Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from coast to coast am on iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: George nor with you. Board. Certified in internal medicine, Doctor
Speaker 1: David Smith is recognized as a visiting scientist for both
Speaker 1: the Human Performance Laboratory for the Division of Sports Medicine
Speaker 1: at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital Medical Center and the North Shore
Speaker 1: Division of Neurosurgery and North Shore Neurological Institute in Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker 1: Is solid background in analytical chemistry with a little emphasis
Speaker 1: on physics. Combined with his medical degree and internal medicine
Speaker 1: career has given him an insight into energy interactions of
Speaker 1: the human body, which has proven particularly useful in his
Speaker 1: study of traumatic brain injury. His book is called When
Speaker 1: Heads Come Together, Discovering Nature's Secrets for Preventing Traumatic Brain Injury.
Speaker 1: Doctor Dave, welcome to the program. Well, hey, George, thanks
Speaker 1: for having me on. I'm looking forward to this. Tell
Speaker 1: us the definition of traumatic brain injury. Well, traumatic brain
Speaker 1: injury can come about from a number of different mechanisms.
Speaker 1: The most common, of course, is an impact blow. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: in the military, it could be an ied explosion and
Speaker 1: sort of a number of multitude things that can occur
Speaker 1: throughout one's life. But it's something that unfortunately, it's more
Speaker 1: common than you would know. There is a physician, doctor
Speaker 1: Daniel Spate. He's an er doctor out of Arizona, and
Speaker 1: he on a wonderful podcast, came out and pointed out
Speaker 1: that because it tends to afflict a younger population, it
Speaker 1: tends to not kill that population, that it actually causes
Speaker 1: more pain and suffering than all to humankind and all
Speaker 1: of cancer, all of strokes, and all of heart attacks.
Speaker 1: It's really a massive problem. I noticed the forward to
Speaker 1: your book was written by a long time NFL Players
Speaker 1: Association consultant. That's a big problem in the NFL, isn't
Speaker 1: it brain injuries? Oh? It really is. Julian Bales was
Speaker 1: the gentleman that did the forward for me. He is
Speaker 1: of the movie Concussion fame, so you might recu the
Speaker 1: movie with Will Smith and Alec Baldwin. Alec Baldwin played
Speaker 1: my colleague Julian Bales in that movie Concussion, And it
Speaker 1: has been a huge problem. How many people have just
Speaker 1: like bumped their heads and eventually it affects them and
Speaker 1: they never even knew it would. Yeah, there's something in
Speaker 1: the nature of three to three and a half million
Speaker 1: emergence room visits every year from because of traumatic brain injury.
Speaker 1: It really is something that touches the lives of most
Speaker 1: people in one way or another, Doctor Dave, Does the
Speaker 1: brain repair itself from some kind of injuries like this, Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's called plasticity, and there is some degree of remodeling,
Speaker 1: but it is considered part of the central nervous system
Speaker 1: and it tends not to recover. So likely the brain
Speaker 1: can kind of find pathways around a prior injury, but
Speaker 1: the actual repair and regeneration of the neuron is less likely.
Speaker 1: Why preventing it becomes so serious? What got you interested
Speaker 1: in traumatic brain injury cases in the study of it. Well,
Speaker 1: strangely enough, I was not a traumatic brain injury researcher,
Speaker 1: and back in two and six, two thousand and seven ERA,
Speaker 1: I was standing in front of the Army research lab
Speaker 1: actually helping consult on how to not bleed out in
Speaker 1: the battlefield. And after I was done, the project coordinator
Speaker 1: came up to the podium, put his arm on my
Speaker 1: shoulder and said, damn, Doc, that's phenomenal. I just can't
Speaker 1: believe how clever that was. And he said, I wish
Speaker 1: clever people would figure out traumatic brain injury. Said, we've
Speaker 1: got one hundred billion dollars and one hundred years of
Speaker 1: research into this, and we haven't really moved the needle.
