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Restoring Hope with Innovative Brain Treatment: Jeff Hadwick's Remarkable Story · Healthy Happy Wise Wealthy

• Mary Meyer: Now for Jeff Hardwick, co-owner of Epic Brain Centers on how he overcame traumatic brain injury from concussions he suffered through football that was bordering on CTE. And how he overcame option addition that was prescribed to him and led to divorce, homelessness, severe addition, and even criminal charges and now through the help of what he is now offering to people through Epic Brain Centers, he was able to overcome that through help from the Brain Leadership Foundation, Dr. Jin and others. I cannot wait to share the rest of this conversation with you Jeff Hadwick: I would all of a sudden start crying, and I didn't understand why. There was no reason for me to be crying, right? And I would be bawling. And that was an example of this emotional outburst that doesn't make sense that starts to take place. And so that would happen several times. I mean, that happened to me. I was 19 years old at the university. I was the starting center my sophomore year, and I'm in the middle of a scrimmage, getting ready to play on Saturday, and I started crying. Remember, everyone looked at me like, what's happening? It's out of order. Jeff Hadwick: I didn't. Jeff Hadwick: And I didn't know what was going on, right? I'm in tears in the middle of this scrimmage. And I remember talking with the coaches of beautiful people that noticed what was happening. And I got called into the office after practice, and by then I calmed down. I finished, you know, the. The practice, and I still would play well. I think that's the challenge, right, Is emotionally I was breaking down, but I was still able to perform. And so that was, looking back, another sign that brain miscommunication was taking place, right? This emotional outburst, right? The stress. Not able to process stress properly because the communication is starting to be faltered. Jeff Hadwick: And I was 19. I was 19 years old. You know, we found. I didn't. My treatment journey didn't start until I was 42. There were other signs that things weren't going well, you know, and sometimes we don't see the signs because we're not taught or told what some of these signs potentially could be, because we still don't have a lot of tools to look at the brain and the way it's communicating as the identifier for what's causing these symptoms. Right. It's still, you know, in its infancy stages. Jeff Hadwick: The only before Dr. Jin's work, the only time you got an EEG was for a sleep study. If you got in a major car accident where you had a super TBI brain bleeding, stuff like that, or you were comatose, you weren't waking up, you were in a coma. So are you dead or are you alive? As Judy Costerman says, a lot of times that was the use for the EEG tool. And now as Dr. Jin created this treatment that uses the EEG, it's a tool now that we can start to look at issues that are taking place in the brain. So back to, you know, because I think I want to share a little bit about, like, how bad things were for me. I'm here and I talked earlier I'm not a shiny quarter. Jeff Hadwick: My. My brain just works the way it's supposed to. And if we get everyone's brain communicating fairly well, it's going to work pretty well. And I'm not going to have these irregular emotions without a reason. I don't have anxiety without a reason to be anxious. Like this morning before the podcast, I care. I want to do a good job. And so I was a little anxious. Jeff Hadwick: There's a reason, you know, but so I get these. These. This pain medication because I have hole in my colon. And that. That was a pain that I had never experienced before. That was pretty bad, you know, so. I needed them. Mary Meyer: It would be. Yeah, Jeff Hadwick: It was pretty bad. And so the way the insurance works is I think it took me six months to actually be able to get on an immune biologic, meaning that Crohn's disease is where your immune system is turned on when it shouldn't be. So for Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, my immune system is tacking my digestive system without a reason. So it's sending the fix the system response, which is white blood cells. And that can be bad when there's nothing wrong. And it's essence ulcer colitis. And Crohn's is. And so it creates inflammation, it creates swelling, and then it starts to erode tissue. So it's like rug burns on the inside of your digestive system. Jeff Hadwick: So that's ulcerative colitis. So the ulcers, so ulcerations form, and then over time, those ulcers can get thinned enough to where then holes get produced in your digestive lining. So that's a perianal fistula is a hole in. In your colon. That was gnarly. The pain for that was incredible. Hence the pain medication. But for me, the pain medication also helped numb the emotional trauma that I was going through. Jeff Hadwick: I was devastated at that doctor's appointment. There's a look a doctor gives you where. When he doesn't have good news. Right. I think we. If hopefully you've never had to experience that. But when you're sitting on the exam table and your mind is racing, you're overwhelmed because you don't really know how to communicate with the doctor with the questions to ask. Life is speeding up on you in that moment, and a doctor comes in and you see him, we know you can sense when they have bad news. Jeff Hadwick: Um, and I've seen it twice, and I can still vividly remember that is. Is him back to. He called me boy. And he said, boy, you have Crohn's disease. And I was devastated, you know, and so I got on this pain medication because I had pain. I couldn't sit down where my hole in my colon was, was right by my tailbone. And so think of an open wound that's connected to your colon that doesn't really heal. Takes a long time for those to heal. Jeff Hadwick: So anything acidic that gets poured on it is extremely painful. And so I started taking the pain medication. But what I learned early on is all the other things that I had going on in my brain. I was traumatized emotionally because of what was happening, but I also had all the issues from concussion symptoms, right? The anxiety, the depression, the brain frog. The diagnosis of Crohn's only added to it. It was already there. That pain medication numbed that misery four hours at a time. Because it's really the half life of when you take pain medication, opioids in particular. Jeff Hadwick: And so I was taking six to eight pain pills