Twelve minutes was the estimated amount of time that it took to completely change my life forever. I think you're gonna love today's story with doctor Matthew Galati. It's everything I look for in chatter that matters. Resilience, reinvention, expression, overcoming circumstances, chasing dreams, changing your life and others for the better. But it's also the reality of life. I mean, this is a
kid that was firing at all cylinders. Second year med student, admired for his intellect, also a bit of a Renaissance man, loved playing soccer, music, friends, and family. And in a split second, it all changed when he hit some black ice and suffered a horrific brain injury. Nobody could tell my family when I was going to emerge from this coma. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours, it could have been days, it could have been years. That's the unpredictability of the brain.
In the prognosis, he'll get better but not much. And this is a story of not only him getting better, but finding his calling. I've really learned so much through this process, me and my family, and we can really help other people who were going through similar experiences. Helping others that have suffered traumatic brain injury and more importantly, even helping us with our brains. Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented
by RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast and ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome and they're always appreciated. So doctor Matthew Galati, welcome to A Chatter That Matters. Thanks, Tony. I'm excited to be here. You have such an extraordinary story. And I I think the best way to paint this picture of how life changes on a moment is to sort of set up
your life before the moment. And, you know, when you're a medical student, a passion for soccer and music, just tell me a little bit about Matt before he became Doctor. Galati. So I was as you mentioned, I was very athletic. So I was into hockey and soccer. And as we'll learn through this podcast, athleticism
and being physically active is actually a very important part of recovery. So the fact that I was very physically fit and active before my injury voted in favor of having good recovery after my injury because I was able to get back to that same level of activity relatively quickly. I was also also had a number of different
interests like guitar, so music. I also had a very supportive social network, so lots of friends, very close with my family, and that is also a positive prognostic factor for having a good recovery following traumatic brain injury. Talk to me about your love for medicine too because with so many different interests, I mean, I I just listened to you, you know, soccer and music and a big social network. How
did medicine even find time within your life? I think medicine was something that I was always interested in, and I I always had a passion to I I know it sounds cliche, but to help people. When I was really young, I actually had a friend who passed away of, at a very young age. He ruptured an aneurysm in his brain, and that kind of highlighted for me the
fragility of life. I had a a best friend actually who we went through kindergarten together, high school, university, and we we even went to medical school and and residency. So we always had this kind of competition between us. It was a healthy competition and, and, yeah, we we pushed each other. You know, we've sort of touched on the fact before the accident. And I'd love to now take us back from what I understand. You were driving back to school
from Toronto when your car hit black ice. I was back home, visiting friends and family for the weekend. My medical school was in Windsor. My family and friends live in Toronto, so it's about a four hour distance. And the weather conditions were were so bad on the Sunday night when I was originally planning to leave that I I thought it's probably safer if I leave the Monday morning instead. And I had to be back at school for a
mandatory small group session. So, I had a passenger with me in the car, a friend who was in another program at, the same university, and we started our drives. And the weather was so bad that there was actually a detour route off the highway at Woodstock. So roughly the halfway point between Toronto and and Windsor. And it was on this detour route where I would suddenly hit black ice, car would spin out of control, and I'd collide with a tree and hit my head either on the
side of the tree or on the side of the car. And, yeah, the rest is history. I suffered a number of severe injuries. I had rib fractures. I collapsed both my lungs. I damaged a nerve in my face. So for months it looked like I suffered a stroke. I couldn't move one side of my face and, skull fractures. And most critically, I had this bleed inside my brain and and was knocked into a three day coma. What was it like to come out of the
coma after three days? Did you have any comprehension of what happened or how serious of a state your house was in? So at first, I'd say that my insight was extremely limited. For whatever reason, I didn't feel much pain. I don't know if my brain just wasn't processing pain at that time. You'd imagine if you were to emerge from a coma, you'd feel completely different. I still felt like
myself. So in my mind, I just suffered a a mild concussion, and I was gonna be back to my my medical schooling and my social lives and all of my activities relatively quickly, but clearly that that wasn't the case. And the way other people were perceiving me when they came to visit was much different from how I was perceiving the situation. Like, I have a my memory of that time period is very splotchy, but I have a distinct memory of
the friend of mine coming to visit. And I was talking to him, and I must not have been making the most sense because there were tears just running down his his cheeks. And I was I remember thinking to myself, like, why is he so upset? Like, I feel normal.
