- Speaker #0
Here are the benefits of free testosterone. Sense of well-being, aplomb, assertiveness, competitiveness, memory, recall, the ability to learn new things, great sex, great sleep, great creativity, playing music, writing, painting, anti-depression. These are some of the fundamental benefits of testosterone. In our treatment, we put back in the missing hormones as well as we address the inflammation. So we've been able to drop inflammation. use a temporary stimuli like clomiphene citrate or e-clomiphene to increase the brain's ability to generate the signals to make ultimately your hormones. We die not because of heart disease or diabetes. We die from things that are missing in our brain that protects our heart, protects our pancreas, protects our livers and kidneys and so forth. And those are the neurosteroids, the group of steroids that are hormones that are produced in the brain.
- Speaker #1
Raw, uncut, and unapologetic. Welcome to Men Talking Mindfulness.
- Speaker #2
Will, good to see you. Dr. Gordon, Mark, great to see you. And we've had several conversations in the past few weeks, so I'm excited to get in this conversation. But I also want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors. If you're curious about attaining a better mood, physical health, and mental clarity, then check out our new show sponsor, Nourish, and that's spelled N-E-U-R-I-S-H. And that's a powder supplement that can upgrade your health from the inside out. You can check them out on our website, mentalkingmindfulness.com for more information. And then also, hey, join us in October, October 19th. We're going to be down in the Dallas area. Will and I, we've got a Spartan race that we're competing in. And you can learn more about that at mentalkingmindfulness.com. And we've got a small team put together already and would love for you to join us. That all said, again, Mark, welcome to the show. And we're going to kick this off with a one breath grounding practice just to get us settled and to get our audience settled. So thank you for joining us. And for those listening and for the three of us here, let's just go ahead and begin with a nice exhale. Really grounding ourselves, feeling our bodies, feeling the space here and now. And now a nice, slow,
- Speaker #0
deep breath in,
- Speaker #2
filling all the way up to the top, holding full. And releasing that. Releasing, releasing. Now bring some movement back into the body, maybe wiggling your fingers, wiggling your toes. And here we are.
- Speaker #0
I'm ready to go. Let's do it. My finger is not that long.
- Speaker #2
And no glove on it just yet.
- Speaker #1
Well, you know what? Let's just jump in. I might say Dr. Mark many times. Can you give us a little bit of your background, you know, the work that you have been putting out there in the world?
- Speaker #0
I think one of the most important things is I'm a New Yorker coming from Queens, Long Island, and therefore with a lot of great energy to focus in on what, as I go from zero to 72 years of age, what I realized was necessary in the world. And that was a better understanding of the chemistry of our body, of our brain, means by which we alter it by. lifestyle choices, poor lifestyle choices, and sometimes good lifestyle choices, also by the jobs that we do, the military, you know, fire department, police department, someone who's a contractor working, understanding that, and professional sports people, understanding that there are a multitude of things that we do to our body that alters the chemistry. And in altering that chemistry in the brain alters our ability to function cognitively and emotionally. So my focus went into an area of medicine which is called neuroendocrinology. Yes, I did endocrinology before, which are usually the hormones from the neck down. And then neuroendocrinology looks at this real estate right here, and how important the chemistry of the brain is for regulating who we're perceived to be, and who we want to be, and how we function. So neuroendocrinology became my life's blood for the past 30 years. over the past 19 years been focusing on the needs of our military and our veteran community and active military. Seeing peoples way back in 2009 who are coming back from deployment where they're having diagnoses labeled as PTSD. What is PTSD? You know, what is it? So how to go in and start looking at what PTSD is. What is TBI? How does TBI alter the chemistry of the brain? And that. That became my platform starting in 2004, really moving forward and looking at how these things that we totally ignore create. inflammation in the brain and alters the chemistry.
- Speaker #2
Very thankful for that work that you're doing with veterans since 2004. And I think Will was going to start with this question here, but you mentioned you've been doing it for the last 30 years. So going back from 2025 back to 1995, can you take us back to then when you first realized that there was a direct link between brain trauma and then human wellbeing and the hormones associated?
- Speaker #0
I'll tell you why. In 1997, I was put on antidepressants.
- Speaker #2
I've been there.
- Speaker #0
I was depressed, didn't have any look forward at my life and so forth, was put on a medication. I'm a reader. So what happened was I picked up some literature and started reading. And an article talked about trauma causing a decrease in hormones and these alterations in hormones. can lead to change in personality. So I got my blood drawn. Organization called Cetagenics in Las Vegas. Expensive, but they found growth hormone, testosterone, and thyroid deficiency. And within 90 days of being placed back onto these hormones and returning my levels to optimal 25 to 35 years of age, and I was in my late 40s at that time, and I started feeling phenomenal. And that's why I started reading more and more and more about endocrinology, neuroendocrinology, head trauma. And then an article came up from a Dr. Beilou out of Paris, France, who said they found the exact same enzymes that convert cholesterol down through a cascade of pregnenolone, cortisol, testosterone, DHEA, and so forth in the brain. And that sort of like put all the pieces together. We only thought about... the hormones and the enzymes below the neck, the gonads, the ovaries, and the testes, as having a right balance of enzymes to convert cholesterol to pregnenolone to cortisol to DHEA and so forth. Turns out it's in the brain. And it turns out that the responsibility for that are in the very specialized cells in the brain. Names like neurons, oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, glial cells, microglia It turned out that these cells had a role to play above and beyond their usual role to help generate hormones in the brain. And then the question arose, why do we lose it? And then one of our mentors, one of my mentors at Caleb Finch at USC, where I was an associate clinical professor volunteer there for 13, 14 years, and he wrote a book. book that basically said that we die not because of heart disease or diabetes. We die from things that are missing in our brain that protects our heart, protects our pancreas, protects our livers and kidneys and so forth. And those are the neurosteroids, the group of steroids that are hormones that are produced in the brain. So in 1997, developed depression was put on a medication. It didn't work was another aspect to it. And now we understand that if antidepressant drugs don't work, number one, you didn't really need them. Number two, there's got to be some hormonal imbalance that's creating this biochemistry in the brain of resistance, treatment resistance. So that is how I started moving forward. Now, in 95 until 2007, I worked for with NFL players, with boxers. James Toney, some major boxers and so forth. ESPN, Outside the Line did a couple of those. And it became very popular to get their hormones tested and not just to replace the hormones. Like a lot of guys got busted for having hormone replacement, but it was the guys that had deficiency from their professional sports, football, rugby, hockey, the checking. in hockey is worse than actually playing the game. And the boxers having chronic trauma, repetitive trauma, creating what they call label CTE. But it turns out that that CTE, the chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is based on a chemical that they call hyperphosphorylated tau protein. Simply, they call it NFTs, which is neurofibro tangles. It turns out that every neurodegenerative illness. has that component. It's in a new article that I'm writing. It's called The Converging Pathway, where it shows that MS, CTE, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, traumatic brain injury, if you will, PTSD, they all have this thing that they call CTE or these NFTs, the neurofibro tangles in the mix as creating that underlying inflammatory mellu. So the fundamental issue is when you have trauma, inflammation occurs in the brain. And what we found in 2013, not me, but the literature, which... educated me. In 2013, they started seeing a relationship between inflammation in the brain, regardless of how it occurred. And it's shutting down a regulatory mechanism in the higher area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which controls the pituitary gland to produce the different hormones that signal other organs or glands in the body to make hormones, luteinizing normal signals the ovaries, the fecal cells in the ovaries, the latic cells in the males to produce hormones. Thyroid stimulating to stimulate the thyroid. Growth hormone goes to the liver and turns on nine proteins, insulin, IGF-1, all these important hormones. And it turned out when you had inflammation, this regulatory system breaks down. And when that regulatory system breaks down, you end up having hormonal deficiency. But everybody's been treating it peripherally. meaning you have testosterone deficiency, let's whack them with some injectable testosterone.
- Speaker #2
That's what I'm on.
