Episode 177: Dr. Chris Frueh Author of “Operator Syndrome”

Unlock the secrets to holistic healing as we join forces with Dr. Chris Frueh to tackle the hidden battles SOF professionals face with operator syndrome. This multifaceted condition, encompassing mental health, substance abuse, chronic pain, cognitive impairment and traumatic brain injury, demands more than the traditional symptom-focused treatments. Experience the profound impact of multidisciplinary care programs like the STAR program, which prioritize education and root cause analysis for sustainable recovery. Together, we dissect the intricate dance between mental well-being and physiological health, highlighting the often-misunderstood role of hormonal imbalances in mood and cognitive function.
 
 Delving into the nuance of mental health in the military, we challenge the norm by placing a spotlight on physiological factors that too frequently fly under the radar. Dr. Free and Deny examine the pivotal role of understanding individual cognitive baselines and the complexities surrounding traumatic brain injuries, providing a new perspective on the critical care our veterans need. We confront the hurdles of endocrine support and stress the necessity of comprehensive diagnostics, setting the stage for an informed approach to therapies like testosterone replacement.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

security hot podcast. Let's go. You're dealing with an expert in guerrilla warfare, with a man who's the best with guns, with knives, with his bare hands, a man who's been trained to ignore, ignore weather to live off the land job with disposed of enemy personnel to kill period with nutrition.

Speaker 1: 0:26

Exciting to finally have somebody that has the that perspective, the understanding of like, okay, I know what's going on and there's a few doctors few doctors out there, there are a few treatment centers that really understand it, but for the guys on the ground, the guys on the team, the guys on the seal platoons and ranger, they're still dealing with that one symptomology, that one, you know, antiquated treatment model, and it's not helping us. It's only when you get to those higher level of cares where you're able to be looked at by an entire team, that's really been successful for so many of us. So yeah, dr Free, thank you for being on here today.

Speaker 2: 1:06

Thanks for having me back. Please call me Chris, absolutely yeah, the, just to say it again. Um, I'm not sure if we were recording our early, our early chat, but the alcoholism, the addiction, the self destructive behaviors and the suicidal ideation and suicidal behaviors, destructive behaviors and the suicidal ideation and suicidal behaviors, that's all desperation. That's what happens at the end of a process where so many things are not working the way they're supposed to work. And, as you know, if you're living it, how do you know what's wrong with you? You can't. You just know you're not the same, but you don't even know where to start. So, sadly, you know these extreme. Sometimes they're referred to as mental health problems. But addiction and depression and that desperation to suicide, those are like signals that everything is, a lot of things are going wrong. It's kind of like thirst. By the time you feel thirsty, you're already extremely dehydrated.

Speaker 1: 2:05

Exactly that's the best way to put it and what you just said. A lot of times when guys are on fire, like I like to say, it's that depression and anxiety, that drinking issue we get referred to mental health, we get referred to drinking programs and they try to stamp out that one fire, right. But that's just like we're dealing with a five alarm fire on all systems and we're trying to just oh, we'll just put that out with that. And you know, I got it, dsm-5 is what we got. But we need to start treating individuals, and especially within this community, with a different lens, a different frame of reference, because we are different and the way these things present themselves sometimes you know that the people that don't know about this community, that haven't worked with them, they think that, oh, it's one thing slowly presents itself like no, when guys are, are in it, everything is just falling apart. And you said it, we try to cope with it the best we can, which is maladaptive coping devices.

Speaker 2: 3:11

Well, if you go to see your doctor and your doctor says you're depressed, and here's an antidepressant, your doctor may not be wrong. But if you're not sleeping, if you're in chronic pain, if you have TBI, that's giving you bad headaches, making it hard to think clearly and to remember things and to focus and to concentrate. And then, on top of all of that, if your hormones are in the tank, if you've got low testosterone or your thyroid is out of whack, that treatment for depression is really literally just. I mean, it might be a little bit of a help, might keep you treading water, but it's not really meeting what the needs are.

Speaker 2: 3:54

And I think that's the problem with our modern health care is too often we go oh, depression, suicidality, soldier, PTSD, boom, hit that PTSD button. And here's your psychiatric medications and here's your therapist. And I'm not knocking those treatments, I'm just saying they're insufficient to address chronic pain, low testosterone, sleep apnea, all the ripple effects of traumatic brain injury, including the cognitive impairments and such. So we yeah, there's so, there's so much we need to and can do better, and I'm glad you found a program that that met the need. Do you want to say a little bit about that, Danny? Talk a little bit about that program?

Speaker 1: 4:40

Yeah, absolutely. The STAR program in Richmond Virginia is by far, hands down, one of the best things that ever happened to me in my healing, and the reason why it's so different and so impactful is that when you go there, you're not just being treated by one doctor, one professional, it's an entire team, and that's what's needed to combat this. You need an entire team to sit down with the individual experiencing all these things and a lot of time. It's about educating as well, because you don't know what you don't know and you're probably not able to explain what's really going on until you understand all the symptoms, and that's why the STAR program was so frigging impactful to my healing and it's been that for that way for for a lot of guys.