a day during that time. And I was never, like I said earlier, to kind of lay that groundwork. I didn't do a lot of drugs and alcohol, to be honest with you. Little drinking, smoked a little pot, but I never even seen hard drugs, you know, heroin, cocaine, you know, methamphetamine. I never even. I didn't know what it looked like. Right. I was kind of a square that way. Jeff Hadwick: So this opioid world, I had no clue how dangerous they are. I didn't. I had no idea. I just didn't know. And no one ever told me, be careful. Right. Because lots of pain. I had this hole in my colon. Jeff Hadwick: I had all these ulcers. I had. I have severe Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. So my whole digestive system was filled with swelling, ulcers, all these things. So clinically, I was not going to be feeling well. No. And so. But internally, I noticed that it helped me feel a little better emotionally because it was just numbing the anxiety and the depression. Jeff Hadwick: I felt good. Mary Meyer: Yeah. Jeff Hadwick: I cared a lot less about those things when I was under the influence of opioids. And so I was on six to eight pain pills a day for 11 months. It's a long time. And what we know now about the way the body chemistry changes so quickly from opioids, whether it's just from a few days to where, 11 months, I was starting to get addicted. And at that 11 month mark, from the time I got diagnosed, I actually started to feel better. I was on medication to put My immune system in remission and it started to work. And so I remember I stopped taking them at around the 11th month mark. Started feeling a little bit better physically. Jeff Hadwick: And then it was about a month of that, I was at my daughter's eighth birthday and she was on my back. I was swimming and I felt a pain in my hip. And so we got out of the pool and from all my years of exercising and working out and running for athletics and football and training. Your hip flexor can kind of hurt when it gets strained. That's what it felt like. My left hip flexor was on fire. But make a long story short, six hours later, I was in excruciating pain, went to the error, got an X ray on my hip. And there's the second time I saw a doctor that had a look. Jeff Hadwick: It wasn't going to be good news. So he put the X ray up and before he said anything, he turned the light on so you can actually see the X ray. And I looked at my hip and you could clearly see that my hip socket was broken and my femur had dislocated outside of the hip socket. And so his first question is, how did you not know? What do you mean, how did I not know? How did you not know that your hip was in the condition that it was severely arthritic and now it's broken so you need a total hip replacement. And back in to that devastation mode that I had first been exposed to a year prior with my Crohn's diagnosis was that I had degenerative hip disease and I needed a total hip replacement. Mary Meyer: Oh, geez. Jeff Hadwick: Back. But then the story, the reason is back on the pain medication and it took me some time to find a doctor to replace my hiit because I had active Crohn's disease. And so active Crohn's disease presents a different issue when you're on an immune suppressant, when you go for joint replacement. Jeff Hadwick: Right. Jeff Hadwick: It can be a big world that they want to be really careful for. And so I was back on pain medication and finally got my hip replaced. And so overall, I was on medication for 22 or 24 months. I was on 8 to 10 Norcos a day. And that's when I became an addict, a full fledged addict. Addict was through that journey. Sorry, my computer is losing power. So realizing I become, you know, the situation I was in, I was on, I was been on pain medication for so long, I was dependent upon it. Jeff Hadwick: There was challenges in my marriage because of all the things that were happening to Me, to us, me being sick for those two years, the issues now showing up because I'm addicted to opioids. It basically, you know, created the loss of a marriage. And so I was. I gave up. You know, I really had given up at that time because of how I was feeling and functioning. My life is falling apart in front of me. I'm also making bad decisions, right, Because I'm addicted to opioids. You know, near the end there, at that time, I was probably going through six to 800 pain pills a month. So you can do the math. Mary Meyer: Oh my gosh, Jeff Hadwick: I would take ten at a time. And so I was bad. I'm lucky I'm alive. I should have easily overdosed on all of that. But in that journey of got divorced, gave up everything, I felt so guilty, I was so ashamed of myself that my kids now come from a divorced family. I've lost everything, I've given away everything because of the decisions that I made and the circumstances that were presented in my life and the way I handled them wasn't very well at all. I gave my family everything and moved in with my parents and kind of gave up. kind of was done. You know, I was definitely having thoughts of suicide. I was a teacher, and so I had a lot of training on what that would mean. And so I knew that wasn't an option, but I really dearly wanted it to be an option. You know, I think I was one day at a time hoping that maybe I didn't wake up, you know, in this situation of losing everything. I have two chronic illnesses, which is Crohn's disease and degenerative hip disease. Everything is gone that I. That I held a value. Jeff Hadwick: But I think really most importantly, I was ashamed of myself. The guilt and the shame that I had for being in the situation, I was. I expected better of myself and I failed, you know, and I hadn't failed a lot in my life when I look at a lot of other things. And so that journey of that place where I was, of course then it was a short leap to where I started doing heroin. I got in trouble with the law. And through the law, through getting arrested, getting charged with four felonies, I'm a four time felon. So I did the avoid and spent a lot of time in jail. I spent 18 months in jail over three years. Jeff Hadwick: I went to every rehab in town once I got in trouble with the law. Bless the court system as they try to help you. You know, they try to offer you services to try and figure out what's wrong? And most of them didn't work for me. You know, I had the post concussion syndrome thing going on and my brain wasn't working properly. So I could stay sober in a six month program. Went to Salvation army twice, went to 30 day programs. I could stay sober during that