Speaker 1: And then the guy in the front row of my
Speaker 1: talk puts his hand up and says, I think if
Speaker 1: somebody could just figure out how a woodpecker can smack
Speaker 1: had said into a brand into the tree, you know,
Speaker 1: eighty million times over its lifespan, I think we'd have
Speaker 1: this figured out. And of course everybody started cracking up
Speaker 1: except me. And about six months later I did start
Speaker 1: to understand with my background in physics and chemistry and physiology,
Speaker 1: it put the three together and started to realize how
Speaker 1: animals actually started to solve this problem. Didn't the great
Speaker 1: boxer Muhammad Ali suffer from some brain injury too, They
Speaker 1: suffered after all these blows to the head. Absolutely right,
Speaker 1: Parkinson's has thought to be something after repeated blows to
Speaker 1: the head, and he ended up suffering greatly from that condition.
Speaker 1: I remember him shaking like crazy on some television interviews
Speaker 1: and things like that. Absolutely, and it's something that can
Speaker 1: be you know, transmitted or not transmitted, but seen throughout
Speaker 1: many other sports the NFL obviously is one of the
Speaker 1: ones that certainly takes front and center. What medical device
Speaker 1: determines whether you've had traumatic brain injury. Well, we have
Speaker 1: a lot of different markers that we're trying. FDA tries
Speaker 1: to validate these for a number of different directions. Honestly,
Speaker 1: it's really difficult to get objective data. We tend to
Speaker 1: in the research community do what's called a tensor MRI
Speaker 1: magnetic residence IMAGY, And what a tensor MRI does is
Speaker 1: take about ten gigabytes of information. It We start in
Speaker 1: the beginning of a season and sort of get a
Speaker 1: baseline evaluation of how your skull looks on this MRI,
Speaker 1: and then come back at the end of the season,
Speaker 1: and then by digital subtraction and geography, we can compare
Speaker 1: the two and find out if there's any changes in
Speaker 1: your brain from the beginning of the season to the end.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. Should everybody get a brain scan? Probably not.
Speaker 1: You'll find that as you do more and more studies
Speaker 1: for just screening purposes, you'll introduce a lot of bias
Speaker 1: and things will show up, unidentified, bright objects will occur,
Speaker 1: and you'll end up going down and chasing all these
Speaker 1: different pathways throughout your evaluation. So probably only when it's
Speaker 1: clinically warrant warranted that we would recommend that. Well. With
Speaker 1: doctor David Smith, the doctor debut invented what is called
Speaker 1: the Q caller tell us about that well, it does
Speaker 1: actually stem back to how these creatures of forests have
Speaker 1: been able to tolerate massive g forces head ramming cheap
Speaker 1: five hundreds of force, and they smack their heads together
Speaker 1: on a regular basis. So when I started to realize
Speaker 1: that there might be a thread between all these organisms,
Speaker 1: I started to look at the anatomy of the woodpecker,
Speaker 1: and you're just not going to believe this apparatus called
Speaker 1: the omo hioid apparatus of a woodpecker. It attaches the
Speaker 1: tongue again, attaches to the top of the beak, and
Speaker 1: goes upward between the eyeballs and over the top of
Speaker 1: the skull and comes all the way back underneath and
Speaker 1: attaches to both jugular veins, then comes together reattaches, and
Speaker 1: it goes in and out with every blow. And when
Speaker 1: you look at this, it's just unbelievable that you know,
Speaker 1: mankind or God or nature or anybody could have ever
Speaker 1: conceived of an animal that looks like this. So it
Speaker 1: was very clear to me that there was something going on.
Speaker 1: And when you started to see that it attached to
Speaker 1: the jugular and it was called an omo hyoid apparatus.
Speaker 1: I remember that we humans have this same muscle structure
Speaker 1: in our necks, and you're not going to believe this one.
Speaker 1: All humans, all mammals. If you have a spinal cord,
Speaker 1: you have these muscles in your neck, and no one
Speaker 1: knew why they were there. And so it turns back.
Speaker 1: Every time you yawn, you block off your jugular veins
Speaker 1: in four different places. And that really got me hooked.
