Now here's a highlight from coast to coast am on iHeartRadio, George nor with you. Board. Certified in internal medicine, Doctor David Smith is recognized as a visiting scientist for both the Human Performance Laboratory for the Division of Sports Medicine at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital Medical Center and the North Shore Division of Neurosurgery and North Shore Neurological Institute in Chicago, Illinois. Is solid background in analytical chemistry with a little emphasis
on physics. Combined with his medical degree and internal medicine career has given him an insight into energy interactions of the human body, which has proven particularly useful in his study of traumatic brain injury. His book is called When Heads Come Together, Discovering Nature's Secrets for Preventing Traumatic Brain Injury. Doctor Dave, welcome to the program. Well, hey, George, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to this. Tell
us the definition of traumatic brain injury. Well, traumatic brain injury can come about from a number of different mechanisms. The most common, of course, is an impact blow. Unfortunately, in the military, it could be an ied explosion and sort of a number of multitude things that can occur throughout one's life. But it's something that unfortunately, it's more common than you would know. There is a physician, doctor
Daniel Spate. He's an er doctor out of Arizona, and he on a wonderful podcast, came out and pointed out that because it tends to afflict a younger population, it tends to not kill that population, that it actually causes more pain and suffering than all to humankind and all of cancer, all of strokes, and all of heart attacks. It's really a massive problem. I noticed the forward to your book was written by a long time NFL Players Association consultant. That's a big problem in the NFL, isn't
it brain injuries? Oh? It really is. Julian Bales was the gentleman that did the forward for me. He is of the movie Concussion fame, so you might recu the movie with Will Smith and Alec Baldwin. Alec Baldwin played my colleague Julian Bales in that movie Concussion, And it has been a huge problem. How many people have just like bumped their heads and eventually it affects them and
they never even knew it would. Yeah, there's something in the nature of three to three and a half million emergence room visits every year from because of traumatic brain injury. It really is something that touches the lives of most people in one way or another, Doctor Dave, Does the brain repair itself from some kind of injuries like this, Well, yeah, it's called plasticity, and there is some degree of remodeling, but it is considered part of the central nervous system
and it tends not to recover. So likely the brain can kind of find pathways around a prior injury, but the actual repair and regeneration of the neuron is less likely. Why preventing it becomes so serious? What got you interested
in traumatic brain injury cases in the study of it. Well, strangely enough, I was not a traumatic brain injury researcher, and back in two and six, two thousand and seven ERA, I was standing in front of the Army research lab actually helping consult on how to not bleed out in the battlefield. And after I was done, the project coordinator came up to the podium, put his arm on my shoulder and said, damn, Doc, that's phenomenal. I just can't believe how clever that was. And he said, I wish
clever people would figure out traumatic brain injury. Said, we've got one hundred billion dollars and one hundred years of research into this, and we haven't really moved the needle. And then the guy in the front row of my talk puts his hand up and says, I think if somebody could just figure out how a woodpecker can smack had said into a brand into the tree, you know, eighty million times over its lifespan, I think we'd have this figured out. And of course everybody started cracking up
except me. And about six months later I did start to understand with my background in physics and chemistry and physiology, it put the three together and started to realize how animals actually started to solve this problem. Didn't the great boxer Muhammad Ali suffer from some brain injury too, They suffered after all these blows to the head. Absolutely right, Parkinson's has thought to be something after repeated blows to the head, and he ended up suffering greatly from that condition.
I remember him shaking like crazy on some television interviews and things like that. Absolutely, and it's something that can be you know, transmitted or not transmitted, but seen throughout many other sports the NFL obviously is one of the ones that certainly takes front and center. What medical device determines whether you've had traumatic brain injury. Well, we have a lot of different markers that we're trying. FDA tries to validate these for a number of different directions. Honestly,
it's really difficult to get objective data. We tend to in the research community do what's called a tensor MRI magnetic residence IMAGY, And what a tensor MRI does is
take about ten gigabytes of information. It We start in the beginning of a season and sort of get a baseline evaluation of how your skull looks on this MRI, and then come back at the end of the season, and then by digital subtraction and geography, we can compare the two and find out if there's any changes in your brain from the beginning of the season to the end. That's interesting. Should everybody get a brain scan? Probably not.