And the doctors, I guess, when you started to get a better appreciation certainly painted a much grimmer picture of the situation you're in and more importantly, not just in terms of the next couple of weeks, but potentially a situation that would change your life forever. I know this was over ten years ago.
The stigma and perception of the ability of the brain to heal from something like this to a large extent where you'd be able to resume a high level program like medicine was, you know, the prognosis wasn't great. Coming out of emerging from the coma, the dogma that was being told to my parents was he suffered this injury, he may be able to recover a little bit, but it may be best if he is realistic about this and changes his
goals. They were just trying to be very guarded in any information that they were giving to my family about my potential to return to the life I I had before. You think that that part of that reason is to really set a bar lower so that it makes you come to terms what feasibility is versus what it seems your mindset was wired about as desirability. I'm not gonna accept status quo. There was all this research already emerging that the brain has this capacity to
change and heal and rewire. But what was being taught in in medical school, even me as a second year medical student, my understanding was that from my studies was that the brain is a fixed organ. There's no room for the brain to heal, create new brain cells, reroute, recover to a large extent. So, and then also I think that it has to do with the level of a physician that you are. So if you're if you're dealing with somebody in the emergency setting, it's a very acute
setting. You're only seeing that patient, for a very short period of time and it's early on and you're seeing the worst. Right? They only have that one specific snapshot of time in their mind. The next step on your recovery is the Toronto rehab, lots of therapy to regain your cognitive and physical abilities. When did you start thinking that you're gonna defy the
knowledge of the day? That perception really started at Sunnybrook Hospital, which is the step down, hospital that I was I was in after my acute care stay. You know, at first, I was in denial about how, as I mentioned before, about how severe my injury was. And then when I started to learn that I had a brain bleed and the severity of my injury, you know, then the anger kind of set in, why me? And then I started to realize, well, I have no, I've hit rock
bottom. I have nowhere to go but up. So why not try to give myself the best possible chance? So I actually at Sunnybrook, I had a friend of mine who came and and she brought me a book called My Stroke of of Insight. The book is all about this neuroscientist who suffers a stroke and it took her seven years, but she was actually able to recover and, rehabilitate her brain and considers herself fully healed of her brain injury. You know, from
that book, I realized, okay, the brain can change. The brain does have immense capacity. How hard is it to believe? Because I know if there's a physical injury that I can see or feel, I know when it's improving. I know when I get back to an element of normality, sometimes if the rehab is done in the right way, I'm actually stronger than I was when I started. But when it comes to a brain, there's a lot
of intangible cues that you have to factor in. In fact, believe I would have to imagine because you can't see it the way you could see it if that injury was on your arm or broken your leg or whatever. Absolutely. I mean, it's a humbling process and it really gives you an appreciation for little things that we take for granted on a day to day basis, like the ability to articulate. I I remember, like, when I was recovering, I couldn't
just speak fluidly like I'm speaking to you now. I literally had to spell everything out in my brain before voicing it. Yeah, it's extremely frustrating, especially going from somebody who was in in medical school to suddenly having difficulty with basic math and and speaking. How much today do you value the gift of intellect that you were blessed with knowing that you had lost it for a while? And because I have to imagine growing up when you're that gifted, you begin to just take things for
granted. I'm the smart one. I'm I could figure things out. But when you go five steps back, if not 50 steps back, it must be something today that you appreciate more than you could ever imagine. Oh, definitely. Once I graduated from residency and, you know, finished my studies successfully, I I wanted to pay it forwards or pay it back. I truly believe that everything happens for a reason. I felt like it was my duty to share what I had learned with other people so that other people can have