- Speaker #0
You volunteered that.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, no, I absolutely volunteered. I've spoken about it on the show before, and it has been great. But even just since we spoke a couple weeks ago, you said, well, being on the TRT, this is the dosage you should be on. And if you're not on the pregnenolone, did I say it right that time? And the DHEA, then... then, then, uh, Yeah, then you're basically shutting off some, what did you say, 37? 35. 35 other hormones that your body should be. Yeah, which is just wild to me.
- Speaker #0
It's a feedback mechanism where when you use testosterone and estrogen, the body says it has a metering system, a sensory system. It says, okay, is testosterone, estrogen, and these hormones all normal for this person? Are they low or are they high? If they're low, it sends a signal to turn the hormone off. on so you make more. That's called positive feedback. But if you're injecting testosterone into your system, the body says, oh, too much. Let's send a negative impulse to hormonally, to the testicles or the ovaries to shut down additional production of the hormones. So that's negative feedback. So when I get an injection of testosterone, my brain shuts off the production of luteinizing hormone. It's actually another hormone called gonadotropic releasing hormone that controls the luteinizing hormone. So you stop making that. Luteinizing hormone is the linchpin or the rate-limiting hormone for 35 hormones in the brain. And then below the neck. So when you run out of allopregnanolone, you become depressed. When you run out of pregnenolone, you become depressed. You don't sleep, anxious. anxious. You don't have pro... progesterone being made and you get swelling of the brain, the fluid dynamics alters, you get more inflammation. So we generally look at our hormones as being gender hormones, reproductive hormones, sex hormones. Well, it turns out that they have a whole bunch of additional benefits. And that term we use is called pleiotropic, which means many other effects. Well, it turns out that all the hormones regulate cellular functioning. and biochemical pathways in the brain. So testosterone will actually shut down four nasty inflammatory chemicals in the brain that lead to neurodegenerative diseases. It also turns on a very powerful anti-inflammatory product called interleukin-10, which is part of our immune system, which drops inflammation. It's an anti-inflammatory product. So if I have a trauma, I have inflammation in the brain and I lose the hormones that have a benefit for what? For stopping the inflammation, for correcting the problem. But we can't make it because of the inflammation. It's a catch-22. So what we do is, in our treatment, we put back in the missing hormones as well as we address the inflammation. So we've been able to not use injectable testosterone, but drop inflammation, use a Temp. temporary stimuli like clomiphene citrate or e-clomiphene to increase the brain's ability to generate the signals. to make ultimately your hormones. And that's how we've been able to put patients on a protocol and then stop the protocol and they keep on producing their hormones in the majority of cases. Yes, we do have failures. It's not 100%. We're at 78.3% success, okay? And 30%, you know, we don't. And that 30% can be due to lifestyle, drugs, alcohol, not eating well, not meditating. That's why it's very important. Um, they're taking medication that is counterproductive for hormones in the brain, like, um, the, the, uh, gabapentin group of drugs, horrible, horrible on the brain. It eliminates three, four key hormones in the brain that help us with anti-anxiety, anti-depression helps us with sleep. And it's all in the literature. So all in the bloody literature.
- Speaker #1
I love that you're diving deep. Um, but let's just go, just stay a little bit. high level, if you will, just for our audience to understand when we say neurodegenerative diseases, why don't we just kind of break down like, you know, the four or five most common, like dementia, like, you know, I'm, I have aging parents, I have aging, you know, family members, I'm seeing a decline in, you know, cognition and stuff. Alzheimer's, another thing, you know, we mentioned TBI at the top, and CTE, and maybe just cover those four. And like, I know, they're obviously connected to the brain. But maybe there obviously is some distinction between them. So help us understand that, because I think our audience would really appreciate, you know, because everyone hopefully doesn't have to face anything like this in the future. But maybe we can, understanding the baseline of this, we can avoid them, you know, with the rest of our conversation later. Please.
- Speaker #0
Neurodegenerative diseases is a grouping of conditions or illnesses that are precipitated by. inflammation. Inflammation that's in the brain. So we refer to inflammation in the brain as neuroinflammation. Okay. So think of it this way. You put a drop of hydrochloric acid on your skin and then you quickly dilute it with water and you remove it. It's okay. But you put another drop on the skin and you let it sit there. And then at the same time, you're raising the concentration of the acid. And what will happen over time, nitric oxide, sulfuric acid, it burns through the skin and it destroys the tissue. Well, the same thing occurs with the inflammatory chemistry of the brain called cytokines. These cytokines will generate destruction of areas of tissue, neuro, neuron, nerve, degeneration. So it erodes layers of the brain. And when we look at things like. Alzheimer's disease and we look at the brain in the skull, we see that the brain has atrophied and there's shrinkage atrophy, shrinkage of the brain. And that shrinkage of the brain is the results of chronic neurodegenerative processes. So the issue is inflammation leads to that. So Alzheimer's, inflammation. Parkinson's disease, inflammation. And one of the stats that really blew me away was when I was writing, still writing it, the paper on Parkinson's disease in the military. Do you know that in a veteran who has never had a traumatic brain injury, that the occurrence after 65 years of age of Parkinson's is 1 to 3 percent? You know what it is if a veteran's had one traumatic brain injury? 53 to 86 percent. 53 to 86 percent. There's a 30 percent increase in multiple sclerosis after traumatic injury in veterans. It's almost a 50 percent increase in Alzheimer's disease. And just on and on and on. And why is that? Well, each one of these conditions, I believe, and the literature starting to really pan out to support it, is that all these diseases have a prehistory or a history of a trauma. I don't know if you've seen the YouTube video on my site of a Navy lieutenant who's in charge of the nuclear power plant on Nimitz-class carrier, who'd been in for a long time, retires in 2020, and subsequently develops multiple sclerosis, diagnosed by the VA in Florida. And he ends up circling around to us because He gets into his car, leaving his diagnosis from the VA of multiple sclerosis. He had lost vision in his eye, left eye. lost function in his right hand, right leg, was having hallucinations, wasn't doing well. As he's leaving the VA, who he told them, I'm not taking any of your treatment, because he's a smart kid. And he went and looked at the side effects of treatment versus the course that the average person with multiple sclerosis has. And he decided not doing anything. He gets into his car, he's driving home, turns on his favorite talk show, Joe Rogan. Remember, 1589 at the second, I'm talking about one of our Navy SEALs out of three who came to us with multiple sclerosis. And in 60 days, he was 50% better. Now, Tim was 100% better in about 100 days. Okay. He was 90% better at 90 days. He was 50% better at 30 days. He sent me a video, which is on my YouTube. telling his own story of what had transpired. So it's a neuroinflammatory process. I mean, they call multiple sclerosis autoimmune disease, but understanding how it is autoimmune is because of the trauma. 30% of people with head trauma end up with MS. He had two major head traumas at below 20 years of age before he enlisted in the military. So anyway, the neuroinflammatory, neurodegenerative diseases are a side effect of chronic inflammation. So the reason why boxers have it is because they constantly are being pummeled. You have football players who are constantly being tackled. They're developing CTE. Well, CTE, the chemical, which is the neurofibril or the hyperphosphorylated tau protein, is inflammatory. It creates this horrible inflammation. And then what happens is the inflammation involves itself in enzymes. And these enzymes are destroyed, like the enzyme that generates serotonin. So you become greater depressed. The enzyme that generates melatonin, so you can't sleep. The enzyme that protects the brain from inflammation, glutathione, is destroyed. OK, so this is how you get psychiatric or neuropsychiatric conditions like depression, bipolar, anxiety, panic attack. We've learned that the lateral side of the mood center, the limbic system, the amygdalas, that if you're deficient in testosterone, people tend to be more prone towards panic attack, anxiety and startle response. Because it helps to calm these areas down. It's like meditating, taking deep breaths, calms things down. Well, without the testosterone, can't calm it down.
- Speaker #1
Wow. Are all neurodegenerative diseases like linked to head trauma? Or like, you know, I mean, you know what I'm saying? Because he kept coming back to that over and over, right? I mean, we're going to, yeah, let's dive into that. I mean, because it's like.
- Speaker #0
It's a great question because define head trauma for me.