time. But as you go further out into months of no longer having a substance, I had no more coping skills, right, because I still had anxiety and depression, I still had brain fog, I still wasn't sleeping well. Jeff Hadwick: I still had all these other challenges that weren't solved by simply not taking a substance to, to numb it. And so in that journey of sobriety, relapse, sobriety relapse, sobriety relapse, six month program relapse, six month program relapse. I met Judy Kosterman and the nonprofit through my attorney, Tom Viloria. Beautiful person, took my case for free to try and help me. And he met, he knew of Judy Costerman through some other business connections who introduced me to Dr. Jin and the treatment. And so I was blessed where I had earned my way to prison on those four felonies. I stole for drugs. Jeff Hadwick: I took things from people so I could use it to buy drugs. And the judge, Judge Hardy, Department 15, he actually saw me not what I had earned. And he listened to the technology. In a court of law at my sentencing, the data that Dr. Jin has on what we do here for treatment with the evaluation of an EEG is so substantial that it was admissible in a court of law where the judge could use that authentic material to decide to go outside of the sentencing parameters and sentenced me to treatment. So he had sentenced me to the treatment and then to the Reno Sparks Gospel Mission. That was where my recovery journey began, really. As I went to the Gospel Mission, I found faith in my life. Jeff Hadwick: But then they also allowed me to get the treatment. And so that combination of when we talk about addiction, it's behavior. I have to make better decisions, right? But I need my brain's help to make better decisions. And so entered the treatment, got the brain communicating properly so that then I can really evaluate the kind of decisions that I should be making in my life. If the goal is to be sober and not go to jail, it was really simple at that time. Stay sober, don't go to jail. Can we pause just for a second? My computer is going to die. Can I go to, Can I walk you to a different room? Mary Meyer: Pulling back to the same story now that the computer's plugged in, that is everything you've said Is, is really astounding. It's, I mean, and, and thank God for good people who just actually did see you. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah. Mary Meyer: Along the way and. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah. Mary Meyer: Because what you're describing sounds so much just like health situation, health issues and. Jeff Hadwick: Then it just, it spirals, you know, it spirals. I think that, you know, to, to get away from, you know, the, the stories, the labels and it's, you know, things happen to us where it's unavoidable. It's part of the experiences that we have. And I think there, there's hope. Let's circle, circle back to that. Is the, the message of hope. Because if, if I can't see it, the mental health, things that are happening with miscommunication in my brain. So I can't see it. Jeff Hadwick: It's really affecting the way I'm living my life. So how I'm feeling, but just as importantly how I'm relating to the world around me. We're human and we're meant to be in relationship with other people. Right. Some people that were those relationships were only a couple who call them antisocial or others that have this enormous friend group and organizations and they're always engaging socially. If you look at the data for the elderly, one of the main markers for longevity of quality of life and how we're functioning is directly related to our social interaction with people. Mary Meyer: Yeah. Jeff Hadwick: You can mark it all along our aging process that the social aspect is a part of the equation on whether we're doing well or not doing well. And I think it's important. So those people that are close to me, how am I relating to them? You know, because I need to be present. I saw that a lot in my story is the way the brain is functioning. It's hard, it's kind of hard to think about. This is how your life is, is how much of our life are we actually thinking about the moment that we're in and the things I'm doing in that moment. We know from EEGs and the data that is given to us by a patient's brain that the way it's functioning, it's not present. Kind of like what you had said with Dr. Jeff Hadwick: Jin. Right. It's out of balance. It's confused on when day and when night is because the brain has to sleep in a 24 hour cycle. So that usually is the beginning of people's issues is their sleep cycle is messed up. Their brain doesn't know when daytime is and when nighttime is. And really the way it is able to tell that is through Melatonin. Melatonin is a night hormone. It's made by our body. Jeff Hadwick: It's made every day, all day, for the rest of our lives. Not CVS Melatonin that I buy off the counter or off the shelf, but my own natural melatonin that's being created. It's the signal to the brain on its presence, whether it's day or night. Right. And I need my brain to all go to sleep at the same time. You have about 60 to 100 billion neurons that make up all of the lobes that make up the brain. And relatively speaking, I need most of them on the same page. I don't need half of them thinking it's nighttime and the other half thinking it's daytime. Jeff Hadwick: So that's just one of the issues that a lot of us face when we talk about how our brain is functioning, which is how I feel and how I interact with my world, you know? Jeff Hadwick: Yeah. And so gotta sleep at night, sleeping at night. Yeah. Jeff Hadwick: Well, it's the beginning, right? It is this most important thing to our overall health. Now, I had a young person sitting across from me at the clinic and he kind of got me. I was like, it's the most important thing, bar none. And he said, well, how about oxygen? You're right outside sleeping, you know, as we try to help people and what's probably. If you're going to take one thing away from this conversation, the one thing I need you to take is sleep. Don't sacrifice your sleep. Because, I mean, in college, if we happen to go to college, or in our early lives or in our relationships or when we have kids, you're not sleeping. Or I steal from my sleep so that I could try and get more done during the day hours. Jeff Hadwick: Right. But there's a price, you know, as I think we all can attest to, every decision I make has a price. You know, sometimes I don't see that cost. Right. And so sleep, so important, that's