similarly great recoveries. And I'm not saying everybody's gonna make a full recovery, but there are things that we could all do to improve our brain health such that their recovery would be better if they didn't do these things. It's kind of like laying the foundation,
creating the best environment for your brain to heal. And speaking of people that showed up at the right time in your life, talk to me about doctor Robin Green and you sort of stepping up for was considered, I guess, a very innovative program. Yeah. So when I I was a patient at Toronto Rehab, I was enrolled in a research study that was, being conducted by doctor Robin Green, who at the time was the Canadian chair of of neurotrauma research. And basically, what this study was about, it was about
intensifying one's therapies. So there wasn't any talk about, like, you know, exercise has this effect on the brain, so we should ramp it up. But but it was just more, if we give somebody more therapy than what the average person receives in the inpatient setting, will their recovery be better? So, I was receiving double the occupational therapy, double the physiotherapy, double the speech language pathology, social work, and psychology treatment that all the other
patients were receiving on the same unit. And also as a part of this research study, I had to write a series of four neuropsychological evaluations that tested all of my cognitive functions like memory and attention and speed of processing.
It was clear that I was making improvements through this intensified therapy, but, the first neuropsych test that I wrote was at the end of my stay at Toronto Rehab, and it was clear that it was gonna take a lot more hard work and determination before I was able to return to a program like medicine. What advice could you give to people? Because if I'm understanding, you know, you've signed up, you're doing double the work, you're certainly improving,
not at the level maybe you wanna be at. Medical school is still not within arms race of desire. But at least you take those signals of improvement saying it's worth the investment versus where I see a lot of people kind of quitting because they're not achieving what they set out to achieve right away. It's never a linear pathway. It's
always, you know, you're gonna face setbacks. You're you're not gonna achieve exactly what you want to achieve in in the time span but it's the people that keep pushing forwards and learn from their mistakes or keep trying to get better, you know success actually happens. Failure only occurs if you give up. When we come back, doctor Galati and I talk about his own struggles with impostor syndrome and what it took for him to overcome it. And of course, my three takeaways.
Hi. This is Tony Chapman. I wanna talk to you about what RBC Wealth Management is doing to support healthy aging. Old age is becoming old news. We're living longer, and planning for our future means we need to integrate health, wellness, and our financial matters. RBC Wealth Management is partnering with leading experts and organizations like the MIT AgeLab, the National Institute on Aging, the Women's Brain Health Initiative, Elder Caring, and the Women's AgeLab.
Why? To provide you with comprehensive resources covering every aspect of you aging well. This includes support for your physical and mental health, caregiving, maintaining financial stability, and preparing for later life health issues, ensuring you can age safely and comfortably, and ideally in your own home. With RBC Wealth Management, you create a personalized plan that adapts as your needs
change, giving you peace of mind and security. Visit rbcwealthmanagement.com and learn more about healthy aging and start planning for your future. Healthy aging? Well that matters to you, to me, and to RBC. At the time there was a huge stigma behind brain injury and there was a lot of hesitancy from you know people around me as to whether I'd be able to return and function at the same level. This caused a lot of doubt in myself, a lot of self doubt. My guest today is doctor Matthew Galati.
He's a brain health advocate and boy does he have context. His journey began with a life altering traumatic brain injury. People basically patted him out and you'll soon learn he's not someone to cut out. So one of the interesting things that I was listening to one of the podcasts you're on, and you talked about developing your own recovery
protocol based on the six pillars of brain health. Talk to me about the six pillars and how you incorporated them into your daily routine, and then we'll bridge in terms of what can I do to incorporate some of those pillars into mine? When I returned home, I, you know, I started working with my outpatient rehab team, but I also started doing a lot of my own research about how best to heal my brain. And luckily I was a second year medical student, so I knew where to look for research and stuff.