- Speaker #1
Well, okay, here's an example, right? I mean, you mentioned, you know, military, this and that. Like, 1983, right, before helmets were a thing, I didn't know what a skateboard was. I think I was, like, 11 years old at the time. I jumped in a skateboard, like, with both legs, went, like, skateboard went out, I went, like, ass, and, like, smashed the fuck out of my head, like, really. And I saw some stars, I cried, like, I believe, like, I had headaches for, like, a couple weeks. and And, you know, here I am, I'm 52, you know, I'm in, I don't really, maybe I don't think I really struggle with depression, but maybe I do a little bit, but like, is this something I should probably get checked or, you know, give me an exam, please help diagnose me, doc. Okay. If the best you can, you know, if you will.
- Speaker #0
We've taken care of some of the top skateboarders, internationally well-known skateboarders, motocross people who, you know, it's a dangerous sport. Oh. All those sports are dangerous. Skateboarding. You know, I've got to answer you in a circumlocutive way is that, you know, I have mothers who come to me and says, my kid is personalities. He's not doing straight A's in school anymore. He's smoking dope. He's stealing from neighbors and so forth. I said, so tell me about what head traumas. Oh, he's never had any head traumas. I said, did he ever roller skate? Yeah. Did he ever skateboard? yeah right yeah chances are he's had head trauma chances are look it up until five years of age you're born during birth trauma Did they use forceps? Did they have to push you out? Were you caught in the birth canal? Oh, between birth and 12 months of age, you were trying to do what? Walk? Did you ever put your hand on the wall and fall and hit your head up against the wall? Oh, and then you started walking and you tripped and fell because your balance wasn't there. Oh, and then you started bicycling or fell off the bicycle. So there are a lot of things that we... totally ignore. So the answer to your question is, could you still be having residual effects of that injury you had while skateboarding? Well, the literature shows 17 plus years after the initial injury, you can still have the chemistry that's inflammatory and they meter it by a chemical called interleukin-6, which is an inflammatory marker. But we have a lot of inflammatory markers. Okay. So doing a blood test, we're just working with a genetics lab for doing inflammatory markers, RNA for inflammatory markers, you know, RNA, DNA, so forth. So we're using RNA, they're using RNA as the marker to say that the specific inflammatory chemical was turned on to be made. So 50 markers, we'll look at that. and then correlate it to our biomarkers, our hormonal brain biomarkers, to see how they relate. So inflammation can last a long time, 17 plus years. And you're going to tell me you've never had a fender bender, a rear end, or something minor like that, or a slip and fall, or wave runner. or snow skiing or water skiing. Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Oh, I smashed it. Yeah. Yes. No. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, exactly. So, so the brain can over time heal itself.
- Speaker #0
Well, I'll explain it to you this way. You get a cold. You have a cold for an average of how long? If you ever get sick? A week? A week? Yeah. A week. What happens during that, that course? You feel fatigued. You're irritable. Don't come and talk to me. I don't want to eat. Leave me alone. I just want to lay here in bed, close my eyes, shut the lights off. And then over a couple of days, you start feeling better. You start being more human again.
- Speaker #2
Unless it's a man cold. If it's a man cold, then it might be two weeks.
- Speaker #0
You take some extra time for good behavior. Right. So what happens is that's an acute process. What happens in traumatic brain injury, chronic traumatic brain injury, is that you keep on having dings. And those dings bring you back up and you come down and you go back up. So we live in a state of chronic inflammation because of all the toxic chemicals that we're exposed to. I'm not even talking about the black mold or the microplastic or the endocrine disrupting chemistry or the biophenones or the XYZ, ABC, all those letters you can put together in any order. They'll find a chemical that messes with our biochemistry of the body. So it's not as straightforward as identifying, yeah, I slipped and fell and hit my head against the wall or whatever. I hit my head in the 1973 earthquake, 1993, you know, the Northridge earthquake, the Simi earthquake. I was in three or four major earthquakes. Wow. Okay. Yeah. And in Mexico City. Horrible one and twice in Mexico City. Yeah, because I go there to lecture. So anything can happen. And then one of the areas that I was pulled into last year in Tampa from a Sergeant Major in the Green Berets who had lost his son, Mac, through suicide. He was a wrestler and a football player. And he was having minor dings but repetitive. And they were subconcussive, which means that every time he had one, there was no real symptom. But over a course of time, they accumulated. They massed together and created the biochemical change to alter his ability to think through things, frontal lobe-related issues. So we talked about the mechanisms that play in subconcussive trauma or microtraumas, if you will. or repetitive head injury traumas. And then there was an article where they looked at female athletes who had broken a leg or a bone, never had any head traumas. What happened? Their hormonal balance was thrown totally off. And the reason is because when you break a bone, you release inflammatory chemicals from that bone fracture. And that goes right into the brain and turns on all these inflammatory mechanisms. Also, the gut. Why is it that we're looking very heavily into the gut, the microbiome? is because chronic gastritis or GERD or ulcer. or dysbiosis, you know, the bacteria is off in the gut, that they can cause chronic inflammation, which alters the brain function. And in looking at our population, I said early 78.3% of our patients are 50 to 100% better in 12 months. What happened to the other 30% when we look deeper, aside from it being lifestyle related issues, it was the gut. And then I dropped a new paper a couple months ago called The Influence of COVID-19 on the Gut Microbiota, the bacteria in the gut. Turns out that you could have gotten the vax or you could have gotten the cold, the virus itself, and it wipes out the gut and puts you at high risk for chronic inflammation. And chronic inflammation is what we need for neurodegenerative diseases. It's what we need to alter the chemistry in the brain. So you become depressed, anxious, bipolar, cognitively impaired. Your short-term memory is gone. Long-term memory is failing. Name recall, word recall, associations that we develop in our brain, we're losing it. Because the communication links are all neurons. And what happens is drugs like statin drugs to lower cholesterol. wipes that out. My mother died of statin dementia. It's one of the reasons why I went into looking deep dive into this area of Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative diseases. Yeah. Water. Spill water.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. You got to have some water. And for those not watching, for those listening, he has his water in a wine glass. We're still questioning.
- Speaker #0
Smell it.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, great.
- Speaker #0
White wine. I'm a red wine drinker.
- Speaker #1
So, Doc, we talked about this neuroinflammation kind of at length here. What can be done to either counter or prevent, maybe proactively? Is there anything that can be done proactively? And then what can be done to reverse it?
- Speaker #0
Great question. Well, understanding that... the inflammation is primary because it's the inflammation that down-regulates, decreases our hormonal production in our brain. So if we're able to drop the inflammation, we should be able to regenerate our hormones, which we've proven. So what to use to help? So there are things like quercetin, vitamin E, vitamin D. EGCG, which is the green tea extract without caffeine. It's pure extract that can help. Fish oil, very important fish oil. Colonel Michael Lewis, D. Lewis, retired now in Washington area, Maryland, Washington, wrote a book called When Brains Collide. great thesis. It's what he built when he was actively in the military trying to get the DOD to increase the omega-3s, DHA, EPA, into the nutrition of our fighting force to give them protection, okay? So think of it this way. Our biological resiliency is like Kevlar, biological resiliency. That is how thick our Kevlar is. So if we do things to thin it out, drinking alcohol, not sleeping, And. not hydrating well, poor nutrition, medication, bad medication, drugs, alcohol, thins it out. So when you're exposed to a trauma, it penetrates.
- Speaker #2
Well, I mean, penetrates, so your brain has a greater buffer to impact? Is that what it is?
- Speaker #0
Yes.
- Speaker #2
Oh, wow.