Speaker 2: 5:27

And, denny, it's not just a team, it's a multidisciplinary team, correct? Yes, so you've got experts in all these different areas of medicine and mental healthcare? Yeah, that's, that's awesome. I've known a lot of guys. I shouldn't say a lot, but I've known a handful of guys that have gone through with just really good experiences like you're describing. And, if I do, you mind if I take a minute just to talk about operator syndrome? Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 5:52

So what, denny, what you and I are talking about, is something that some of us have referred to as operator syndrome, which is the idea that it's not just one thing, it's multiple things that are interrelated with each other. So the framework is traumatic brain injury, sleep disturbance, chronic pain, headaches, cognitive dysfunctions, hormonal dysfunctions, and then you have the psychological depression anxiety, ptsd, anger, substance use. You have the perceptual system, impairments related to vision, hearing, balance. You have, then, all of this stuff. How does it wrap around and affect your family and the people you love around you as well?

Speaker 2: 6:40

As then you got to transition out of the service. There's a challenge, a massive challenge. You have all the existential issues of the things you've seen and carried with you that are likely to start to reveal themselves in ways that they haven't previously. Once you retired I mean you still you have more time to think about the men and women, the you know brothers and sisters. You've lost the, the people who didn't come home, the situations where you had to make very, very tough decisions and split seconds, and so on.

Speaker 2: 7:16

And then you're, you're out there in this new civilian world that that they don't understand you. They expect you to understand them and for you to become one of them, which I would argue is a good thing to sort of be aware of and to try. But also, it's probably not possible to actually become a civilian again, as if all of those years just never existed. So don't even try to think that way. And then the other piece is all the toxic exposures. How much bad shit did you have injected into your shoulder? How much bad shit did you breathe, eat, drink? What were the chemical mixtures of heavy metals, radiologicals, burn pits, biologicals, et cetera, et cetera, that you have been exposed to your whole life, your whole professional career? So, if we think of it in allostatic load, it's a lot. No, it's a whole lot.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Now, in your research and in your studying of this, what is kind of like the best way to approach this? Because I think guys need to understand that we hear endocrine system and we hear low testosterone and that becomes the the shiny thing. Everybody wants to look and feel better and in my own experience, I tried putting the physical stuff up front, Like I didn't want to worry about the psychological stuff. I was like, hey, if I can stay in the fight, that's all that matters. So the physical stuff up front, Like I didn't want to worry about the psychological stuff. I was like, hey, if I can stay in the fight, that's all that matters. So the physical stuff, the physical improvement in the testosterone, gets a lot of a lot of us excited, but we also neglect everything and then we don't take a look at the entire human being, we're just looking at the. Okay, this is going to make me better and it me feel better. But what's in your idea, in your approach, what is something that we should be looking at first?

Speaker 2: 9:10

Well, let's start with kind of a philosophical perspective that you just described, which is the mental health, the medical care providers, the health systems we have. Now, I guess I'm going to put it this way they put the mental health stuff in the foreground and the physiological issues in the background. So your depression is about your mood, your feelings, your emotions. Back here in the background is your hormones and the injuries to your joints and to your brain and such I am thinking and suggesting we reverse them the foreground and the background. So put the psychological. It still matters, it's so important, but put that back in the background. Focus first on things like hormones.

Speaker 2: 9:57

Because guess what, if you have low testosterone, let's say your testosterone is well below whatever the threshold that may be set. And first of all, the problem with that is you're always being compared, benchmarked, to general population. I doubt you started in the general population, so you're not being benchmarked, and this goes for everything. By the way, you're being benchmarked against Gen Pop, and you probably never were gen pop, not really. But if you have low testosterone, you're going to appear depressed, you're going to be irritable, tired, dragging, low motivation. Your muscle mass is going to start to change, your libido, your sexual functioning, your mood. You're just going to feel down and you're not going to enjoy things. You're going to be anodonic, lack of pleasure. All of that is depression. But guess what? It can easily be caused by low testosterone. So if you can get that figured out and address that, then what's left is depression. But we don't do it that way. We start with depression and we forget or ignore the hormonal realities too often.

Speaker 1: 11:09

Yeah, and that's presenting a huge issue right now that a lot of guys aren't wanting to go get the mental health. They're wanting to focus on what they can do on their own, because there isn't an easy pathway to getting endocrine support in the military. It takes a lot of different doctor's appointments and visits and it's a lot of blocks and a lot of difficult. They make it so difficult for guys to actually sit down and go see endocrinologist to get those tests and then, if they do, there's the, the army standard, and then there's you know that, oh, you're perfectly fine by army standards, but the reality is the individual's still dealing with low T and then maybe he chooses to treat it himself and then you're dealing with probably not the best dosage, probably not the best recommended type, and that just leads to more suffering.