My dad told me, he's like, I read something somewhere about a brain injury survivor, and he said he started exercising and his brain switched on like a light switch. Then my brain switched on like a light switch, and, I actually went to Chapters Indigo shortly after that and just stumbled across a book called Spark, the revolutionary new science of exercise in the brain. And this book really became my bible in the outpatient setting, and it starts out by talking about a school
district on the outskirts of Chicago. And there's nothing remarkable about the school district. They didn't put more money into the school district. The students weren't any smarter. But the one thing that was completely new was that they revamped their gym programs such that their students would exercise rigorously at the beginning of every every day to prime their brain
for learning. And, the really amazing thing is after changing this gym program, this one school district scored number one in the world in science, number six in the world in math on international standardized testing. And then the book goes on to talk about all the benefits that exercise has in the brain and their umpteen. And so, you know, it increases the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain. It increases neurochemicals in your brain like dopamine and serotonin that improve
mental processing. It's anti inflammatory. It promotes positive structural changes to the brain. So certain important brain regions, like the hippocampus, the memory center grow in size with exercise. And it actually creates new brain cells through a process called neurogenesis. So I started structuring my days around aerobic exercise. And by aerobic exercise, simply, I mean, any exercise which elevates your heart rate and breathing.
I learned also that it's not enough just to create these new brain cells. You then have to fill them with meaningful information. So, I would go home after running in the morning and I would take a short nap because I had some fatigue, and I would start my cognitive activities for the day. So, I started reviewing notes that I'd missed in med school to practice my memory and attention. I started writing in an agenda to practice my organizational skills, took up the guitar
again to practice my fine motor skills. Also supporting the aerobic and cognitive exercise bit, I was reading about all the other lifestyle pillars to support my brain holistically. So, brain healthy diets, mindfulness meditation, good sleep hygiene,
and limiting harmful exposures. And by harmful exposures, I mean things like drinking alcohol, which obviously have has profound bad effects on the brain, but maybe some things that people don't commonly think about, like the effects of harmful pesticide residue on the brain. So I was eating all my produce organic, for example. I mean, these are just simple things that anybody can apply. Are those in fact the pillars right there, or is that just the
the formation of that? So aerobic exercise, which simply creates new brain cells. Calm is exercise, which connects brain cells together, brain healthy diets to provide your brain with the best building blocks that it needs to heal and thrive, mindfulness meditation to filter out distracted thoughts about past or future so that we could be ultra focused on the present and structuring these new healthy neural connections.
Sleep, hygiene, and sleep is important for learning. It's actually when our brain consolidates memory and limiting harmful exposures to, again, provide the best environment for our brain to heal and thrive. Another interesting area of that you were talking about, and this is in a separate podcast, is the importance of the gut brain connection. The gut brain connection is huge. So the gut is actually it's been dubbed our second
brain. It's called our enteric nervous system. It's actually directly connected to the brain via the largest nerve in the body, which is the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is responsible for the bidirectional communication between the gut and the brain. And it's also the nerve that's responsible for our rest and
digest response. Also in the gut lies almost like an organ within an organ called our our microbiome, which is a community of microbes, which are essential for mediating this connection between the gut and the brain and the permeability of your gut lining. So, what I really learned about eating brain healthy is really fourfold. So, number one, you have to starve the bad bacteria in your guts. And what does the bad bacteria like to eat?