- Speaker #0
That's right. There are two systems. There are two systems in the brain, one called the glutathione system. which is a first line of protection against inflammatory free radicals. And then the second line is called SAD, superoxide desmutase. Long name, that's why they call it sod. And I always thought they were talking about gardening. So anyway, the ability of our body to regenerate that vitamin C, very important, but not ascorbic acid, which is the most common, but ascorbate palmitate, which is a palmitic acid, palm oil, which helps it to get absorbed into the brain. What does it do? Helps regenerate the enzymes that increase glutathione. So everything we do is about increasing it. There were three major military studies on N-acetylcysteine, NAC. It's a precursor, two amino acid precursor to the three amino acid glutathione. So they did a study where they had guys that were out in the field of battle who were exposed within 12 to 72 hours to a blast trauma, and they were brought in to this study. Half of them were put on N-acetylcysteine, four grams for three days, and then I think one gram for two days thereafter, and the other group, placebo. In the group that received the placebo, 89% of them developed insomnia, anger, and depression. Okay? In the group that received the N-acetylcysteine, 86% of them had no symptoms. 14% of them developed symptoms similar to the group that were in the placebo group. And there are a number of studies, three studies that came out of the government from the medical, not Walter Reed, but the medical. Bethesda. No, the other one where it's the research. Fort Detrick, they do their research.
- Speaker #1
Was it Johns Hopkins?
- Speaker #0
No, it wasn't Johns Hopkins. But anyway, it was the military medical. Center. Okay. Okay. Military Medical Center. And they did the study. They're brilliant studies. But what they came out to show is how important this protective glutathione is. And acylcysteine helps to generate that. So we have in our products, we put in all the things we've talked about into the product. And then we have one which is called B is for Brain, which has in it B vitamins that are very special for protecting the brain from... uh, emotional impact of inflammation.
- Speaker #1
These, these folks that were, um, they were, I guess, victims, if you will, of a, of a blast of some sort. I say victims intentionally because we assess certain blasts and say, okay, well, they're, they stepped on a mine or they were close to a mine or they were in a vehicle that an IED hit or something like that. But a lot of the time, as we've discussed, Mark, is we're in close proximity to blasts that are intentionally set off by us, right? So we have a breacher come up on a door, slap a slap charge on there and blow it. Well, we're right next to it, and that's a blast. Or we're using a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle. That's a blast. we don't really consider that. So there's probably hundreds, if not thousands of service members and, or veterans who have these blast effects that don't even realize it. And then, and then they're being administered all sorts of medications, um, that are even that are masking the symptoms, but are not actually addressing the root cause.
- Speaker #0
Right. Absolutely.
- Speaker #2
Well, is it the shock waves? I'm sorry. Is it the shock waves from the blast that like, I mean, cause obviously our brain is and an aqueous solution and is the shock waves that... You know, because it's not like you're banging your head. Right. But you're you know what I mean? Is that what it is?
- Speaker #0
Well, it's an article that is about halfway finished right now, which is called Meccano transduction. Meccano transduction. What does that mean? Guys that are on the flight deck, engineers, flight deck engineers, they're working on the engines of the jets. They've never been to. deployed into the field of battle. They're there just working on the engines, listening to the roar. Turns out that there's a certain decibel and a certain frequency that will cause the vibration of the brain to create inflammation through things called free radicals. Free radicals like nitric, not nitric oxide, like what? I'm blanking on them. Hydroxyl groups on peroxynitrite, on reactive oxygen species. active nitrogen species classifications, turns out that these turn on, activate the immune cells in the brain called microglia. So the microglia are there. in a resting state. And when you have disruption of the control for resting state, they become activated. And when they're activated, they start dumping pro-inflammatory cytokines. So the vibration is enough to create the problem. So you're right. You don't need physical contact. And a large group of our patients, of our military clients that are with us, have never been deployed. But they were in what? Basic training. What did they do in basic training? I went to Bragg and was standing on the catwalk overlooking the urban, you know, the urban breaching that they did. I'm having a flak jacket. I've got a helmet on. I'm standing next to the CO. And they go and they breach it. And they're using a lesser charge, as you know, John. They're using a lesser charge. But I still felt the overpressure standing 13 feet up, six foot tall. 19 feet, still felt it. And after they went in and they took care of the hajis that were in there, whatever they did, I turned to the CO and asked him a really important question. How much money you guys spend per year on doors? He looked at me like it's the weirdest question anyone could ask him, but he answered about a million dollars. I said, you probably have great firewood you know, in Virginia, it gets a little cold, huh? I mean, in North Carolina.
- Speaker #1
Virginia, Fayetteville, Bragg. Yep. For sure.
- Speaker #0
But anyway, so the problem is perception. And one of the arguments I had way back when with the DOD and the VA is their criteria for classifying someone as having TBI, mild TBI, moderate TBI versus PTSD. And the criteria was. If you didn't have near loss of consciousness or a Glasgow score 13 to 15, you didn't have, you know, retrospective or prospective memory loss, or you were fatigued or vomiting, you didn't have any of that. They put you into what classification? PTSD. So you're immediately given that little baggie with the different colored pills in it and said, OK, this will help you. So they're drooling from the side of the face and they're not having any symptoms because they're suppressed. And they feel emotionally disassociated. And therefore, taking their own life is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with anything because they've lost the control system that allows them to evaluate their system and say, make decisions that are logical. I'm going to go and find an alternative means of treatment because this shit isn't working. You know, when I was at the beach sitting across from one of the operators, with your first name, who I had been taking care of long distance. And he tells a story that he woke up one morning and he was depressed, couldn't get out of bed. And because he was one of their choice key operators, they sent him to Bethesda to Intrepid and whatever else. And they ran him through and they found three hormone deficiencies. So what did they give him? They gave him three antidepressants. They send them back. They're back to the beach. He goes back to the beach. The first thing he does is he throws out the medication, goes to GNC, and picks up the DHEA, pregnenolone, vitamin D. And I come in and I bring him the other aspects of the treatment protocol. He's doing very well. OK? So, you know, why did he develop it? He was breaching. My partner, Andrew Marr, was Green Beret EOD. And in his fourth tour of duty, he gets blown up. knocked unconscious, not a scratch on his body. But six months later, he's on 13 medications, full blown alcoholic, comes into the program. We test him, find his deficiency. He gets on treatment, ends up doing MBA at Pepperdine five years ago. I think it was four or five years ago. He's right now in law school in Texas, in a law school. So what does that tell you? He was, you know, non-functional. Now he's peak. absolute back at his peak. And he says, I'm better now than I was when I enlisted.
- Speaker #1
Wow. Well,
- Speaker #2
why are your methods seem like aren't being utilized everywhere or else? I mean, and instead like seeing as radical, like I mean, cause you obviously have done the work, have done the studies and have proven, you know, that if we really look at, you know, neural, you know, brain inflammation in a way, right. That, and we can heal it, you know, by. obviously understanding the biochemistry that's going on in the brain and the body. But it's like, so why do we have like a VA and why do we have a country that they just like, oh, get on an SSRI or get on some other, you know, like money. I mean, why aren't people knocking down your door?
- Speaker #0
Two reasons. Two reasons. Number one is because I am a for-profit organization that uses 60% of profits from across my entire domain to support our veterans. Okay? Wow. If it was free, then there would be a lot more people coming in. And that's what I've been working on since 2009. is how to get this free. For three years, Andrew, Warrior Angel Foundation, Andrew Marr, Adam Marr, we were paying 100% and we both went broke, okay? Because we saw the good that we were trying to do being more important than making it stable. And we learned a very important lesson, okay? And that's probably why he went into MBA, so he can help with the... financial issues because we were just doing emotionally. People were getting better. That's the bottom line. So the other aspect is you already said it. It's easier just handing them a little bag of medication.
- Speaker #2
Right. And it's probably more profitable, a hell of a lot more profitable, I'd imagine.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, for someone.
- Speaker #0
For someone. Absolutely.
- Speaker #2
Right. Right.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, absolutely. So my entire past. Last year and this year has been the plight of trying to get awareness out there, writing stuff to hopefully get into Pete Hegseth's hands, getting it into RFK Jr.'s hands and Elon Musk because the cost for our program. You know how much it is if a doctor does two MRIs of a patient? A couple thousand. Or does a spec scan. It's $5,000 average for two brain functional MRIs or MRIs. And I think it's about $10,000 for a spec scan. Jeez. Our treatment, all-inclusive, is around $4,900 to $5,500. And they're not in our program for life. They come in, they get better, and they're out. We've got a lot of people who finished our program in less than six months. We just have a major out of Fort Hood who was in our program for six months. He was on eight medications. He's now doing a... PhD in Texas in an area that will support neuroscience. Wow. And he's leading our charge in the state of Texas for HB 381, which is a bill to fund us for a pilot study with 250 veterans, excuse me, 250 Texans who happen to be veterans. So this is what Andrew, Joshua and myself have been working on. We've been back and forth with in Austin, Texas. I hang out a lot in Magnolia, Texas. Just picking up this accent that's conflicting with my Long Island and drink the water.