Speaker 2: 12:09

Yeah, I wish we could address that, and testosterone replacement therapy may not actually even be what's needed. There are other ways for many people. There are ways to bring the testosterone up without going to that step the testosterone up without going to that step. And so there are medications, there are supplements, there are vitamins. Even just simple things like taking two weeks and getting caught up on sleep can begin to make a difference. So there's just so many things short of testosterone replacement therapy. And that's part of what bothers me about medicine today is why don't we at least get the data and look at it? We may decide we don't want to use TRT, okay, but let's at least identify what the nature of the beast is here, so to speak.

Speaker 1: 13:01

Yeah, yeah, we're really hesitant to do blood work and do mris, all these things, and I don't understand why it's so hard to just do simple blood work. Uh, pain out of pocket is not pretty, but once you do it and you realize that that opens a gateway to so much, so many other modalities, so many other like once you have the information, because they can't give you just blindly medications or vitamin interventions if they don't have the data.

Speaker 2: 13:35

That's right. That's right is if we're concerned about your cognitive functioning, denny, and we think, okay, maybe you've had a TBI, let's assess your cognitive functioning in a performance task. So we give you some tests and we sit you down and you're at a table and you do the IQ testing and the memory testing and the neuropsychologist comes out and says well, good news for you. Denny comes out and says well, good news for you, denny, your IQ is at the 85th percentile or the 75th percentile or the. You know it's up there and your memory is checks tests out better than average, your concentration tests out better than average, so you're good to go.

Speaker 2: 14:23

Sir, I've seen this over and over again where I shouldn't say over again, but I've seen this many times where somebody comes in and they get that feedback, they go somewhere else, they get treated, they start feeling better and then they get retested and they get retested at the 95th percentile. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, if your baseline, if your intellectual baseline is really high, as it is for operators I mean, I think the average operators is at about the 85th percentile for general IQ, if that's your baseline and you get tested and you come in at you know anything above 40 percentile, they're going to tell you, oh, you're good, you're fine, you're normal, you're healthy, and not appreciate how much of a decline from your own personal baseline that would be.

Speaker 1: 15:20

And that's something I just experienced with talking with a friend. And you're exactly right. We tend to think and that's the one thing about TBI that's not really well understood by a lot of doctors specifically dealing with this community to think, before we get educated that a traumatic brain injury means a penetrative brain injury. I have to have something that impacted me and that's, that's only that's a brain injury, but we don't talk about the concussions. We don't talk about the. You know, when you have a hard impact on a free fall, jump or static line jump, the concussive blast from indoor breaching or from just working with mortars.

Speaker 2: 16:03

Well, those blast exposures are, yeah, are a powerful form of invisible, um, physiological injury, but but they're invisible, we can't see them. You feel it, you get sick to your stomach, even maybe you feel it in your gut. You feel it in your head. Guys describe being woozy and a little disoriented for a little while Clearly a physiological effect, but you weren't unconscious, you weren't on the ground, you weren't bleeding from your eyeballs necessarily. So you're right, we are missing too much of the traumatic brain injury that is occurring Right yeah, it's um.

Speaker 1: 16:47

I remember the the venn diagram, which is something that really stuck with me and I like I brought it up during my own uh va consultations. But ptsd and tbi, they have some overlap, some things present themselves and are the way that the va system, the way doctors typically look at. It's like, well, I mean, yeah, there's a commonality here and there, so we're just going to say it's ptsd but at the end of the day, totally different. Ptsd is completely different and totally different it's. It's something that I would argue that when you are able to overcome and deal with these issues, that doesn't become an a lifelong factor for us.

Speaker 1: 17:28

A lot of us are able to move on with our lives, get help, get treatment. But the TBI, you know, ptsd isn't a reason why a lot of us have issues with our memory, with our cognitive skills. It's TBI. But it's still hard to fight for that because at the end of the day, that's a huge residual. You'd have to pay every soft service member through their rating systems and that's an injustice that I feel more individuals need to understand and talk about, be willing to advocate and talk about traumatic brain injuries, because it's not just being knocked out and having something that actually penetrated your school. It's being able to look back at your history, your military service and look at all the times you were knocked out and if you went through the Q course, if you went through SEAL training. There's a lot of times.

Speaker 2: 18:18

I mean it's part of the definition of going through a selection program, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, just by definition, of having gone through the program, yeah, yeah, of having gone through the program, yeah.

Speaker 1: 18:36

I think another issue that we're starting to talk about a lot more is the simple fixes, like where we're talking about sleep earlier and the power of actually being able to get that full eight hours of sleep or as close as possible, and, it's true, down-regulating, being able to cut back on your stress. Those are simple things we can do, but when you're not aware how it affects your body, you don't really see it as being important. I didn't look at sleep and restorative sleeping as something that was important for me until I was at that treatment center, and how crucial is it to sit back and look at the simple things like minimizing our stress or being aware of toxic stress?

