaker 1:
[118:42] It's a great story and there's different stories inside of the history of health, medicine. There's another really great story about the gentleman who had been sounding the alarm about trans fats for years. For years, we knew and there was so much data that trans fats were deadly fats and yet they were so ubiquitous, there were sort of modern industrial processing. We wrote about a whole newsletter about this. The gentleman's name is Fred Kumero. And fascinating, fascinating story. Sounding alarm and everybody during that time, doctors, researchers, other stuff, there's no way this can't be there. Industry trying to suppress the idea and he just didn't stop the fight. He just kept on. And then finally, in his lifetime, different than the story that you shared, there was started to be progress and recognition, no different than some of the campaigns around smoking that, wow, trans fats are a unique fat that are very deadly, even at lower levels in the body. And we have to make changes in our food system to prevent these fats from being there. The unfortunate thing is that still trans fats end up in our food system and we get exposed to them, but largely, These industrial levels that people were consuming is much more lower. And Fred Kumaro, I think, lived into his 90s.

Speaker 2:
[120:08] Yeah. Well, I mean, I can feel that. Pylori. People thought ulcers were not infectious. He showed it. It took him 20 years of fighting, 30 years. So, it's endless. But I think it takes people who are committed and who are right. They knew they were right because they knew the information and they knew what they were talking about and they stuck to their guns. God bless people like that.

Speaker 1:
[120:37] Part of medicine is, of course, people changing and evolving their thought as they get presented with new information. In micro, medium or heavy ways, have you evolved how you've thought about this since 2020, sorry, since 2006? You've been doing this now for 20 years. Have there been changes in your approach as you've been presented with new information, clinical guidance that have been there that are worth noting or mentioning?

Speaker 2:
[121:10] Yeah, there's a couple of things which are new. So at CIL, the basic things, anatomy is basic. So if you put a tracer in the ganglion, it connects to the brain, there's no question that. I'm starting to understand stellate as more, not just, before I was just thinking about that it changed the sympathetic nervous system, fight-and-flight nerves in the brain and norepinephralal. That was the only effect I would think about. Now, I think of it as affecting the immune system. One, because it reduced interleukin 6 and all this. So, inflammation causes brain fire. Brain fire leads to not functioning well, depression and all the things. We know stellate reduces inflammation. I think that's huge. Further, epigenetics, so genetic code can be changed by stellate. That's huge. I think that's pretty amazing. The other thing I am thinking about it now, in the last six months, I became a social media expert. But, I am going to be presenting at an anxiety conference next week, talking about anxiety in adolescents and their age. So, a lot of that is secondary to social media. So, social media, I am actually writing a paper right now on PTSD and social media that is the same in many ways. Causes inflammation, causes sleep dysfunction. In fact, if you look at the suicide rate of pre-teens, we are talking about 9 to 12, it's spiking. It's the highest it's ever been. Why are 9 to 12 year olds taking their lives, right? Part of it is the screens, because if you don't sleep, because if you are watching your screen, you don't sleep. If you don't sleep, now it's 1 or 2 in the morning, your inflammation goes up, no question, right? That happens. So now you're depressed, your inflammation is increased, and all of that continues. And then you do, especially women or girls are more sensitive because they have a tendency of going online and comparing themselves, and they're beating themselves up. So all of that are major problems. So part of our, you know, we're going to go back in our patients and look, has the addictive use of technology been reduced by using Stellate? I don't know if you're familiar with Metta just lost their lawsuit and all those algorithms and all of that, dopamine, blah, blah, blah. The bottom line is we know our children trouble. I think Stellate will have a function in that, but I think prevention is key. You need to reduce, you need to get no, my recommendation is very simple, no phones and better for anybody after 9:30 p.m. No screens, no nothing. Because blue light is completely screws up, no tone, and you can't sleep, and that causes all types of problems. Especially the younger brain, your brain, children brain up to 16 years old, is built when they're sleeping. You're not sleeping, you're not building your brain. It's not good. And you're already seeing increased anxiety and also decreased academic function. That's not good. Like in China, if you're under 18, after 9 p.m., all the phones go out by law. That's that, last six years. No choice, no debate.

Speaker 1:
[124:43] Crazy.

Speaker 2:
[124:44] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[124:44] That may not work here in the United States in the land of the free. But the problem is there. And a lot of parents are struggling with it. And they just, you know, and kids know it's a problem. And they have this yearning for, you know, life in the 90s before these phones.