The bad bacteria likes to eat all the the yummy things that people usually enjoy as a treat, like refined carbs and sugar and, you know, junk food, fried food, fast food, there's always a balance of healthy and unhealthy bacteria. And when that balances off, there's more unhealthy bacteria that leads
to a lot of inflammation in our gut. And the lining between our gut cells, the the junctions start to widen and it becomes very permeable and inflammation can then pass from our guts into the bloodstream and wreak havoc on the brain. Conversely, you have to feed the good bacteria in your gut. And what does the good bacteria like to eat? They like to eat fiber rich prebiotic foods. So things like bananas, asparagus, garlic, fruits, and veggies. The third point is eating a lot of healthy
fats like omega three. Omega three actually makes up one third of our brain and our brain cells. And it's also anti inflammatory and neuroprotective. So very important to eat healthy fats. And the last point is to eat a plant
based diet. And some of the best foods for the brain are actually green leafy vegetables, like kale and spinach, because they contain something called lutein, which is like this little tiny protector that sits on top of our brain cells and scavenges all the free radicals or the stress or oxidative stress, all the things that are trying to harm our brain cells. What about fish? I mean, we talk about plant based, but in omegas and fish. I'm
just curious your thoughts on that. Fish are probably some of the best source of omega three that that we can get, because it's actually in a form that's more bioavailable, than if we were to get omega three from something like almonds or walnuts. You take this upon yourself. I love what you're doing in terms of the aerobic exercise and the guitar. You're just trying to move all of the
cylinders firing. Speaking of firing, you show up six months later to Toronto rehab and show remarkable improvement in your cognitive abilities. That must have been a very proud moment for you to realize that you had taken the the thinking of the day and moved the yardstick considerably. After implementing this new program for myself and by focusing on all the lifestyle pillars of brain health, by the time I wrote my second neuropsych evaluation,
everything was through the roof. I was now at the top of not just the brain injured, subjects who had written these neuropsychs, but also the healthy controls. Keep in mind, this was in a very controlled setting. A neuropsych is is very, very controlled. It's not doesn't simulate being able to, return back to something like medical school because there's a lot of variables there. Right? Like, by returning
back to medicine, I had to return to independent living. I also had to recognize that I had to incorporate these lifestyle pillars into my life, which, you know, with, a medical school schedule was very, very challenging. How much doubt did you have? Like, how did you overcome the daily, I can't do it the way I used to do it, or even comparing you to other people that had not had this severe brain injury? I mean, or was it just more of
the way you motivate yourself? At the time, like I mentioned, there was a huge stigma behind brain injury and there was a lot of hesitancy from, you know, people around me as to whether I'd be able to return and function at the same level as I was functioning before or at the same level as everybody else. And this caused a lot of doubt in myself, a lot of self doubt. And I almost had this imposter syndrome when I returned back, like, was I
worthy to be a medical student anymore? You know, I I did have to be my own best advocate, my own cheerleader, and and say, you know what? You can do this. Luckily, that's where the strong support of my family and my close friends came into play as well. How are you today? Your brain, your healing, your confidence that you're in a position to continue to do what you set out to do in life? Oh, I feel great right now. I do consider myself mostly fully healed. I still do have some cognitive
fatigue late on in in the days. I will occasionally, slur my words or have difficulty with processing information after a long day of work, but my my schedule is also much busier than the average person. So it's hard to say whether that's a consequence of my brain injury or just cognitive fatigue that anybody would experience with such a busy schedule. Let's shift gears because that that alone is an extraordinary story. And I could wrap up
my podcast right now with my three takeaways. But what I'm so impressed with is this brain changes initiative that you're taking upon yourself to help the other people that have had a traumatic brain injury? I kind of was almost ashamed of my injury at first. I said, well, you know, I use the analogy of, like, a hockey player. You know, a hockey player needs his hands to stick handle. It's if he doesn't have his hands, then he can't practice
his craft. Well, the most important organ that I needed to succeed in medicine was my brain, and that was the one organ that was was damaged. So are people going to trust a doctor who's suffered a brain injury? So I kind of said to myself, well, once I recover from this and I graduate from medicine, I wanna just lock, you know, all this talk about brain injury into a closet and never open
it again. And and then I started to realize, well, I've really learned so much through this process, me and my family. And we could really help other people who were going through similar experiences because when I remember when I was recovering from my injury, I was desperately searching for examples of anybody who had made, you know, a remarkable recovery and returned back to a high demanding program. We started Brain Changes as, you know, that avenue that people can