Speaker 2: 19:19

Well. So the importance of sleep. I mean the analogy that I'll give you is let's say, I have a magic pill I can give you and you take it every night and it only works for that night. You take it at night and what it does is it? It resets your entire nervous system. It helps you rest and recover Recovery super important so that you will be at your best the next day. It's going to clear out your brain, so all the toxins that collect in our brain during the day. It's going to clear those out. It's going to magically reorganize and make sense out of your daily experiences and help categorize them and sort them so that you're saving the important things. This pill is going to help your body recover physically from injuries, illnesses, even minor, minor stress injuries throughout the body. It's going to help regulate your metabolism, your hormones, your brain health. It's going to help heal your brain. If for those injuries, it's going to improve your mood, improve your ability to relate to other people and to work and to function. And it's just called sleep.

Speaker 1: 20:36

It's not a pill, it's called sleep.

Speaker 2: 20:39

And that's what sleep does for us, and all of those things are really super important. So if we're not sleeping, we're hurting ourselves, we're injuring ourselves further.

Speaker 1: 20:51

Absolutely that's. That's one thing I didn't want to let go of. Uh, because you're trained. You're trained into the understanding of sleep as a reward, if you get everything done.

Speaker 2: 21:03

The patrol base is good to go.

Speaker 1: 21:05

Then you get sleep. So I thought, and so many of us always think, that sleep is something we can just sacrifice and in reality it's just as vital as putting good food in your body. It's just as vital as being able to frigging, pull security and do all your actual mission tasks. It's vital to us and we need to change that.

Speaker 2: 21:27

If you're doing push-ups and pull-ups and running, that's in order to train, but there's no point in training if you're not doing the other side of the coin, which is the recovery. Yeah, I'll share a personal experience. I had, and I used to have, the same misunderstanding of sleep myself, understanding of sleep myself and and and you know, just just to say we, the research over the last 10, 15 years has really opened our eyes quite a bit more from what, from what we used to understand about sleep. But when I was in my late thirties, early forties, I worked a lot of hours at the medical school where I was. I was writing grants, running grants, running projects, and I was probably working I don't know 70, 80, 90 hours a week, not sleeping much.

Speaker 2: 22:13

And at some point I made a career shift. I left the VA, left the medical university and I moved to my job in Hawaii. And I got here and suddenly realized I had two weeks before I actually had to start working, even though my pay period started at the beginning of the month. Classes didn't start for two weeks, so I didn't really have anything to do for two weeks and so, with no to-do list in my head, no alarm to set in the morning, no meetings or phone calls to make in the morning, I was naturally just sleeping and I was sleeping for 12 hours a night.

Speaker 2: 22:50

I couldn't believe it. I'd gone from sleeping four or five hours a night and now here I was sleeping 12 hours a night. That was my. That was a signal that my body was telling me you need to catch up. And if after, over the course of about a month, it came down to about eight hours a night, that came down to about eight hours a night, just gradually on its own, that was a sign of probably very significant sleep deprivation that my body was. Now it had a chance it was catching up. So, yeah, good for you, we need our sleep. We need our sleep.

Speaker 1: 23:25

No, what you just described is every soft professional that first week back or first like stay, like as soon as you leave country, like those first few days. That's when everybody sleeps the most. Eventually you go back to that whole abusive cycle of not sleeping as much.

Speaker 1: 23:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's. We overlook it. But even now in my life, I realize that if I get back into a string of nights where I'm dealing with insomnia, it's all self-induced. I don't need to rely heavily on medications. I just need to put down my books, I need to put down the phone and get back to my ritual, finding that ritual that works for you. For me, it's going to bed early and waking up early. I like getting things done early in the morning, but then once in a while, things happen, life happens and you inevitably find yourself staying up later.

Speaker 1: 24:22

But it's not about we constantly lean on medications. We're constantly prescribing medications for sleep, and I was right there too. I was taking them, but at some point I was like on three different medications, so I didn't have dreams. I'd go to sleep and, at the end of the day, where things change was when I started taking accountability and getting the sleep when I needed to and doing that sleep hygiene, removing the cell phones, removing the TVs and that's something that we can all do.

Speaker 1: 24:51

If you're struggling with it right now and you're listening to this, if you don't know where to start, a great place to start is not watching TV in your bed, not listening, not watching your TikToks lives and Instagram lives on TV Set. That stuff aside, like you said, it's the only time our brain gets to actually remove toxins. It's the only time you're able to shut down and just like anything else in your body. Your brain needs time to recover and you're not doing yourself any help by staying up late, and there's a huge difference when you're actually getting enough sleep and the way you function. I've noticed it.