Speaker 1: And I knew immediately from my background in physics that
Speaker 1: that would cause an increase in blood into the brain
Speaker 1: space and that would create sort of a locking of
Speaker 1: the brain in its place, sort of like bubble wrap
Speaker 1: or even an airbag. Is it like a cushion. It
Speaker 1: is like a cushion, and it allows all the structures
Speaker 1: of the brain to accelerate and decelerate at the same rate.
Speaker 1: That way, there's no ripping and tearing, and you can
Speaker 1: tolerate car accidents, for example, when your airbags go off
Speaker 1: and your seat belts are functioning correctly, then you decelerate
Speaker 1: with the car at the same rate and your chances
Speaker 1: of injury are far less. I assume they work, but
Speaker 1: do motorcycle helmets and helmets in general work in case
Speaker 1: people fall off bikes, hit their heads and what have Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they do exactly what they were designed to do.
Speaker 1: They prevent you from having a skull fracture, they prevent
Speaker 1: you from getting an eye gouged out during sport. But
Speaker 1: unfortunately they can do very little to prevent the movement
Speaker 1: of the brain within the skull. So the FDA has
Speaker 1: looked at number of different versions and things of that nature,
Speaker 1: and they've never literally been able to give them authorization
Speaker 1: to make any claim against traumatic brain injury. I would
Speaker 1: never encourage you to take it off, especially if you're
Speaker 1: a motorcyclist, but it's just not been something that's been
Speaker 1: able to prevent a brain injury. It is fascinating by
Speaker 1: learning about traumatic brain injuries individuals. What can they use
Speaker 1: to help themselves avoid any problems? Well, avoidance is number one,
Speaker 1: so doing anything and everything. In the NFL and other
Speaker 1: sporting events are trying to actually invoke rules to reduced
Speaker 1: the amount of force that might be occurred occurring inside
Speaker 1: the brain. But other than that, as I mentioned that,
Speaker 1: the Army Research Lab haven't really been able to move
Speaker 1: the needle much literally hundreds of billions of dollars and
Speaker 1: we've not really improved it by one, two or three percent.
Speaker 1: We came along and I reached out to doctor Julian
Speaker 1: Bales back in two thousand and eight after watching him
Speaker 1: testify to Congress on traumatic brain injury in the NFL.
Speaker 1: And when I contacted him and told him of what
Speaker 1: I was thinking in the theories I was coming up with.
Speaker 1: We ended up devising a set of tests through his labs,
Speaker 1: and we were in animals able to demonstrate an eighty
Speaker 1: three percent reduction in brain injury. That's huge. Oh. He
Speaker 1: called me at two o'clock in the morning. He was
Speaker 1: at the time, he was chief of neurosurgery at West
Speaker 1: Virginia University, and his boy was up three octaves and
Speaker 1: he says, Dave, I know we had talked about trying
Speaker 1: to block three or five or ten percent, but the
Speaker 1: results were showing eighty three percent, and boy, we just
Speaker 1: took off at that point, doctor Dave, what is a concussion?
Speaker 1: So a concussion is a little bit frustrating for the
Speaker 1: academic world only because you can introduce a bias. It's
Speaker 1: harder to actually understand what people are describing in a concussion.
Speaker 1: It's not objective, it's not always reproducible and how you're
Speaker 1: making that diagnosis, but it's the clinical way that we
Speaker 1: notice that people have sort of gotten their bell rung
Speaker 1: or the lights went out. There's a number of different
Speaker 1: diagnostic criteria to create that term concussion. Certainly the thing
Speaker 1: that is people are most used to using as a
Speaker 1: term to describe this event. We as a company and
Speaker 1: me as a scientist, chose to try to find that
Speaker 1: objective method, which again was that very sophisticated, very expensive
Speaker 1: tensor MRI before a season and after a season to
Speaker 1: get a much more objective evaluation. I finally got the
Speaker 1: picture of the two rams on the cover of your book.
Speaker 1: You did. Yeah. The thing that's amazing with the rams
Speaker 1: is is that the rams do have amo hyoid apparatuses.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the actual cover, you'll see
Speaker 1: something called pneumatic horn cores, and these structures enable that
Speaker 1: creature to breathe right out through their sinuses up into
Speaker 1: the horn cores and into the hollow horns themselves. Listen
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