seek to help with their recovery. So our mission through Brain Changes is to improve the standard of care for traumatic brain injury by supporting clinical research. And we also put out a lot of education, awareness, and support around these lifestyle pillars of brain health. So that whether you have a brain injury, whether you're a healthcare provider, whether you're completely normal, in terms of your your brain function but just wanna know
how best to support it, It's right there for people. And from what I understand in April and Victoria, you're going to do another summit. Talk to me a little bit about what you're hoping to accomplish and even who you're attracting and what they're going to walk away with. When we started Brain Change, as I mentioned, the the goal was to improve the standard of care for brain injury. And really the way we saw that was threefold. So number one, through the
research. The second way we thought we needed to influence a change in the standard of care was teaching the teacher. So almost teaching medical providers these approaches to to healing the brain. And the third point was to educate the everyday person that the brain has the immense capacity to change and heal and recover. As you can imagine, even as a second year student, medical student at the time, I was with the understanding that the brain is a fixed organ, that
there's no room to create new brain cells. So I could only imagine what the average everyday person thinks. So the goal of the summit is really to bring all the stakeholders in the area of brain injury, but even keep if you just have an interest
in brain health in general to the table. So it brings together patients, family members, health care providers, you know, the lay public or everyday person into a day of brain health, and there's going to be lots of brain healthy talks centered around each individual lifestyle pillar of brain health, and they're gonna be given TED talk style. So very digestible with one or two salient take home
points for for the audience. Not too scientific. This year is gonna be a three day event, and it's gonna be three days of lots of brain healthy activities like breath work, and there's gonna be a cold plunge even, you know, brain healthy meals. So it's a very unique experience. People loved it last year. This year, it's gonna take place April at Mary Winspear in Sydney, BC. If you're looking to buy tickets, please visit brainchanges.org. Matt, I guess my final question to you is,
are you glad this happened to you? I mean, it's really changed your trajectory in life from just helping the patients that one individual can help because you've got a finite amount of time to potentially being a major force in change in terms of how we treat our brain going forward. Everything happens for a reason. And I I do believe that this is my purpose and it's given me such a passion and a drive and, again, like, a
motivation to help other people. I think when I started medical school, I wanted to, get into obstetrics and gynecology or cardiology. So this has really rerouted my path. It's been such a rewarding journey, and what I've really come to learn through all of this is that the most gratifying way you could live your life is in service to other people. And this is the best way that I'm able to be in service to other people. You know, doctor Galati, I always wrap up my podcast
with my three takeaways. And the first one is how unbelievable it is when you sit with someone that has a curious mind, even before your injury from guitar and soccer and medical and friends and family that you just you're living life and your insight of how important it was when that injury happened to have that in your knapsack. And I think it's a great lesson in life for all of us to continue to always add to our knapsack because we never know what the next
turn's gonna be like in life. The second one is your honesty and talking about at times it felt like I was an imposter or when I was in the hospital coming out of the coma. You know, I started to get knocked down because everybody around me was sort of putting that bar down. But for some reason, you found a way to lift yourself beyond that bar. And I think that's another lesson in life because very often, we set mediocrity as our goals in life, our friends and our family.
Everybody sort of puts wants us put us within these bars of the status quo or what we're capable of, and you found a way to remove those bars. And I think that's a wonderful lesson. And the final one is just you are a servant to humanity. I guess we all are, but I am just so proud of having you on the podcast, not only for sharing the six pillars that we can all incorporate into our life, but just the fact that you're making this your calling in
life to help others. And I guess that's really what this podcast is all about is sharing stories of people overcoming circumstances and yours was horrific to continue to chase your dream, which you did, which was medical school, but more importantly, not just to change your life, but change ours in doing so. So for all of that and more, it's just been an honor to have you on Chatter That Matters. Thank you so much. Hopefully we can do it again. Once again, a special thanks to
RBC for supporting Chatter That Matters. It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening and let's chat soon.