Speaker 2: 25:28

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 25:31

The ability to actually be on fire, be alert. It is measurable, Not to mention you become a better person. You're not going to be as much of a dick to the people around you. So true, and you don't need five copies.

Speaker 2: 25:53

I would be curious to hear, maybe more about your story, your experience with the transition. So how do you? Yeah, so you don't. You, as as a, you know, as as an army of one soldier, of one, you don't fix the system, but you find you work within it to find a way to get your needs met. So how did you? You do that.

Speaker 1: 26:11

So the best thing that I was able to do was and I always tell it is be vulnerable to start asking for help, and that means every provider you're seeing start asking questions as to where's the next level of care, where can I go. And that inevitably led me to that nurse case manager that I talked about earlier, miss Amy Ellinger. That's the first person that talked about a polytrauma treatment center option. That's the first person that made that a reality. Nobody else was talking about actually going somewhere where I was going to be able to be treated by a care team, by a care team at the same time for prolonged care. That everything else is an appointment here, there, for one thing at a time, and that doesn't work. That doesn't work for us in our community.

Speaker 1: 26:59

That things that truly work is being able to take the individual out of the system he's currently in, meaning work. It's just inevitable. We want to talk about manning, we want to talk about keeping guys in the system, but if we want to retain them, if we want to maintain the soft operator for longevity, we have to be able to give them up for at least a couple of months so you can get the care that he deserves and that's what truly works. While you're in. I should say caveat, while you're in, because there's that money. You know SOCOM, big Army, they have resources. So while you're still in, that's the best way to get help. Be willing to be vulnerable and ask for help, to go to those treatment centers, because the STAR program is just one. There's PrEP, there's Place in Maryland, I forget the name of it but there's other centers.

Speaker 2: 27:44

There's NICO, the National Intrepid Center that's the ones at Walter Reed there's a lot of them.

Speaker 1: 27:52

There's NICO, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence at Walter.

Speaker 2: 27:54

Reed, there's some other intrepid spirit centers around the country. There aren't some good programs, but to your point, yeah, there's not enough of them and there's not enough slots. There's not, and then it gets more complicated when you leave the service.

Speaker 1: 28:03

Yes, and that's a difficult one and I always tell guys get your help now. Get your help now. One, because I know how passionate you are. You're already in the job, you love it, you don't want to leave it. So get help. Take that need. Be willing to give up three months to become 100% better mentally, physically, spiritually. Be better suited to take that team, that next level of responsibility. Come back a healed person, Because when you go on the outside then it gets very difficult On the outside. You have to lobby and find resources on your own. The VA is what we have. We can't fix that system.

Speaker 1: 28:54

And I know it for a fact. I've been going to VA centers and you go for one appointment and that appointment is to schedule other appointments. It's not to get treatment right away, it's to schedule more appointments and what you realize is those appointments are going to come in a week or two weeks, it's going to be a month. I've been booked out over a year out for certain treatments and that's a reality. But there are benevolent organizations, there are independent treatment centers that can also help. But you will have to hunt and find resources and find doctors. You have individuals like Dr Gordon, who is an amazing practitioner when it comes to endocrinology and helping with TBI. But you have to reach out and do your own research to find individuals that are educated in what you're going through and have a way for you to get help. Um, even within you know, if you're, if you're retired and you go to a conventional you know military hospital for help, you're not dealing with the same individuals that you're dealing with at the star program. Again, you're going back to that same individuals that you're dealing with at the start program. Again, you're going back to that one individual appointment.

Speaker 1: 29:52

But it doesn't mean that you you're at a loss and you can't get help. It means be educated, understand what you're dealing with, what you're suffering from. It's not just one thing. Don't just take that diagnosis of PTSD and say, well, that's what I have. Ask questions, be willing to look at okay and be honest with yourself. A lot of guys don't want to admit that they have an issue with drinking, when in reality, they do Be willing to sit down and say, hey, am I drinking too much? Is this something that I rely on to get sleep and cope with pain and the issues of transition? If that's the reality, maybe you have to step away from it and get help from the community. However, when you're still in and I'm guilty of it too we just didn't think it would happen to us. We just didn't think that it'd be us until it's, it touches someone close to you until it hits home within your community, within your company, within your battalion.

Speaker 1: 30:50

And now, when you're out, you start seeing the numbers and SOCOM, they just put out a memorandum advising guys to please, not only go get screened, but if you have a diagnosis, have it documented in a military hospital so that we can start gleaning some knowledge off of that, I think, to General Fenton's credit, this is a really big, really big deal step they're making.

Speaker 2: 31:16

I hope Fenton's credit, this is a really big deal step they're making I hope so. For the very first time, SOCOM hoping to try to make a systematic effort to track cancers and really start to understand it at an epidemiological level, we hope, which is what that early screening is about.