- Speaker #2
Water's fine.
- Speaker #0
Give me a call later, okay?
- Speaker #2
Yeah. I mean, actually, I know I met Adam and shot out to Adam a while ago. He was at with Dobler. right um who does works with mdma he was out here in york and i got a chance to meet him you know we had tried we scheduled for the show he had to cancel so we're trying to get him back on but like i love what you're doing with or warrior angel project and it's like a lot of this work yeah that's where it's that's where it started and adam's gone into the psychedelic world which is really really uh interesting um you know in hb
- Speaker #0
1802 in texas in 2023 with uh Rick Perry was part of it. Morgan was part of it. Morgan, yeah, Morgan Marcus. Morgan. Morgan was part of it. Also, Morgan Luttrell and Congressman, and also Dr. Martin Polanco, who's probably the leader in Ibogaine technology. And then what happened with Amber and Marcus Capone. Marcus Capone. Yeah, Capone, is that they helped to get the Ibogaine moving forward. My position on psychedelics is really fundamentally the same as what we've been talking about. If there's inflammation in the brain, you need to settle that down so that you give psychedelic-assisted therapy so it can work. When the chemistry in the brain is off, how are we expecting to get the chemistry we're putting into the body, the ibogaine, the psilocybin, the LSD, the MDNA, the whatever, how are we supposed to get it? to utilize the biochemical pathways in the brain if they're not there or if they're altered. Great point. You know, so I wrote a paper that was published two years ago on psychedelic. spotlight. And it basically walked them through the logic of, if you want to optimize the treatment with psychedelic-assisted therapy, you need to first correct, start the process of correcting the biochemistry of the brain. Otherwise, it's not going to be able to maximize or optimize its benefits. And I just got off this morning, was a guy who went to Mexico, a veteran who went to Mexico. He was on our program for about six months before. He comes back with this incredible story of how phenomenal he's doing right now. And we're going to meter him to see how long it lasts. But it should last because the chemistry worked the best. I mean, the Ibogaine that he took had an opportunity to optimize because his chemistry was almost completely optimized. and another guy who came to us he said that um He's cold turkeyed off his medication. He'd been on our program, stopped all his psychotropic medication, antidepressants, all that stuff. And he didn't feel any difference from stopping it, where he said that in the past, before our treatment protocol, he tried to stop his medication, messed him up. Sure. Messed him up. And that's because, as you said earlier, John, is that the... medication doesn't address the causation for why they were put onto the medication because it masks the symptoms and never actually treats the causation, the chemical changes, the inflammation. That's what needs to be addressed.
- Speaker #1
Well, let's move to one of the hormones we've spoken about on the show before at length, and that's specifically testosterone. Yeah. And then we'll tie it all back together here. And before we hit record, you said there's another peptide that's better than testosterone. And we're going to bring that one up too. Okay.
- Speaker #2
PT141. There it is. PT141.
- Speaker #0
That's like ET.
- Speaker #1
ET.
- Speaker #2
It's a miracle. Bring me the miracle. Yeah. Let's dive into this miracle hormone. Like, why is it misunderstood? Like, what's the broader, like, why, you know, the. brain impact health of testosterone and like overall well-being, like maybe gives a baseline of actual good testosterone flowing through the body or not good, but, you know, functional testosterone flowing through and what that does for us, how it helps us.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, absolutely. Well, here's a short list of all the benefits of free testosterone. And the reason why I make the distinction between free testosterone and total testosterone is because free testosterone is what does the work. total testosterone is a number that only has 2% of free testosterone in its number. And you say, oh, my testosterone level is 850. So I had a guy that was 850, but his free testosterone was less than four and it should have been 15. Wow. So two endocrinologists at the VA kicked him out, said your testosterone level is great. So he goes to a civilian endocrinologist. who does the laboratory testing and says, oh, your testosterone level is great. They were only looking at total testosterone and failed to take in the fact that free testosterone is the key. So all those people listening out there, focus on the free and it should be 50 percent of the range. And for instance, so if the range in your laboratory is between 10 and 90, take the 10, add it to 90. It's 100 divided by two and it's 50. So it means that you should be at least a 50 on that fictitious range. So it's the free testosterone that's the key because it gets into the brain. Total testosterone, only 2% could possibly get into the brain. We need free testosterone to get into the brain. So here are the benefits of free testosterone. Sense of well-being, aplomb, assertiveness, competitiveness, memory, recall, the ability to learn new things, great sex, great sleep. Great creativity, playing music, writing, painting, anti-depression. These are some of the fundamental benefits of testosterone. And you can say energy, but fatigue, energy, libido are multifaceted. It's not just one thing, and that's where PT-141 comes into play.
- Speaker #1
Mark, are you selling this stuff?
- Speaker #0
No, I don't sell any peptides. What I do is educate, and I'm just... building the video on our YouTube site is how we took 127 plus vets with VA orthopedic diagnoses. and fixed it. Rotator cuff, linoleum of the hip, back problems, knee problems, ankle problems, elbow, you know, so which is another discussion on peptides. So anyway, what is the importance of testosterone? The importance is that when it's deficient, we age rapidly because of all those things we've lost. Depression goes up, you know, and you've seen the... possibly the article out of Task and Purpose, where the Congress was pushing against the DOD to test all operators for low testosterone and if they're deficient in testosterone, to replace the testosterone. So I was called by the senior writer for that article, Patty, and she told me this. And I said to her, that is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. And I said, oops. I apologize. I'm a New Yorker. She says, no problem. Why? So I explained to her the following two very important things. Number one, you guys are exposed to multiple means of inflammation. So inflammation occurs in the brain. And as I already talked about, that inflammation shuts down the communication between the hypothalamus and the pituitary. So it can't make the signal to tell the ovaries, the gonads, to make hormones. Number one. Number two. two, I was educated on this by you guys. You guys suck up Motrin, ibuprofen, like it doesn't, you know, like it's the last day. You got a special on it. You get 100 tablets for free, and then you pay a penny for another million. So you guys are sucking up 800 milligrams, two, four tablets a day, not for a day, not for a week. I've got guys nine months to a year on chronic... ibuprofen, which is in a classification called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, NSAID, okay, NSAIDs. So what's important about this? Well, in 2018, my world, my neuroendocrine world got rocked. An article was published in 2017, I didn't get to it until 2018, from Denmark. And what did they find? They found that... all these non-steroidal anti-inflammatories indexed by ibuprofen shut down the ability of gonads to respond to luteinizing hormone. So the signal coming from the brain is saying, okay, make testosterone, make testosterone. And what's happening? You're not making any because there's a block and the block is in the ability of the signal to be sent to the nucleus, which codes out for testosterone production. So you lose that. So you lose that. So what's the natural response by traditional doctors? Oh, just hit them with testosterone. Just give them testosterone. And that burns out the system in the brain and burns out the systems in the gonads. So what we've been doing since 2014, and we did a three-year veteran study on the use of clomiphene citrate. We've got over 1,000 people on it right now. And that is what's stimulating their brain to produce the luteinizing hormone. So as I just said, if they've been on ibuprofen or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, you're producing the luteinizing hormone. But when it gets to the gonads to say, make testosterone, it can't do that. So what we were doing is we were raising the luteinizing hormone very high to force the testicles to respond. And they did. And then in 2020, an article came out and saved us. What did they find? A mineral fixes the problem. Selenium. 200 micrograms twice a day for eight weeks helps to fix the problem that ibuprofen or the non-steroidals created to the testes.
- Speaker #1
Can't you get selenium in like Brazil nuts?
- Speaker #2
Brazilian nuts. These nuts.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, these nuts.