really a big teaching moment here at the clinic, is how to correct your sleep so that you start waking up feeling rested and refreshed. Quantity versus quality. Quantity doesn't matter how much. It's the quality of my sleep, that's what matters. Jeff Hadwick: I had 10 hours of sleep and I'm exhausted. Well, the 10 hours means nothing because it's not quality sleep. Right. If I have four hours of quality sleep, meaning it's actual sleep, the brain is actually getting through the sleep cycles in an appropriate fashion, the way it was designed to, that's going to produce feeling more rested and Refreshed when I wake up in the morning, I remember for a good 10 years I never felt rested and refreshed. When I'd wake up in the morning, it was as if I didn't sleep, you know, and that was part of the trauma that started to build in my life is I'm always tired. And when I'm tired, we can all list a set of characteristics that come with that. I'm grumpy, I'm irritable, I may not be interested in much. I don't have time for any bullshit, right. Jeff Hadwick: I'm tired, right? And that goes back to my sleep at night. And is my brain getting good sleep from what it needs? Right. And what the brain needs is it needs to cool down. That's in essence what brain sleep is, is it needs to cool down. The brain, relatively speaking, uses 25% of my calories and 20% of my oxygen. The resources it demands are extremely high. Right. I'm 6, 5, 250 pounds. Jeff Hadwick: My brain uses 25% of the calories that I give my body. That's substantial. The problem with that is the byproduct of a spent calorie. What's left over is heat, Right? That's what's done after the body, after we use a calorie up for energy in the brain, the heat has nowhere to go, right. When my body, my muscles are burning calories, producing heat, it sweats. It's able to dissipate through our skin. The brain doesn't have that ability. There's no ventilation and there's no coolant system. Jeff Hadwick: Back to why sleep is so important. Only in sleep, in particular deep sleep, does my brain shut off, which means it's not burning any calories. So the heat that's built up from the day's use of functioning is able to dissipate so the brain can cool down. That's where the feeling of I feel rested and refreshed. Well, an easy way to think about, well, then my brain had the ability to cool off at night during the sleep process that ultimately it wants to get into. Mary Meyer: Yeah. So I know when I talked to Dr. Jin and he said sleep from 10 to 2 and if you have something to do, get up at 2 and that 10 o' clock to be in bed, sleeping is a really early time thing. Mary Meyer: But. Mary Meyer: And then he said, get 20, I think 20 minutes of sunlight with no glasses on in the morning. And that does help do a good reset, right? Or 11 o' clock in the morning. Is it 20 minutes? Am I remembering that right. Jeff Hadwick: Oh, this is all your podcast audience that probably listens to a lot of other podcasts. There's not a concise agreement on how many minutes. Let's be real. We go 45 to 60 minutes of sunlight exposure, nothing covering my eyes, just being outside, rain or shine. Right. Hurricane or 100 degree weather outside in a hurricane. But we're looking for, in particular for the blue spectrum light that's in the sun ray itself. That blue spectrum is absorbed by my eyeballs. Jeff Hadwick: I have two kinds of cells in my eyes, vision cells and light cells. It absorbs that color. That absorption of that blue color is in essence the signal to the production system for melatonin, whether it's day or night. And so that triggers the production system to store melatonin during day hours and release it during night hours. That's the key to unifying my brain to be all awake when it's supposed to and be all asleep when it's supposed to. Is that melatonin regulation, if you will? Jeff Hadwick: Yeah. Jeff Hadwick: You know, there's a lot of people out there. Some. Some say 30 minutes. You know, we say 45 to 60 minutes. I think without missing words. 30 minutes is a good marker. 45 minutes is better. Get outside. Jeff Hadwick: The real message is go outside in the morning, get some fresh air, get that exposure to sunlight and do it for 30 to 45 minutes from our clinic. I would prefer 45 minutes because we see the best results that way. Trial here for whether melatonin is present or not for 30 or 40. All I know is what I see over eight years of, of treating people, early seven years of treating people, and my own experience of how much time I need to go outside so that I start to wake up feeling rested and refreshed again, is a set amount of time. And be outside, right in the shade. You know, the car doesn't work because you have windows. It filters it. You actually need to be in the environment. Jeff Hadwick: You don't have to look at the sun, you don't have to be in the sun, just be outside. And that will help regulate that melatonin system. So melatonin dumps in my system at night to help facilitate the sleep cycles, which are the stages of sleep. Jeff Hadwick: Right. Jeff Hadwick: You have dream sleep and deep sleep. And there are several different stages, but it's a cycle and the brain wants to regulate that sleep cycle. Dream sleep, deep sleep circles back out, deep sleep, dream sleep. And it'll do that, relatively speaking, until about 2am or so. Going into the deep sleep cycle. That's an important One, because that's where the brain's able to cool off. Jeff Hadwick: Right. Jeff Hadwick: Because the brain, much like an engine, can overheat if it doesn't able. If it isn't able to release that heat somehow. So that's the. The system of. Of actually what's happening. When people say, well, you need to get to sleep, you need better sleep. Well, there is a how to right. Outside, you know, dark room, a cool room, your body, your core temperature basically needs to drop 3 degrees before I can fall asleep. Jeff Hadwick: Now, that's not us saying that. That's all the clinical data for sleep studies that are out there that they put you. If you ever had a sleep study done, whether it's for sleep apnea or something like that, they have these markers on when we can predict you're going to fall asleep. One of them is your core temperature has to drop. And so cool room, dark room, sunlight in the morning, comfortable, which I always tell people, that's probably doesn't need to be said. Most people don't go out and buy the worst mattress that they find. Right. Be comfortable. Jeff Hadwick: Those other factors really play into the quality of sleep that I'm going to have. Dark room, cool room, and sunlight in the morning. Jeff Hadwick: Sunlight in the morning. You gotta go to bed early. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah. You know, 10pm Basically is when the brain wants to start going into the deep sleep cycle. That's where we want to try and capture as much of that time that the brain will start doing that. And it starts about 10 and ends about 2am you know, and that's where it's hard. It's hard to then fit my life schedule into being in bed by 10:00pm yeah. You know, or kids or, you know, when I have kids, stuff like that, It's. It's trickier. On average, if I can do in bed before 10, on more nights than not, I'm probably gonna feel better than not. Jeff Hadwick: Right. Jeff Hadwick: All balance. It really is all balance. Because one of the. The major things I think to point out in our human condition is when I start to feel good, I will protect that. Just like I protected my addiction. Right. And I think that's the. The way I got to cheat with having treatment during my recovery process is I started to feel good pretty quick because my brain was getting healthier. Jeff Hadwick: I was in environment that was encouraging me to make better choices. The Reno Sparks Gospel Mission. I was there for 16 months working on my sobriety. So couple the two together. I started to feel better quickly. And as I try to stay sober, if I feel good, I'm not going to introduce anything that changes how I feel. I start to protect that. And that so important when we talk about recovery. Jeff Hadwick: So addiction to anything. Addiction to anything. Gambling, food, sex, drugs, right. If in general, I'm balanced in my life and I feel pretty good every day, meaning I have mental clarity. I don't have anxiety and depression. I'm feeling rested and refreshed from my night's sleep. I'm enriching my life by doing something I enjoy each day. I surround myself with people I love each day. Jeff Hadwick: I'm going to protect that. And so I will keep doing the things that are producing that. Just like the opposite side of the coin is, I keep doing the things that kept me homeless, that kept me addicted, that kept me running from the pain emotionally and physically that I was having. You know, so it's. It's the counterbalance to it is we here at the clinic in particular, even in recovery, is getting people to the point where they start feeling better. Now, that's not easy. You know, hopefully within those two weeks usually happens that people start to feel better, they come in for treatment. It's one of the pieces to the puzzle of how to start to feel better and function better in my life. Jeff Hadwick: Well, I need my brain's help. So we work on the brain part, right? We start to get that functioning better. And then here at the clinic, we also try to educate and surround them with hope, acceptance, and love. Because everyone here at the clinic has. Jeff Hadwick: Their own story, right? In a place of not doing well. And we all have the commonality of treatment was the catalyst that helped us get to a better place in our lives. And there's an element of comfort, I think, that people have here because we don't judge, right. I sat in the chair just like you did. I sat in the EEG for the first time just like you did when I was doing your eeg. And we can have a real conversation about that. I know what that feels like. I know the fear and apprehension that a patient is feeling when they sit down and they hear, hi, I'm Jeff, your neurotech today. Jeff Hadwick: This is what we're going to do, right? We try to break through those barriers to be human with people and connect. I remember I'm a big slogan guy, sports, football team. Those elements usually have slogans that follow along, right? So I'm still in that camp. I like things that help motivate me, something to remember. They make me think. But, you know, the Steve Charter. Steve Charter is someone that really made an impact in my Life. He was with the Salvation Army. Jeff Hadwick: He was in recovery himself. He was the program director there in my two six month stints that I spent at the Salvation Army. He's a beautiful man. He was a therapist, a drug and alcohol therapist. But he was a real person. He had his own story. And he talked to you in a real way. And he told me one time, he said, jeff, what I've realized in my journey here on earth, it's not about money, it's not about cars, it's not about jewelry, it's not about possessions, status, it's about building intimate relationships with people. Jeff Hadwick: That is the most important thing that we can do as humans while we're here on this earth is build relationships, intimate relationships with people. And I think my co worker Jordan, you know, Jordan, as story is mine, just a different path. Treatment, addiction, misery, jail, homelessness, right. Had the treatment is we try to build relationships with people. Right. I want to, I want you to feel that you've been seen when you come here, you know, because when we're having mental health struggles, I think because it's invisible, we then take on that Persona that people aren't seeing us and what's happening, right? We see somebody in crutches like you had said earlier. Right? Crutches, we see that, but we don't see the silent struggles that people are having on a regular basis. When people come here to the clinic, we already know that they're probably in that category, that they're having silent challenges that you can't see. Jeff Hadwick: And we try to meet them where they're at, to see them. Right. And provide hope. That is so important, you know that I walked out of a mental health hospital, right? Right. As before I committed my first felony. I'm on heroin, I'm on pain medication and I wanted to kill myself. So I had somebody that I was around at the time that said, you need help. The first person I ever like directly were like bro, you need help. Jeff Hadwick: And so she recommended I go to NAMS Northern Nevada Adult Mental Health, which is our mental health hospital here in Washoe County. And so I went the next morning because I wanted to die. And I went through the process. Unfortunately NAMs, when you have private insurance at the time they didn't accept private insurance payers, it was all Medicaid clients. So anyway, I got turned away. I was there trying to go through the intake process and they said unfortunately, because I was still a teacher at the time, so I had third party payer insurance, private insurance that they wouldn't be Able to take me. And I