Speaker 1: 31:33

Yeah, I think the best course of action is to stop fearing something or putting things in the back burner, thinking if you, uh, don't think about it, it won't happen to you. Lean forward, um, especially if you're out of the military. Yeah, your health is in your hands. Like you have to be responsible, take responsibility and be willing. Like look, you can go to lab core, you can go online and secure a blood panel test through LabCorp, quest Diagnostics, or go to a primary care provider and get a screening done. It's your health, it's your life.

Speaker 1: 32:04

It's like at some point you have to understand that no one's going to care about this more than you. You can't continue to ignore your health. We did it for so long. I was guilty of it, all my friends are guilty of it. We just think that we're invisible in our twenties and early thirties until you have that first major surgery. Then you realize, oh shit, I'm actually made of flesh and bone. So you have to take initiative and do something, and nothing's more satisfying than being able to advocate for yourself taking that step and say you know what? It's my life, I'm going to make sure that I'm good to go and taken care of. Yeah, um, this reality is you only have one life. Take care of yourself now. You, you were you.

Speaker 2: 32:48

You talk a little bit about what how you educated your own doctors using the operator syndrome paper.

Speaker 1: 32:56

So it's as simple as taking the printout that you know. You can find us on the web, you can get it from I even have it on our website but being able to sit down first, read it yourself, read it yourself and look throughout your life and see where any of these issues popped up. When did you start feeling like you were dealing with migraines? When did you start feeling that you were having issues with sleep, with low testosterone? Do you have a test that confirms it? When you have all these things that are actually in your history and you can look at chronologically and say, okay, yeah, I've been dealing with this for a while, then it's a matter of actually talking to the individual, and the army makes it simple, especially when you're transitioning out. You're going to sit in front of a provider for months before you walk out. The best thing you can do is sit down and say, hey, from this year to this year, I have it documented that I came in and I started asking about headaches. These are migraines. This is something I've been dealing with for years, but on top of that, I don't sleep good anymore and once you start asking those questions, you're going to be presented with appointments to check out.

Speaker 1: 34:09

Do a sleep study. Once you do a sleep study, you're going to have a diagnosis of probably obstructive sleep apnea. You have to be willing to ask those questions and state that you're dealing to have a diagnosis of probably obstructive sleep apnea. You have to be willing to ask those questions and state that you're dealing with these things. You can't avoid it anymore. You're about to leave the military. You have to be honest with yourself because you're going to be sitting in front of a VA doctor for your ratings. So if you don't advocate for yourself in those appointments, in those doctor's visits, when you get out, your rating's not going to help out, it's not going to reflect what you actually went through. And then you're going to find yourself in the same issues, in the same pain points that a lot of veterans are dealing with right now.

Speaker 1: 34:45

That, hey, I didn't speak up, I didn't say that I had this, and that helps doctors understand. Like, oh, wait a second, what study are you referring? Right here in front of you, this piece of paper and nine times out of 10, doctor's going to look at it and they're going to make a note and they're going to say, okay, I'm going to read this. I've had the pleasure of now seeing the same provider for a few years on the outside. When we first talked, he didn't understand it. He didn't have it. Every time he sees me, it's going back to the same conversations again. Now I read this, now I understand this, and I'm dealing with more retired individuals from your community, so I now I see the correlation, now I see that this is a real thing.

Speaker 2: 35:27

They're seeing the pattern. Yeah, yeah exactly that pattern recognition that is just now starting to, I think, percolate through a lot of providers on the outside of the community.

Speaker 1: 35:40

I hope, yeah, and if you're lucky and you still live in the same area where you work like for myself I'm still here in Northwest Florida there's a lot of chances these doctors are seeing the same people from the same community. By you being honest and vulnerable with what you're dealing with, that allows a doctor to reflect on his notes and write down detailed notes of what his patient's saying and what they're presenting, and when they see another patient from your community with the same issues, that sticks with them. This isn't a community of you know, four, five, seven million people. This is still a very small, intimate community. Or five, seven million people? This is still a very small, intimate community. So your truth and your vulnerability helps the next guy in line, because he might not be as vulnerable as you.

Speaker 1: 36:23

He might not be willing to say like, yeah, I have issues going to the bathroom, I have issues in the bedroom, I have issues with my anger. Maybe he's not being 100% upfront, but maybe he shares one thing that connects it with you and the doctor can say hey, you know what? I think I need to refer this guy to this treatment center, or maybe I can get him into this doctor who's going to help him more with this issue. Um, because we're connected. We're a tribe. We are a tribe of individuals who are dealing with something that is very different than other groups, and that's not to say that firefighters and police officers they're not dealing with the same type of stress. All I'm saying is we are a small community suffering something that is unique to us.