- Speaker #2
Brazilian nuts. The Brazilian nuts. The nuts that help your nuts.
- Speaker #0
544 micrograms of selenium in five Brazil nuts. Cashews have it, but Brazil nuts are the very best. Okay. So there are natural ways of getting it. Plus you get the oils from it. So it's good for the skin and so forth. So what we do first is we fix the inflammation and we address their history of ibuprofen use. and And in doing our blood panel, the 28-point biomarker panel, we see the pattern that is classical. for ibuprofen or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory use, where the luteinized hormone is high and testosterone is low. So the major out of Fort Hood, that was his pattern. Six months on treatment, he's off of his psychotropic medication and whatever, eight medications, and he stops our program. He's still maintaining at 48 years of age, a level of testosterone that's higher than mine. 13.4. The median is 15.
- Speaker #1
That's the free testosterone.
- Speaker #0
That's only free. I'll only talk about free testosterone.
- Speaker #1
Okay.
- Speaker #2
Right. Let's take it a step further with NSAIDs. And it gets even a little scarier as like your paper, the two eyes of hypogonadotism. Is that what you said? Gonadotism. Right. And then, right. Gonadotism.
- Speaker #0
I haven't released that yet. How'd you get a copy?
- Speaker #2
You sent it to me, Mark. You sent it to us through. Oh, thank God.
- Speaker #0
Yeah. I give you information.
- Speaker #2
Well, I mean, we could talk about this, right? This is published. Yeah, okay. Well, pregnant mothers and a placenta and NSAIDs disrupting fetal testosterone synthesis and causing shorter androgenital distance, AGTA, which is the taint. I believe we can think it's a taint, right? In males is a biomarker for reproductive issues. I mean, this is like, this is happening, right? Mothers, if they're taking, I guess, too much or... or any uh and said any kind of thing any could could actually have like and and then it goes even you take a step further transgenerational could be a problem down the road god it's like we're gonna have we're gonna wrap it up everybody eventually with some like good news but right now like i think this is important news as well so please dr mark take us to this well um you saw the first paper that i did which was called um the shadow the shadow oh that was the the
- Speaker #0
That's TBI in the shadow of PTSD. But the article that was from 2023 was on endocrine disrupting chemistry and gender dysphoria. Oh, wow. Okay. It's on my website. It's good I didn't send it to you because then I'd sit back and let you talk about it. No. Oh, I get this.
- Speaker #2
No,
- Speaker #0
you're spot on with the paper. Yeah, you're spot on the two eyes of hypogonadism. So what they found is, as you said, the transgenerational is where a mother is allowed to take Motrin, not allowed to take Tylenol or to take aspirin, but allowed to use ibuprofen or naproxen, I think it is. And it goes across the placenta and diminishes the response of hormones. So that we need at between six and seven weeks of gestation, we need our first hormone pulse. to establish XX or XY as the gender. Then after birth, between one and three months, another pulse occurs to reinforce the original pulse that happened in utero, in the womb, okay? So if you interrupt that, you end up having gender dysphoria. And I'm going through, I wrote that article in 23, I think it was, but it had been a thought for a long period of time as I started seeing more... gender dysphoria occurring as we move forward in years. So I'm looking at how about the use of all these non-steroidals? They've gotten more and more and more because the other drugs, Tylenol and aspirin, have been removed and the non-steroidals have been put into play. They didn't even know that it created this problem with hormonal production or with the endocrine disrupting aspect of it. What do you do to fix it? Is selenium the answer? I don't know. I think the real answer is staying off all these medication, drugs, and whatever that you have, you know, that during gestation until you're seven, what, second, second, third trimester, unless you really need it. Just like you stop drinking alcohol when you're pregnant. Most, most cognitive people do.
- Speaker #2
We're broadcasting the world now. Stay off the NSAIDs when you're pregnant. out there, ladies.
- Speaker #1
Stay off them altogether, it sounds like.
- Speaker #0
I've got tons of reference articles in that paper to support the position. And all I do is, look, I'm not a genius. What I do is I love reading. And in the reading, and because of what I've been on, I've been on my own treatment, the stuff that you're looking at getting onto. I've been on this since 1997, official. 95 is when I started in 97, when I officially got on to everything. based upon that laboratory testing that found growth hormone, testosterone, and thyroid deficiency. And my capacity for reading is quite high. I see it in our population, people who are failing in school, go back to school, get their PhDs. I've got two guys who got their PAs. One of them works with SOA. You know SOA. So their doc who's a PA or their medical officers of PA, Ryan, did very well. He's been trained in all our stuff, has access to all our stuff. So anyway, there's a lot of danger out there, and we're ignoring it. That's why this awareness is so very important.
- Speaker #2
I'm glad you're helping us today. Thank you.
- Speaker #0
I'm trying.
- Speaker #1
So my question, my next question is related to testosterone, but it's with females. What studies have you done and what effects have you seen with your protocol in females?
- Speaker #0
Well, we do the exact same testing in males as females. Okay. And if they're deficient, we put them on hormones that they need. testosterone, progesterone, estriol, estradiol. And in 2005 or 2006, we started a project for females where it's intravaginal introduced cream. A lot of women, when they go to their OBGYNs, they give them topical creams, but you can't put testosterone on the top, on the skin of women because it causes their hair to get darker and to increase density. Okay. So they were putting it on the inner thigh, but what we did in 2005, six with the nurse and with two females that became our key, uh, our primary, uh, recipients of the technology intravaginal, very small dosing, and it gets absorbed and it helps immensely because when you put it on the skin, it's got to go through all these layers. And there's an enzyme in the skin that converts the free testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, which can't get into the brain. It's made in the brain. It can't get past the periphery, the brain blood barrier into the brain. So you need free testosterone. So in the women we give testosterone, they get the same benefits. Clear mind, more energy, libido goes up. You know, I've had it with the guys more than with the women, where the wives will call me and say, look, whatever you give my husband, decrease it, please. and I respect that. Okay. Decrease it please. And from the women, I hear the opposite. I said, can I get a little more? Can I get a little more? Their work is better. Their cognition, as I said, memory, recall, the ability to learn new things. Cognition is better. They're sleeping better. Mood is great. As long as you stay within the physiological level for free testosterone. There's a side effect of free testosterone that I've only seen in less than a dozen patients in the 20 years I've been working with the military, and that is panic attacks. Oh, wow. Yeah. Turns out that too high of a level of testosterone will turn on a chemical in the brain called adenyl cyclase, which is like speed. And then I'm just dealing with... an individual who said on testosterone, he's lost his libido. It turns out the same chemical adenyl cyclase is important for maintaining erections and getting erections. And after long-term use of testosterone, you burn out the adenyl cyclase. So you create from a sufficiency to a deficiency. And that's where you start having... libido-related issues. And then PT phone home comes into play. PT-141 is this amazing peptide that was developed in Russia. And it's a snippet. It's a peptide, which is a small amount of amino acids in a chain that comes off of our ACTH, adrenocorticotropic releasing hormone, or simulating hormone. which stimulates our adrenals to make cortisol. They found this small piece of it that when you give it to males or females, supercharges their libido center. So they're like 18 years of age or else a six-year-old just finding themselves. Male, five-year-old, six-year-old, finding himself.
- Speaker #1
Got a six-year-old little boy currently finding himself. And I'm sure he's going to watch this show later. When he's 18, he's going to be like,
- Speaker #0
good God,
- Speaker #1
Dad.
- Speaker #0
So the PT-141 injectable, it helps to re-stimulate in women. There are a lot of articles in the... neuropsych for women and in the OBGYN literature and the hormones and behavior, where it talks about how it gives them more stimulation, more reactivity. They go through the appropriate phases in stimulation, lubrication, and so forth, arousal, lubrication, and so forth. And they have a more enjoyable time. having sex as well as it heightens the orgasm level of orgasm and the spasms of the vagina. In the men, it basically does the same thing, but with their organs, not with her organs, but helps them with- I'm buying some of this stuff immediately. Afterwards, I'll tell you where you can possibly get it. It's very expensive. It's about $72 for 30 shots, which means about three months supply.
