Learn how athletes, vets, and civilians with Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD are becoming healthy and healing their brains. A humanistic doc about the journey of ten different individuals from near suicide to recovery, and a real life.
“The brain is a soft organ housed within a hard cover that contains many sharp edges. No matter if you surround it with a tank, when it is hit, it’s gonna shake.” – Anthony Davis, USC Trojans.
Traumatic Brain Injury affects not only veterans but also athletes and civilians as well. “Quiet Explosions: Healing the Brain” explores current strategies that are achieving some success at healing the injured brain. On the forefront, Dr. Mark Gordon, a neuroendocrinologist from California, approaches the healing process from a more holistic approach based on his and other’s research into the effect of trauma to the brain and resulting hormonal damage and deficiency.
Almost 2 million people in the US are affected by TBI every year and current treatment depends almost entirely upon drugs: antidepressants, anti-anxiety, pain medications, and others too numerous to mention. Those suffering from TBI often report the side effects of the drugs prescribed are frequently worse than the original symptoms. Veterans die from suicide at an average rate of 20 per day, an average ever increasing. A quote in the film from former NFL player Anthony Davis makes the point: “We have devised a system to send soldiers to defend our sovereignty but have failed to devise a plan to bring them back into society.”
But veterans are not the only victims as the film points out. Athletes in any sport in which the head and brain sustain blows are at risk of TBI. Repeated concussions are the culprits that lead to a damaged, unhealthy brain. Mark Rypien, a former quarterback in the NFL, states that after a concussive blow on the field, trainers often ask, “How many fingers do you see?” No matter your answer, theirs will always be “That’s close enough” and send you back in the game. My husband, a college football player who sustained innumerable concussions, died of Alzheimer’s and was himself convinced that the head trauma he had suffered was responsible.
People in dangerous professions, firefighters, police, are also subject to the physical and emotional traumas that bring about TBI, as are civilians who suffer traumatic assaults. These are the prospective patients of Dr. Gordon and others who are now working to heal the injured brain by applying the science of endocrinology, nutrition, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, and magnetic field therapy. The real-life sufferers, like Davis and Rypien, speak to the effectiveness this type of therapy has on their lives, healing their brains. And they have the brain scans to prove it.
Kudos to all these brave men and women who step forward in “Quiet Explosions: Healing the Brain” to acknowledge their suffering and encourage others to seek the kind of help they have been fortunate to receive. Our society too often seeks to solve both physical and psychological injury by throwing drugs over the problem. Thank goodness for the persistence of physicians like Mark Gordon and Gregory Amen, a brain disorder specialist, and others like them to seek an alternative solution to healing the brain and helping so many in need.
Now available on DVD and Streaming from Cinema Libre