Speaker 1: 37:12

It is important to remember that you're not only advocating for yourself. You're advocating for the next individual, your junior on the team, the guy you served with that's about to retire. Two years later he's going to see the same providers at some point. We have to get out of this mentality where we think that doctors are these brilliant individuals that retain everything they've ever studied. Doctors are human beings. They don't always have the latest information. They don't always have the latest models. They don't understand what it's like to be a breacher. They don't know what it's like to be the 18 Fox on a team that has been on 17 deployments and has had issues, all because of everything he's been exposed to. When you're willing to advocate for yourself, when you're willing to talk about the deep, intimate details and how all these things pertain to you, it paints a picture for them, and that's what we really need to do as a community is be willing to share more.

Speaker 2: 38:11

And I think you have to. I think, as an operator, you have to be aware and you have to be patient. I think, as an operator, you have to be aware and you have to be patient that most care providers really aren't going to understand what you have done for your career. They really don't understand the extent of the blast waves, of the op tempo, of the sleep deprivation, of the back and forth across time zones. They really don't know the back and forth across time zones. They really don't know and they don't know. They don't know. While they might think about deployments, they really don't know what's happening in training. They don't.

Speaker 2: 38:46

You know much of this injury, much of these injuries occur during training. Maybe a majority of them occur in training. You do a breaching course, a demolition course, tactical combat, driving course. All of these are things that are putting insults on the brain as well as the rest of the body. So I think it's time and time for us to start expecting that your providers not mine, your providers for your community are going to have better awareness of the types of injuries they should be expecting from an operator.

Speaker 2: 39:28

Can I mention a few words about the book that just yeah, absolutely yes, please. This is the book. It's Operator Syndrome and it's thin, so it's a pretty quick read, or it's intended to be a quick read and actually it's not intended to necessarily even be a book you read straight through. You might just go right to the chapter on hormones or the chapter on adaptive lifestyle kinds of things, but wrote the book it kind of modeled after the medical paper. It's not an academic book though. It's a simple, straightforward. It's intended to be a simple, straightforward, easy to read book to provide guidance to operators, to their spouses. I think a lot of the book is going to be relevant to first responders, I mean.

Speaker 2: 40:14

I'm hearing that and other soldiers. And part of what's special to me about the book is, although I wrote 75% of it and structured it and put it together throughout the book, it has quotes from operators. I think there's over 40 operators who contributed quotes in the book spouses and other care providers and scientists so there's a lot of different voices in the book.

Speaker 1: 40:41

It's not just mine yeah, I think the uh. The amazing thing about this, too is, uh, got the book right here. We're also going to be doing a giveaway. Uh, guys constantly complain about one thing, and I think it's like one of the there's a few canaries in the coal mine, um, but not being able to read.

Speaker 1: 41:04

That's one of the first things that I picked on, because that's something that I lost, that I wasn't really paying attention to, I couldn't focus to read and, um, it's okay, this is something your wife can read too. This is something your family members can read and understand what you're going through, because we are horrible communicators due to anger and we're so upregulated we can't focus at home and our anger gets the best of us. So if you're a spouse and you're listening and any of this is ringing any bells, understand this book's also for you, because it gives you the insight to what your husband or spouse partner is not willing or able to talk about. In those moments of frustration, because I knew I couldn't talk to my wife when I was going through the worst of it, I couldn't put it into words, I couldn't sit down and say I feel like I'm on fire.

Speaker 1: 41:56

I feel like I'm a NASCAR that's just been doing laps over and over and over and I finally pit and everything's exploding and they're telling me to get back on the track, but I can't move the way I used to, I can't function the way I used to. Everything feels and it's the best analogy that can connect with individuals, because, it's true, my symptoms, the things that really went wrong, didn't happen until the last combat deployment, when we came back, when we were at a standstill because of COVID. That's when no one's allowed to come back, no one's allowed to communicate, and you're sitting down. Maybe you're drinking a little bit too much. Now you're no longer upregulated and in that fight mode of being in Afghanistan, now you're starting to slow down, and that was. Slowly but surely. Things start to fall apart, and that's where I am now looking back and reflecting.

Speaker 1: 42:54

That's when things got to the worst, because I was great on that deployment, I felt great, besides the chronic pain, but I had, you know, I had some injectables I could use for that. Uh, toradol was great. But when you come back, you don't have an 18 delta in your house to give you Toradol, you don't have an 18 delta to keep you, you know, in the fight, so to speak. You're dealing with the chronic pain, you're dealing with the things that are starting to fall apart and the only thing that shows up is alcohol. So I don't blame anybody for reaching out for that. But after you read this, after you understand that there's a bigger fight, there's a bigger beast to deal with, understand that drinking is not going to solve the issue. It hurts to understand that for a lot of us, we think that that's the only tool there isn't. Get a hold of this book, start reading and understanding that there's a way through this.

Speaker 2: 43:48

You can fight back. That is part of the point of the book is it's really written to be a guide, to not only explain and educate but also to provide information on the treatments that are out there, the solutions, the lifestyle habits that we can all be using to help ourselves function better. And so really the book really is intended to be kind of a guide. And you're right, it is written so that it would be meaningful for spouses and operators. It's really kind of my letter. The book is addressed to you guys.