- Speaker #1
Oh, that's not- That doesn't sound terribly expensive.
- Speaker #0
No, I'm being facetious.
- Speaker #1
Okay, I was going to say, it sounds super cheap.
- Speaker #0
It is reasonably priced. Well, anyway, so what it does is it helps. And in women that are in their 60s, they psychologically would like to have good interpersonal relationships, and they feel deficient. This corrects it. And it's female sexual dysfunction syndrome, which is talked about. and Also in males, it works very well. You know, what happens is you can, if you're aroused, visually, smell, visual, hearing, whatever, it'll kick in the libido center and you will be ready to scale the walls. So having testosterone, what we do, going back to the testosterone issue, so... We don't start any of our patients on injectable testosterone. What we do is we start them on either clomiphene citrate or on e-clomid. And in 2014, 15, and 16, we did the three-year veteran study. And the reason for that was in 2013, 14, the DOD started pulling back on dispensing of testosterone because they believed it was making the warriors out there a little bit more lethal than what they wanted to. Okay. So they pulled back on it. So we had to find another replacement. So I had used in recovery protocols with beta HCG, used clomiphene citrate and guys that were no other word, but abusive with testosterone. They needed to have regeneration of their system. So we use clomiphene citrate and beta HCG. So in 2014, team. We started the project in January 2015. I'm reviewing the results, and the results are just impressive. I had already been on injectable testosterone for almost 17 years at that time. I threw out my testosterone and went on to Clomid, which I'm still on now at 72. Our oldest on Clomid is 76, still producing testosterone. So this fallacy about over a certain age you need injectable testosterone, no. What you need to do is first test it out and see if the person responds. And if they respond with an elevation luteinizing hormone, it tells us that the hypothalamus pituitary is working. And if they produce luteinizing hormone, but they don't produce testosterone, you know the problem is in the testes by something blocking, whether or not it's not- Get off the Advil. Ibuprofen or whatever, or environmental toxins or burn pits. The toxin. from burn pits we've forgotten that um also in one of the things i was educated on by seeing a large group of vets coming from a brag is that in close combat training you're sucking up your you know your fume of the brass uh everything fumes fumes the vapors from the um the primer which is mercuric chloride and you're pulling up the round going through the chamber, and you've got lead. So lead and mercury stop the conversion of DHEA to testosterone. So we'll see guys with huge levels of DHT. And the first thing I says, how much DHEA are you taking? Dihydroepiandostroin, which is very important for generating a lot of hormones. And they said, I'm not taking any. And I had to go back and read that mercury and lead poison. two enzymes that allow for the conversion of DHEA to testosterone. And therefore, they weren't able to make testosterone. That's why they were having all the symptoms relative to testosterone deficiency. So we send them out for a heavy metals test. And we find high mercury, high, not high, hello, but elevated levels of mercury and lead. And then we go and my daughter, who takes care of all our civilians, as well as she's a naturopath, who knows how to detox. And so she'll detox the individual. and get rid of the mercury and with zeolite and a couple other things, cilantro, zeolite, red infrared heating, sauna. These help to expedite it and some kind of a tea. So it helps to expedite it. She also takes care of all our vets and civilians with gut-related dysbiosis, and it really works very well. So what we do is first the clomiphene citrate and If they respond well, wonderful. Keep them on it. People say, oh, there are a lot of side effects from Clomid. That's if you give it like you give it to a woman. We use 50 milligrams, 25 to 50 milligrams every third night. That's what the three-year study was about, to find what the lowest dose was and how we can pulse it in order to avoid any side effects and maximize benefits. And what we found is every 72 hours, it works phenomenally well. 50 milligrams at nighttime, okay, at bedtime, works very well. Yes, we've got a half a dozen guys who take one pill a week, and they've got levels like a 15-year-old of testosterone or 16-year-old. Unbelievable. And then we've got some people who, because they were on testosterone, have basically damaged their system or on... ibuprofen. We ask everybody if they've been on ibuprofen when we go through their review, their consult. And if they have the pattern off of Clomid where they're not responding, and we go up in dose, and they still don't respond, then we'll put them on injectable testosterone, okay? Put them on injectable testosterone. And the reason being is, I had one vet who was on 200 milligrams of testosterone cipionate every Sunday for like five years while I was active, the VA would give it to him. And then he retired and the VA was holding back on using testosterone because they were using it under the last administration to treat all the people who were going through gender reassignment. So instead of giving it to people who needed it, They preference people who were going through gender reassignment by using hormones. Okay. We've had periods of time where in the last administration, we couldn't get testosterone for our regular non-psychiatric patients. Okay. So anyway, so we'll put them on testosterone. Now, the question I ask a lot of docs who are treating people we see with to injectable testosterone right out of the gate. I say to him- TRT? TRT, correct. Testosterone replacement therapy. I say to him, how much testosterone does an average 25 to 35-year-old strapping healthy male make a day? A lot of them would say, I don't know. And you're giving them 200 milligrams a week in one shot? And he said, I don't know. It's 4 to 10 milligrams per day, so it's 28 to 70 milligrams per week. So in our protocol, our max is 80. And we get people who are responding very well because my job is not to treat everybody like a bodybuilder. And that's what they got hooked into, is they're treating everybody like a bodybuilder. And I've proved it again and again with people working out in the gym that low doses do just as well as high doses without the side effects. What are the side effects? Our body is smart, very, very smart. If you put too much in of anything, the body will try to find ways to get rid of it. So our body has two ways of getting rid of excessive testosterone, converting it to estradiol and converting it to dihydrotestosterone, DHT. DHT has benefits on the gut, the bacteria. It has a negative effect on losing hair. oily skin, acne, prostate enlargement, and shrinkage of the testicles. Okay. Those are side effects of testosterone. The estradiol, you know, I say to the guys who have elevated levels of estradiol, I said, What are you feeling from this elevated level of estradiol? Oh, I'm more emotional. I said, bullshit. I said, bullshit.
- Speaker #1
Really?
- Speaker #0
Well, their estradiol is elevated, but they've got so much more of free testosterone, which counteracts a lot of the potential side effects of estradiol. Yes, I will be honest and say that there are rare individuals who will respond with adverse effects at lower levels than expected. So I don't really say bullshit. I work with them and try to fix it. A benefit of the estradiol is that it increases growth hormone production.
- Speaker #1
Does it increase bone density as well? I've heard it increases bone density.
- Speaker #0
And that's the reason why certain of the CIRMs that are used out there, selective estrogen receptor modulators, are not good is because I don't use Arimidex. because anastrozole, arimidex, because there are eight systems in the body that need estradiol, growth hormone production, neuroplasticity, nitric oxide synthetase, which allows good blood flow in the brain, libido center, estradiol is what helps that. The liver, you need estradiol and growth hormone to make IGF-1, the main growth factor below the neck that increases muscle um maya actinomycin protein synthesis for muscle growth, muscle repair, endurance, and so forth. It helps protect the lining of the arteries. It protects the heart and bone mineral density. Those are the benefits of estradiol. So when you throw stuff in to block it, like arimidex, it leads to a problem. We use a CIRMS that doesn't appear to do that. which is our Clomid and E-Clomiphene. And the fact that we're pulsing it, not giving it every day, helps to protect the individual. So they spike, they peak, they produce. Then it comes down, they spike, they peak. So every 72 hours, and then when we look at them on what we call the trough, they took the last pill 72 hours later. We look 72 hours after the last pill, and we see where their testosterone levels are, and they're producing great levels in the majority of cases. Yes. There are people who do not, okay? And that's the exception, not the standard, okay? And I never say anybody is, you know, overreacting or whatever. That could be them, okay? But what we find is as we balance all hormones, it's not just a matter of taking testosterone. It's about making sure the entire homeostasis, the balance of all your hormones is there. I put out a very short video, I think it's three minutes, that talks about this aspect of balancing the hormones. And you made mention about pregnenolone that you had a chying time to say.