Speaker 2:
[125:03] Well, the cool thing is kids are smarter than you think. So in fact, I was in the news about breaking, phone breaking. So turns out 10 to 20% of Gen Zs now got dumb phones. It's like, I have a website. It's dumb is smarter.com.

Speaker 1:
[125:26] That's yours?

Speaker 2:
[125:26] That's my website. Take a look. It's got, I think it's cute. It has my new book I'm working on. But what's important, though, is that they're realizing. So one of the questions the newscaster said, it's like, okay, why is a breaking going on? Are the kids under technology? No, they feel bad. They can't sleep. Remember, they don't sleep and they feel terrible and they can't function and they cranky. Why is that happening? Because the dopamine drops, right? So if the dopamine goes up and down all the time, your body is out of control. And a lot of people are getting into breaking.

Speaker 1:
[126:03] Breaking.

Speaker 2:
[126:06] B-R-I. Breaking is like making a device a brick. So there are a lot of software. In fact, I'm working on a software package for me. Young children. So we're talking about one to two years old, right? And the mothers. It's a special bond. Special time, dopamine, oxytocin, people loving. So there is a term that was introduced in 2018. It's called teleference, or technoference. So technology interfering. So there was a study done years ago. So if the child is looking at the mother, the mother turns her head, they get anxious.

Speaker 1:
[126:40] Why? What's going on? You should be focused on me.

Speaker 2:
[126:43] Yeah, you're ignoring me. I'm going to die. I'm going to starve, right? This is one year old we're talking about. What they've been studying is phones because women are doing this. And then it turns out that children are becoming more anxious and women are becoming depressed. So I talked to one of the mothers like, oh my God, I'm so excited. I have this new thing coming in. It's gone. I'm going to break my phone. So it's not going to suck me in. I can spend more time with my child. That's a big deal. And the problem is we are making anxious children. We are making, and then the other thing I saw like phones attach to the crib. That's just mind-boggling to me. It's bad, but it's happening a lot. So the point is, thank God, Gen Z was the first generation immersed with smartphones from the beginning and Alpha generation right now, they start to wake up. There's a huge market for dumb phones and bricking.

Speaker 1:
[127:41] I think there's literally like a company called Brick that they put this magnet device and you have to connect it.

Speaker 2:
[127:48] It has its issues. That's why mine is going to be so much better. You know it? But yeah, it's called bricking. Oh my God. But the mere fact, that was the question. Why are the children getting away from the phone? Because they feel bad. And the parents should be parents in the sense that you can exercise parental control. You can set it. So people can have access to the phones, let's say, one hour a day. You don't need to play all those video games. You don't do all of that. But the key point is no phones in the bedroom. Definitely. And you know, average number of hours that kids play is seven to nine hours per day. It's horrible. On the phone. The reason I got into it at all, my son was very avid user of video games. A year ago, he said, I just want to do, I'm done with this. I'm just going to do Legos. Let's get some Legos. I'm going to go see his room. Big ships in his room. Because he knew, smart enough to know this was bad for him. And he switched from that. And now he's getting old consoles, black and white, because it doesn't suck in like that. Every Tuesday now he's doing board games. No screens. Before I told, don't do it. Oh, but you're an old man, you don't understand. This is what it's like. This is what it's like. It's like, no, it's not.

Speaker 1:
[129:22] I love that.

Speaker 2:
[129:23] That's my rose. And it means that the next generation are being self-aware enough to get them.

Speaker 1:
[129:29] Yeah. And we have to support them with the right information and families. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[129:34] Yeah. Yes. And go in nature and walk. The point is, so, you know, after like you, autonomic nervous system gets controlled or better, that's what you should be doing, right? Not get involved back and suck in the game, but nature, get some sleep, all of that.

Speaker 1:
[129:52] I want to give you an opportunity before we mention again, where people can find your book, and also the clinics and information about them. I want to give an opportunity for you to leave our audience with a final message. There's this quote from the book that I'll share. It's your own writing. Trauma is not a life sentence. It's an injury and it can heal. What are some final words you want to leave our audience with?