Speaker 1: 44:25

Yeah, and you do a beautiful job, and I think it's important to note that we need to stop looking at providers as cold individuals that don't really care. Maybe that's the truth for some, but not all, and it's testament to your connection with the SEAL community, with your friends, of how you got involved and first started peeling back the layers on this issue, because it was a connection and it was somebody that actually cared and wanted to understand what's really happening with these guys, and that's something that can be said for so many providers out there. A lot of people go into these fields because they care about the human factor and you'll see it, I've met them. You'll meet doctors that want to know what's going on and they want to connect with you. So it's okay to be vulnerable. It's okay to say, hey, I'm here, I need help, please help me, and I know for a long time I didn't want to do that.

Speaker 1: 45:22

I know there's so many guys, but once they see your connection and your friendships and how that led to you wanting to help the community, I think that's a powerful thing that comes across in this book. It wasn't just Chris just being a brilliant guy that was just wanting to solve these issues. This is a human being that cared, had a heart that saw people that needed help, that weren't getting help. The you know, the conventional way. Yeah, so what's next? What is next on your agenda? Oh man, what's next? Well, Next?

Speaker 2: 45:55

What is next on your agenda? Oh man, what's next? Well, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I have more to do over the next few months and really for, I think, the coming year or so, in terms of just helping. I'm going to be at Soft Week. I'm going to be on a panel at Soft Week. I'm going to be in DC for some meetings in a few weeks week we're going to be in DC for some meetings in a few weeks. I'm going to have the honor of joining the Camp Homefront this coming weekend, a retreat put on by Tom and Jen Satterley, and so I'm excited by that, and I've got a number of other kinds of things like that. So that's kind of what's next. But I think this for me this summer is going to be a little bit about regrouping and just sort of catching up on my own sleep, practicing a little bit of what I, what I preach, and, yeah, just a little recovery time for me this summer, I think.

Speaker 1: 46:49

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 46:50

You got to be able to down, down, regulate, take some, you know, take some downtime, that's my hope, that's my, that's one of my goals, and use that time to begin to figure out the next steps. Heck yeah.

Speaker 1: 47:04

Well, before I let you go, I do want to get your insight. What are some of the things that we can start doing, just whether it be taking vitamin D, getting outside, slowing down, what are some things that you do in your own life, sort of in a restorative approach, trying to get back?

Speaker 2: 47:25

From a lifestyle perspective. Well, you talked about one thing, and that's sleep hygiene Super important, and that's a skill set. You got to learn it and you got to practice it. You got to um real. I mean, it's not easy.

Speaker 2: 47:39

It's not like you just read a you know, read a list of do's and don'ts and then you're good to go. It's. It's actually very effective, but you got to learn how to do it. The other piece I would say is live an anti-inflammatory lifestyle. Reduce that chronic systemic inflammation in our bodies, in your body that we now know is a major health factor. That kind of stems largely for all of us from our modern lifestyle, all the junk we put into our bodies, the poison we put into our systems, put into our systems. So try to eat a whole foods diet. Eliminate sugar, junk food. Fast food is poison. Sodas, even unsweetened sodas, of course. Alcohol is inflammatory. Turmeric supplements, vitamin D supplements, magnesium supplements are generally good for most of us.

Speaker 2: 48:35

Hot sauna bathing If there's a miracle lifestyle habit, it might be hot sauna bathing Really. Yeah, we're now in and there are medical, randomized, controlled medical trials showing the power of hot sauna bathing for treating depression. But the way that it would treat depression is by lowering that inflammation. So it's a powerful anti-inflammation habit and anything that lowers our inflammation is going to protect us from all of the chronic diseases, not just depression, but obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, cancers, cardiac problems, everything. Every chronic illness on the planet is affected, is driven is made worse by inflammation in the system. So if you do everything to adopt an anti-inflammatory lifestyle, you will, right off the bat, you will be starting to feel and sleep and function better.

Speaker 1: 49:41

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 49:44

Hey, denny, it's been great. Yeah, it's an absolute pleasure, chris.

Speaker 1: 49:49

Yeah, thank you so much for coming on, man, I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 49:52

Thanks for having me back and I'll look forward to the next time you you invite me back, and I want to say congratulations to you on your not just on your retirement but on your health journey and and just all the best wishes for the for what's about to come next for you, whatever that may be.

Speaker 1: 50:10

I appreciate it. Thank you so much, brother, and I can't wait to have you back on. Until next time, everybody take care and we'll see you all next time. If you like what we're doing and you enjoying the show, don't forget to share us. Like us, subscribe and head on over to our Patreon, where you can be part of our community and get access to all of our episodes as soon as they drop. And remember we get through this together, take care.