- Speaker #1
Oh man, I don't know why I have such a pregnenolone.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, pregnenolone is called the mother of all hormones. And the reason why it's called the mother of all hormones is because it is responsible for giving rise to all the steroidal hormones in our body. When you use testosterone, you shut off its manufacturing. So how do you get pregnenodial? How do you get allopregnanolone? How do you get progesterone? How do you get cortisol? How do you get all these hormones that come from pregnenolone? If by taking testosterone, you shut it off, you have to replace it. So there's a video called Beyond Testosterone. argument for DHEA and pregnenolone. There are two key pathways, DHEA pathway and the pregnenolone pathway. And the literature talks about increased anxiety, depression, agitation, and aggression when you lose those hormones. And we've seen it in our practice.
- Speaker #2
Yeah. It's crazy how important, with testosterone for sure, and all the derivatives of testosterone. uh, you know, play within the body. Right. I mean, it's just like, uh, we can really keep going down the rabbit hole, especially with testosterone, but thank you, you know, for mentioning the distinction between total testosterone and free testosterone and the free testosterone is where we want, like at the, at that higher level. Well, so, uh, we're going to start wrapping it up, Dr. Mark a little bit, but what are some, you know, someone that's, uh, coming back to the head injuries and, and, you know, brain trauma, um, you know, somebody that has had or continually has some sort of continual brain trauma, whatever they're doing out there in the world, what are some simple steps that they can take today or later this week to help really... understand what's going on on the inside, but also support the hormonal health that we've learned about to really become healthier?
- Speaker #0
Well, that's a great question. And it's about thickening the Keflar. So with things like gamma tocopherol, which is vitamin E, gamma, there's alpha, delta, and gamma. The gamma is the one that helps protect the brain. Then there is the fish oils, Very important. Nordic Natural is just one suggestion. It's quality fish oil, making sure you're getting five to ten, reading the book When Brains Collide to just thicken that Keflar. Adding quercetin drops inflammatory markers so that you don't keep building and enlarging the amount of inflammation to increase the occurrence of neurodegenerative diseases. Good hydration, staying away from alcohol as best you can, hydrating well with either alkaline water or mineral-enriched water. Minerals play an important part in the brain. That SAD system, superoxide desmitase, magnesium, manganese, zinc, these are all important minerals to help our body defend itself against inflammation. Great protein intake, eat a half a cow every month. or quarter cal, you know, just good protein intake. Hydration, that's what we talked about. Sleep, very important to get good sleep. If you're going to bed and you're in bed for eight hours, nine hours, ten hours, and you wake up in the morning and you don't pop out of bed, it means during the night you're not getting into deep sleep. And that's a function of pregnenolone. Pregnena diol, progesterone, and allopregnanolone. The mother of all hormone generates three other hormones that help build a chemical in the brain called GABA. GABA, aminobutyric acid, G-A-B-A, is the natural volume of the brain. So I've had people who've come in, a Marine who came into the practice, and I asked them a simple question. How many hours are you in bed? And I'm looking at his lab results. How many hours are you in bed? He said. 13. I said, damn, you must wake up in the morning feeling great. He said, doc, on the contrary, I wake up in the morning feeling like I never put my head to the pillow. I'm looking at his lab results. Zero pregnenolone, zero progesterone, which means he could not develop allopregnanolone. Allopregnanolone is a pharmaceutical drug now called Brixanolone for $34,000 a year. Holy cow. postpartum depression, depression, anxiety, and they haven't even talked about sleep. Pregnenolone, a year's supply is about $80. Wow. And the literature shows that it is absorbed by the gut. It's absorbed into the blood. It passes into the brain and gets converted to allopregnenolone. So we've got the entire journey of it by taking it orally, a good quality one. So that's... what you can do to defend yourself. If you're suffering with symptoms of traumatic brain injury, you need to get the 28-point biomarker panel done. I'm just about finished with the paper on the 28 biomarker panel, which will be posted on my website so anybody can get it and get their doctor to run the test because this is what we've... It took 14 years to develop that panel and we've used it... 2004, we've used it for 21 years, okay? 14 and then 21, so seven years we've used it in its present state. And as I said, my background was computer electronics. I spent 10 years and wrote a software package that interprets the laboratory results, gives you a 12-page report, and predictive treatment. So we're now in about 123 facilities in 14 countries, bringing on Australia, New Zealand, Thailand. and Malaysia. And what it does is it helps to accelerate any doctor who wants to help us with this program and, you know, availability to immediately be able to provide the same level of care that we have been doing at our level in neuroendocrinology through the use of the program. So that's basically it.
- Speaker #1
Well, that's basically it. That's a lot there. But I'm glad, I mean, We did break down the entire. what, almost hour and a half.
- Speaker #0
down into a few minutes there, Doc. So I appreciate that. And I look forward to getting onto your protocol myself. I know I'm one of the folks who's going to be jumping on here soon. But yeah, fantastic information. Probably going to have to watch it myself two or three times, at least to fully understand it, fully grasp it all. But this has been phenomenal. So thank you.
- Speaker #1
Thanks to an increase in RevuStream. To date, we've now brought in, since January, since being on What's His Name Show, on Joe's show, he's been very kind. He's been very, very kind, as you guys have been by allowing me this time now to share with your audience the work that we do. And my soft spot is with our veterans, as you know. And we put 60% of all our proceeds into a fund to help our veterans. And now. their family members. And we still have funds left for about, as of today, about 40 more vets. And in June, we'll look and see how much more we have. And it's ongoing. So I keep on traveling as I start traveling to weird places like Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, where they want to learn this science a lot more than here, Australia. They want to learn the science. So if there are any people, you can direct them to us.
- Speaker #0
We've got a U.S. veteran friend. We have a U.S. veteran friend in Thailand that we should definitely link you up with when you head out that way.
- Speaker #1
I'll be there August 12th until the 20th, giving a lecture. If they get in touch with me, I'll get them a free pass into the HEAT symposium. I spend a whole day going through this on a technical level.
- Speaker #0
I'm sure he would find it fascinating. So we'll definitely connect you.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, I think he's up in Chiang Mai, but awesome. This has been so great, Dr. Mark. Really, really, really, really appreciate your time and everything you've done, like all the hard work you've done, all the research, all the lives that you've helped and all the science that you're bringing into our community right now, but into the world. And hopefully this becomes more mainstream because people need a lot of help. And if we begin to reduce that. inflammation in the brain, like what is possible, you know, but it's also, it's like, it sounds like it's not, uh, extremely invasive in what you're doing, but something that is actually, you know, over time, um, can really radically shift a person's life and what they're doing. So this has been so great.
- Speaker #1
That's what we're hoping. Give people an opportunity to step up and do what they really want to do.
- Speaker #0
Thank you for that, Mark. Well, Last question for those who want to find out more about you, find out more about your protocol for veterans who may be listening.
- Speaker #1
The best place is the educational website, which is tbihelpnow.org. Under the science, you'll get a lot of the articles that I've written. They're all consolidated there. And then you can go to the media so you can see some of the videos that we've done. and then From there, there'll be a link to our YouTube channel, which has short videos on some of the Peptide for Health program that we have, some of the podcasts that I've done. Pieces of this, obviously, will be added to it with your permission.
- Speaker #0
Of course.
- Speaker #2
Of course. Yeah, yeah,
- Speaker #1
yeah. I always ask.
- Speaker #2
Let's make sure we include the link. No, of course. We'll make sure to include the link in our show notes to get to your website. What is that? TBI. What was that again, Mark?
- Speaker #1
TBIhelpnow.com. Dot org.
- Speaker #2
Dot org.
- Speaker #1
Beautiful. Dot org, right. And I'll send it to you so you have it as well.
- Speaker #2
Yeah, we'll take it offline. But thank you, Dr. Mark. Thank you everyone for listening. John, great to see you.
- Speaker #0
You as well. Thank you,
- Speaker #2
Mark. So helpful. And thank you.
- Speaker #0
All right. Take care, everyone. Thanks for joining. Bye-bye.
- Speaker #3
Thank you for joining us today. We hope you walk away with some new tools and insights to guide you on your life journey. New episodes are being published every week, so please join us again for some meaningful discussion. For more information, please check out mentalkingmindfulness.com.