You'll find that as you do more and more studies for just screening purposes, you'll introduce a lot of bias and things will show up, unidentified, bright objects will occur, and you'll end up going down and chasing all these different pathways throughout your evaluation. So probably only when it's
clinically warrant warranted that we would recommend that. Well. With doctor David Smith, the doctor debut invented what is called the Q caller tell us about that well, it does actually stem back to how these creatures of forests have been able to tolerate massive g forces head ramming cheap five hundreds of force, and they smack their heads together
on a regular basis. So when I started to realize that there might be a thread between all these organisms, I started to look at the anatomy of the woodpecker, and you're just not going to believe this apparatus called the omo hioid apparatus of a woodpecker. It attaches the tongue again, attaches to the top of the beak, and goes upward between the eyeballs and over the top of the skull and comes all the way back underneath and attaches to both jugular veins, then comes together reattaches, and
it goes in and out with every blow. And when you look at this, it's just unbelievable that you know, mankind or God or nature or anybody could have ever conceived of an animal that looks like this. So it was very clear to me that there was something going on. And when you started to see that it attached to the jugular and it was called an omo hyoid apparatus. I remember that we humans have this same muscle structure in our necks, and you're not going to believe this one.
All humans, all mammals. If you have a spinal cord, you have these muscles in your neck, and no one knew why they were there. And so it turns back. Every time you yawn, you block off your jugular veins in four different places. And that really got me hooked. And I knew immediately from my background in physics that that would cause an increase in blood into the brain space and that would create sort of a locking of the brain in its place, sort of like bubble wrap
or even an airbag. Is it like a cushion. It is like a cushion, and it allows all the structures of the brain to accelerate and decelerate at the same rate. That way, there's no ripping and tearing, and you can tolerate car accidents, for example, when your airbags go off and your seat belts are functioning correctly, then you decelerate with the car at the same rate and your chances
of injury are far less. I assume they work, but do motorcycle helmets and helmets in general work in case people fall off bikes, hit their heads and what have Yeah, I mean they do exactly what they were designed to do. They prevent you from having a skull fracture, they prevent you from getting an eye gouged out during sport. But unfortunately they can do very little to prevent the movement
of the brain within the skull. So the FDA has looked at number of different versions and things of that nature, and they've never literally been able to give them authorization to make any claim against traumatic brain injury. I would never encourage you to take it off, especially if you're a motorcyclist, but it's just not been something that's been able to prevent a brain injury. It is fascinating by learning about traumatic brain injuries individuals. What can they use
to help themselves avoid any problems? Well, avoidance is number one, so doing anything and everything. In the NFL and other sporting events are trying to actually invoke rules to reduced the amount of force that might be occurred occurring inside the brain. But other than that, as I mentioned that, the Army Research Lab haven't really been able to move the needle much literally hundreds of billions of dollars and we've not really improved it by one, two or three percent.
We came along and I reached out to doctor Julian Bales back in two thousand and eight after watching him testify to Congress on traumatic brain injury in the NFL. And when I contacted him and told him of what I was thinking in the theories I was coming up with. We ended up devising a set of tests through his labs, and we were in animals able to demonstrate an eighty three percent reduction in brain injury. That's huge. Oh. He
called me at two o'clock in the morning. He was at the time, he was chief of neurosurgery at West Virginia University, and his boy was up three octaves and he says, Dave, I know we had talked about trying to block three or five or ten percent, but the results were showing eighty three percent, and boy, we just took off at that point, doctor Dave, what is a concussion? So a concussion is a little bit frustrating for the
academic world only because you can introduce a bias. It's harder to actually understand what people are describing in a concussion. It's not objective, it's not always reproducible and how you're making that diagnosis, but it's the clinical way that we notice that people have sort of gotten their bell rung or the lights went out. There's a number of different diagnostic criteria to create that term concussion. Certainly the thing that is people are most used to using as a
term to describe this event. We as a company and me as a scientist, chose to try to find that objective method, which again was that very sophisticated, very expensive tensor MRI before a season and after a season to get a much more objective evaluation. I finally got the picture of the two rams on the cover of your book. You did. Yeah. The thing that's amazing with the rams is is that the rams do have amo hyoid apparatuses.
But if you look at the actual cover, you'll see something called pneumatic horn cores, and these structures enable that creature to breathe right out through their sinuses up into the horn cores and into the hollow horns themselves. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more