Speaker 2:
[130:17] Well, considering my perspective on suicide, which I think we've covered, if you're suffering from trauma, symptoms. But to me, I don't know that it's not a global term. If you're having symptoms like you can't sleep, you're very anxious. If you're feeling of doom, know it's a physiologic change in your mind. It is possible to treat it. It is important to know that it's treatable. You can get out of this trauma hell, I call it. If you don't have hope, that's what takes our lives. You need to have hope that it's possible to do. If it hasn't happened yet, something hasn't worked, look somewhere else. Don't keep doing the same thing, expect different results. It's not going to work. Whatever you're doing is not working this three months. Stop. You want something else. If you've had 20 years of psychiatric medications, and all type of things are still in trouble, try something different. I'm not saying Stellate. It could be other things. It could be KMS. It could be ketamine. It could be psychedelic, imigate. There's a lot of choices that are coming online, which is not conventional. But the most important thing is, if you don't have hope, you're not going to pursue it. You're not going to get treated.

Speaker 1:
[131:36] An important message. Don't give up. Keep on looking. Keep on digging to find the right choices.

Speaker 2:
[131:43] They're real choices. It's not just hypothetical. It's not taking this on, take your press, and now you're going to take a... No, we're talking about the completely different approach. Psilocybin. All medications will be around forever. I mean, it's not a medication. God made it. But a lot of people with depression have amazing results. Try something different. Don't do the same thing. But be careful. I mean, there are certain things you need, like Ibogaine, for example, a great drug, but it's not available here. But you need to do it in the same way. Do not do that particular one in the cave. That's a dangerous medication or natural substance.

Speaker 1:
[132:23] The book is out. People can get it. We have a copy right here. The God Shot, Healing Trauma's Legacy, The Science, The Stories, The Solution, Lincoln's side of the show notes. Stellamental Health. You've mentioned the multiple clinics. Some examples of some cities were recording here in Santa Monica. There's a location here, I believe, in Santa Monica. You haven't been before?

Speaker 2:
[132:44] I think so.

Speaker 1:
[132:46] What are some other cities inside of the US that you guys have operations in?

Speaker 2:
[132:49] We have Boston, San Francisco, San Diego. I don't remember.

Speaker 1:
[132:57] Yeah, they can find it on the website.

Speaker 2:
[132:59] Yeah, if you go, if you put in a search for stellamentalhealth.com, I think that pops up.

Speaker 1:
[133:05] Eugene, thank you so much for this wide-ranging conversation on your story, your vision for mental health, which is connected to physical help and physical injury in the body, your vision for providing patients with hope, the inspiring stories that you've shared, the funny stories you've shared, the heartwarming stories you've shared, opening up about your own family's journey in this process of navigating trauma. And most importantly, how this shot, which sounds very scary when you first initially hear about it, and something that a lot of people wouldn't think that they want to actually explore, that the shot in the neck actually could be something that could help them get to the root issue of why trauma exists in the first place.

Speaker 2:
[133:50] I appreciate it. Thanks for spreading the word. You know, simple, I mean, it's not, I'm not saying your podcast is simple or anything like that. I think the more people get more information, I truly believe it saves lives. And that's for a clinician to come up with my little carby hole and seeing all this grow is just an amazing journey.

Speaker 1:
[134:10] Yeah. Well, I'm excited to have it in my toolbox of options that I could present to family members. I have many family members that are physicians or people that are asking for, hey, what's available that's out there for people who are really struggling with trauma, suicidal, you mentioned even potential with, I've had multiple people in my life who unfortunately, past co-workers who have dealt with schizophrenic episodes that they're navigating. I'm excited to have this as one of the tools in the toolbox. I haven't had anybody that I am personally connected to go through this because I've only been familiar with their work over the last couple of months, but I've gotten a chance to talk to people that you and your team have treated, and it literally gave back, give them back their life, and so.

Speaker 2:
[135:02] One other site I want to give you is drugeneleopov.com. That has, if you go to publications, everything I've talked about and more is under publications and presentations. So when people want to read the journals, the papers, they're there.

Speaker 1:
[135:21] Yeah, and we'll have every paper you've mentioned here. Our team will link the show notes and put the paper in the video, if you're watching on Spotify or YouTube. But yes, we'll also link to that website as well. Eugene, thank you so much.

Speaker 2:
[135:34] Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:
[135:38] Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already subscribed, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on, that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy to digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is by the way free, and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This, or just go to dhruprohit.com, that's dhrupurohit.com, and click on the tab that says, try this.