remember walking out of that hospital back to my car. I was hopeless, right, Because I was on heroin. Jeff Hadwick: I was taking 50 to 70 pain pills a day, and none of it was working. The drugs weren't working anymore. I had no coping skills. And that was where I believed I was probably better off dead. But I knew I couldn't do it because of my. My kids. Yeah, that was hopelessness. You know, that's how I look at hopelessness. Jeff Hadwick: And I don't ever want anyone to feel that because I was out of answers. I didn't have any answers. And so the next day, I committed my first felony, which was my catalyst into meeting Judy Costerman and being introduced to the treatment. So in a really strange way, it was probably the best thing that happened to me, was going down that path because that was how I was able to get access to treatment, both drug treatment and the gospel mission and medical treatment for my brain, because I needed both. You know, if you're. If you're an addiction, you need to be able to figure out how to make better choices, and you also need the help of some kind of medical treatment, which is what we have to fix. My brain and the way it's communicating, right. The combination of those two is really the key, you know, to feeling better when it comes to drug addiction. Jeff Hadwick: Now, to everyone that's listening to this EMBP and the treatment that we do, drug addiction is just one of them, right? It treats anxiety, depression, post concussion syndrome, ptsd, addiction, as well as some others. It can help with autism, it can help with some other conditions, but not everything. It's not a magic pill, but it does really well with. With the things that I have stated, because the thing they have in common is they all have communication issues in the brain. That's the important take home for all of this. It's about improving the performance of that communication, right? Because early on I met a lot of people and I share a little bit of a story of my addiction. And they say, well, I'm not an addict, so the treatment must not work for me, right? And we want to really remove ourselves from. I'm not that. Mary Meyer: So this can't work, right? So this can't work, right? I know if you're, you know, when the doctors look at it, like when Dr. Jin looked at my scan, he said, no, you're not, you're not a. You can't do it. He just said. He said no to me. So there is, you know, that's right, the doctors that look at it, that maybe you can explain that, like why some people will qualify, but other people would just be told, this isn't right for you. Jeff Hadwick: I think there's. It's, it's actually not as complicated as it may sound. So when we do an EEG and we look at global communication, right, Are there issues taking place with that communication as well as how is the brain showing us it's sleeping? So there's two different things. Jeff Hadwick: Okay. Jeff Hadwick: When the brain is only showing sleep issues, we tend to not order treatment right away because one, the treatment's expensive. But two, the sleep issue really can be fixed by the patient by simply reintroducing the proper lifestyle to sleep better. Morning sunlight, getting to bed before 10, the cold, dark room comfortable. And over time, they will start to fix their own issue, which is sleep, you would say, Dr. Jin, you know, half your brain thought it was nighttime, the other half thought it was daytime. Then they reverse at night. So the parts of your brain that were asleep during the day wake up at night, and the parts that were awake during the day go to sleep at night. And so it has its own challenges in itself where it's just out of balance, it's confused. Jeff Hadwick: And that's simply fixed by morning sunlight exposure and following healthy sleep habits that we know work. And those typically would be the patients that were like, you don't really need treatment per se. The radio stations are pretty tuned in. It's changing channel at the same time. It's. Your brain is just confused on when day and night is. So go try this first, because it's free. Start fixing that. Jeff Hadwick: And then if some of the symptoms are still present, because when, when I'm sleep deprived, I'm going to be anxious at times, I'm going to have depression at times, I'm going to be irritable at times, I'm going to have brain fog at times. So are my sleep issues able to fix those things? If not, then we reevaluate. Right. Fixing sleep. The EEG also tells us the quality of your sleep. So from that first EEG, where in this case, Dr. Jin was like, mmm, let's not do treatment first. Let's fix your sleep first. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah, that for a period of time, a couple weeks, we're not talking long, long time. Right. If someone goes outside for that 45 minutes for four or five straight days, they will start sleeping better. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah, right. For sure. Mary Meyer: After feeling better. Mary Meyer: And I, I did that, and I did start feeling better after a couple. Jeff Hadwick: Weeks, we'll start to know. So you call us back, and I'm still having these symptoms. So we'll do another eeg. Cause that's gonna show us is the sleep starting to get fixed. Then we can look at. Is there actual more miscommunication now that the brain is on the same page, meaning it's all awake during the day? And then we can a lot of times better evaluate. In fact, are the stations a little out of tune and are they not changing station at the right time? So that would be one. Jeff Hadwick: Right. Jeff Hadwick: We try to be good stewards. It's when you come to epic brain centers and you see our doctor, the medical director, Ricardo Gonzalez, we all try to be good stewards. It's just not treat, treat, treat, treat, treat. Right. Or, you know, like when you go a lot of times to other medical providers, medication, medication, medication. It almost seems like they're writing you the prescription before you even go in and tell them what's wrong. Jeff Hadwick: Right. Jeff Hadwick: An example, we don't really. We try not to follow that model here where we really evaluate, does this person need treatment? If there's other options to try first, we always recommend that, yeah, for sure. Then some of the other conditions. Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a whole nother challenge. It can be done. We typically don't treat schizophrenia here. There's medication issues that come along with a patient, unfortunately, that has schizophrenia. Jeff Hadwick: Medication can impede our treatment's ability to correct the communication. So antipsychotics are one of those that make it really tricky where at times the treatment won't work. And so schizophrenia is definitely in that class. So we won't do a lot of that here. Could it be done? It could, but there's a lot of different things that have to be put in place by the clinic and the type of setup it is with a doctor on site all the time. You know, a different kind of mode for the clinic as well as for the patient, changing medications, being in a proper setting so that any of the issues that may come up as medication get changes, they're kept safe. So it's a whole different. It's a different ballgame. Jeff Hadwick: Seizures, seizures are one that are tricky. We find out a lot more about it. Can seizure patients be treated with embp? Absolutely. And anyone that hears this podcast that's familiar with TMS and seizure, that usually is not a thing. Traditional Ms. Is a single frequency, repetitive nature of delivering that magnet. The traditional TMS route will trigger a seizure. In the traditional TMS world, which we're not traditional, we're cutting edge, completely different type of treatment. Jeff Hadwick: Traditional TMS That's a hard no. If you have any history of seizure, you cannot get treatment. EMBP is a whole other ball game. You can have treatment with variable pulse TMS if you have seizure disorder. No, it's as simple as that. We don't have to get into all the technicalities of it. Again, we don't do a lot here because you have to have different parameters put in place for a seizure patient. We don't have that kind of staffing here for that. Jeff Hadwick: But you can. Jeff Hadwick: Right now it is just private pay. It's not. Jeff Hadwick: Yes, okay, so that's. We haven't talked all about that. It is a cash pay clinic, so patient pays 100% of the cost. They can submit for reimbursement whether it's in network or out of network. In network for private health insurance is usually very difficult to get because EMBP treatment indication, which means for depression, for anxiety, for addiction, for PTSD as four examples. FDA hasn't given treatment indication for the symptomology to pay in network. Currently we're going for FDA approval for treatment indication, but we're not there yet, unfortunately. Getting closer though, a lot closer. Jeff Hadwick: Now, the device with the computer program, all of that is FDA cleared. Just to be clear, we've already gone through several hoops to make sure that basically it is safe, it's effective and it's okay to be given to the public. The next step is that treatment indication. And that's what we're going for right now. Not really. We. Dr. Jin and the technology company that he's a part of, Northern Tech, Northern Technology and Sciences, they're the ones that are in charge of or monitor or control create the technology. Jeff Hadwick: They're going for fda, we're simply a licensee from them to do the technology EMVP with the eeg. But there's a lot of promise. We're in several military EMBP is in several military bases treating special forces. It's around the world. There's many clinics in Taiwan, which is where the International center for Northern Tech is, is in Taiwan. There's clinics in Canada, Mexico, Taiwan. Jeff Hadwick: Trying. Jeff Hadwick: To think where else. Those are some of the examples of outside the US that you can get mvp. Inside the US there's only a few right now other than the military bases where the epic brain centers was the first to open up using EMBP almost five years ago. But it's hard here in this arena for cash pay clinics where in the US even I rely heavily on my medical insurance to help cover the cost for any type of medical treatment. It makes it tricky. But the Mayo Clinic currently is doing a clinical trial for Northern Tech using EMBP technology for Long Covid is one of them. I think there's three Covid tinnitus and there's a third one that they're doing clinical trial on. Long Covid is the big one. Jeff Hadwick: It's extremely successful for long Covid type symptoms. What is long Covid? Well, it's a catch all. It encompasses everything that the medical industry can't explain. Right. So long Covid is basically Covid type symptoms that have been persistent since either a COVID infection or a vaccine side effect. One of the two. We've seen both. We've seen people that have developed long Covid, which is a lot like post concussion syndrome. Jeff Hadwick: The same kind of type of symptomology, anxiety, depression, brain fog. Some still don't have a proper sense of taste and smell. They can also have other neurological issues in the nervous system, whether it's pain or balance or gait or, you know, mobility is. Long Covid has some really strange symptoms attached to it. Yeah, EMEP helps correct all of those symptoms. We've seen it here at the clinic with what we'd categorize as long COVID patients. And the Mayo Clinic is seeing it now. It's just in its infancy stages of that clinical trial. Jeff Hadwick: They have so many patients they're going to treat. I think they're maybe a quarter way through. And the results that they're having are identical to the results that we've seen here for those types of patients in the past four or five years, which is remarkable. People get better, they feel better, they function better. And the EEG helps solidify that. What the patient is telling us on how things have gotten better, what's no longer present in their life in terms of how they feel and function. And the EEG then verifies that brain communication has been normalized. And the communication, the radio stations are better tuned in, the brain is changing station at the same time. Jeff Hadwick: And the EEG helps verify that. Yeah, yeah. It's remarkable. It really is remarkable. Jeff Hadwick: That's fabulous. Jeff Hadwick: So, and it's pretty simple really, to be honest with you here, your first appointments in EEG. So you call the clinic schedule an EEG. All of our appointments are 45 minutes. The EEG in actuality is 10 or 15 minutes of the recording piece of it. So you have a bunch of equipment on. You sit with your eyes closed for 10 or 15 minutes for the EEG recording. Then the second appointment is you meet with the doctor, have 45 minutes to go over all the things that are taking place in your life. How you're feeling, how you're functioning, what the EEG is telling us, and then what we believe we can do to help at that point. Jeff Hadwick: That's when you would enter into the treatment portion. If the doctor believes it's the next best option, the next best option, the patient wants to go into treatment, then you would start treatment. That's where you would get ordered 10 treatments, one a day for 30 minutes for two weeks. After those 10 treatments, we would then do another EEG and then you meet with the doctor again. That's the path that a patient would take as they come here. Now, most people, 10 treatments isn't enough. Usually from our data over the past four and a half years and the thousand patients or so that we've treated, the average, about 75% of the patients need about 20 treatments to normalize that communication, which is tuning the station in, getting it, changing station at the same time to solidify. That usually takes about 20 treatments to do that. Jeff Hadwick: And then once you do the next. Jeff Hadwick: To kind of stabilize it. So it could be 10, could be 20. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah, we don't know, you know, and when a patient first starts, we can't really say how many you're going to need. We can give you a ballpark based on everything else. How healthy are you in general physically? Cardiovascular, gut hormones are all of those from your knowledge and other testing, and hopefully you've been going to the doctor at least once a year for a checkup and a blood test. Jeff Hadwick: Right. Jeff Hadwick: To check these music markers. Are you relatively healthy? Do you live a fairly healthy lifestyle? Meaning you don't indulge in any kind of substance overly, you know, you don't any anything crazy like that, then you're going to put yourself in a better place for your brain to receive what we're going to do. So it's going to be more effective. Right? So then it's a better, a better tell for what we're looking at. Then the EEG can help too. The EEG can tell us, I mean, how scrambled is the communication in your brain? If it's really scrambled, it's probably going to take a little longer to fix it. Right. If there's some substance there of some harmony, then it might take less treatments to fix it. Jeff Hadwick: Does that make sense? So we need that EEG to look at. Okay. How bad is that communication? If it's really bad, it's probably going to take 20 treatments. If it's not so bad, then it may only take 10. But that's where our treatment model, we check in after 10 so we can better evaluate do I need more Coupled with how I'm feeling? Because it's not about that eeg. It's about how is the patient feeling and functioning. Right. That's gonna follow along with whatever the brain tells us in terms of communication. Jeff Hadwick: If that eeg, the communication is doing pretty well, the patient's gonna be feeling pretty well. Right. They kind of coincide with each other. And so that's a piece of the journey that people take here, too. Mary Meyer: That's awesome, Jeff. Thank you for sharing so much information. Jeff Hadwick: It was a lot. Mary Meyer: Yeah, no, it's great. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah. Jeff Hadwick: People. Mary Meyer: I know people do come from around the country too, to do. To get help. Jeff Hadwick: They do. They come from all over. We've just this year we had a couple from China, a couple from Australia, a couple from Germany, a few from Mexico. So they do come globally as well as from all the other states. I think probably the least amount of patients is the local. Right. I mean, what. How lucky are we all? Me too. Jeff Hadwick: Because when my treatment journey was here is to have one of the few places to get EMBP in Reno, Nevada. Right. Mary Meyer: Yeah. Jeff Hadwick: But, yeah, we get people from all over the place. Call, please call the clinic. My name is Jeff. My co worker is Jordan and Ellie. You can find us at epicbraincenters.com if you have more questions. If you're hearing this podcast and either yourself or, you know, someone that you're like, yeah, Jeff sounds a lot like my brother or my husband or my cousin or my wife or. Right. Or anything that we've talked about here. Jeff Hadwick: We always offer people to come down and see the clinic, come take a tour. Let's have a real conversation about what's happening. Because we're all unique and we all have a need to have certain questions answered to conceptualize what it actually is we do and how does it work. Because I know for me, I thought, no way when I first heard about this technology, I thought, there is no way that that is going to be able to do what they're telling me it's going to do. And sure enough, it does. But we need much like when we first started here, it's a process. You know, we want to help walk with you through the process of understanding, of thinking about and digesting what it is that we're doing here, how it couples with physics and neurology that are at play in the brain to help people Feel better. And so we are always available for a conversation, because I just want to plant a seed. Jeff Hadwick: I say this with when I taught high school and I'm raising kids, I plan to see the truth in a young person's life. And my human condition will nurture it. It'll water it so that it starts to grow. And when I need it the most, it's there to be put in play in terms of what decision am I going to make? Sometimes the right decision, but at least they have the knowledge there to think about what they want to do next. And that's what we try to do here. Right. Is we just want to fill people with a little bit of seed of knowledge and information, what we know is happening from the treatment, how it affects the brain, and then allow the patient to go through the processing of what they need to. To be able to understand there is hope. Jeff Hadwick: And that no matter, other than the few things that we talked about, that this can be for you too. Mary Meyer: Right. Jeff Hadwick: Right. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah. Jeff Hadwick: So thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for writing this platform to be able to share a little bit about me, and only because we want to have the message of hope. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah. Jeff Hadwick: I think is to have the message of hope and that there are people that have been through some things that are here to help you walk through your things. Mary Meyer: For sure. Jeff Hadwick: You know, for that, I appreciate it. Mary Meyer: Yeah. Thank you, Jeff. And thanks to everyone there doing all this great work. So. Jeff Hadwick: Yeah. Mary Meyer: All right. Jeff Hadwick: Thank you. All right, you guys take care. Bye.