Type: Head Trauma (40 years ago car accident/ Head against steering wheel/ lost consciousness off/on for 8 hours)
Devices: ICES M1, Brain Gauge (for measuring results)
Symptom: memory issues and TOJ score on the Brain Gauge really sucks
Protocol: ICES TBI test protocol for 1 month
Results: I lost motivation because I could not tell a benefit and my TOJ score consistently stayed in the toilet. I plan on retrying it now that my work is not as demanding
Might be coil placement. Brain Gauge scientists can probably advise. Last time I heard TOJ issues I think the best strategy was coils front and back, based on brain gauge improvement.
Yes. I was using front and back placement. I will revisit it again. Thank you for your feedback.
I meant to put my Sacral Post in the Pain and Inflammation Category and the TBI post in the Neurological Category, but they ended up in the “Other Interesting”. Probably a newby error, but is there any way to fix it an put the posts in their proper category?
No problem Shirley, I’ll take care of it.
@4sure @Bob Do you remember the exact pinpoint location of the impact injury? If you press on that spot do you ever have a flashback to the event?
I just ordered Brain gauge. Looking forward to finding out my scores.
I had a serious mental breakdown about 6 or 7 years ago. Lost total touch with reality, but didn’t even think to go to a doctor. I have been working on recovering from it for a few years and am making headway. Examples I would give is that I started inventing thousands of things in my mind and emailing people and trying to solve Vincent van Gogh’s ear without using resources. I know that those don’t sound as off as I was. I remember telling people that I felt like my brain exploded and people laughed, but I experienced it as if my brain exploded. I am a Christian and I said things like, “I think a spirit of insanity just landed on me.” Nobody took my sentences seriously, and I ended up losing relationships because of my off-thinking and off-behaviors, but not one person asked, “Are you okay?” or suggested going to a doctor. My sense of time passing was years off at the beginning. Literally years passed and I was still mentally just trying to figure out logically what happened to my brain. My dog’s vet came to my house when my dog had cancer and he asked if he could change my calendar to the proper month, but when he put it on the proper month it was suddenly obvious that my calendar was a year and a half off. That was years into it and that was pretty good. I looked and my calendar at home is currently on the proper month and my calendar at work is only one month off. I had inverted day for night and couldn’t fall to sleep before 4 in the morning and could not function at work, but it is a family business and I would be the only one who could fire me and I should have, but I didn’t. Functionally, I was put over my grandmother’s estate and it took me over 3 years to do what is supposed to happen in 6 months and there were times when it was just one piece of paper or one phone call I had to make, but I couldn’t seem to do it. There is still literally one piece of paper I have to bring to the lawyer about that, and I am improving to the point that the courts are no longer threatening us. As for what caused it, did have falls with head hits against things like concrete and the bathtub. I also know that I had out of control blood sugar (At the time, I was having neuropathy, vision problems and horizontal nail ridges, which I resolved with Whole Food Plant Based low oil, low salt, low sugar diet) I have come to the conclusion that I had high homocysteine (I was allergic to meat and didn’t supplement B-12 and came from Standard American Diet with lots of processed food and junk food.) I also believe that I had aluminum in my brain. I say that because I tried the fix for that of Fiji water for 12 weeks helped me stop having hallucinations and lessened night terrors to almost non-existent. Right now, I am using the ICES for sleep and it has been working wonders, and not getting sleep for a decade is one of the things on my list, which could have messed up my brain. I also failed the left nostril peanut butter test for Alzheimer’s (Dr. Greger did a video on how researchers used that as a test. I could smell it through my right nostril and couldn’t smell it through my left nostril.) There has been dementia and Alzheimer’s in my family.
Okay, that is enough back story. Yes, I have no diagnosis. I got the ICES as part of the things I did to help my brain. I was having a lot of night terrors and anxiety on top of not sleeping and the ICES has helped me with all of those. I see improvement in so many categories. I used gamma because of the studies on gamma pulsed light and gamma pulsed sound and I figured that gamma pulsed magnet added to those might help. Someone just shared with me that there is an App for pulsing gamma light and sound, which I will be doing. (I was using YouTube audio and a $40 gamma light kit with the ICES, but finding out that there is an App for that makes me happy.)
I also use delta, theta for sleep and I have used TMS for discouragement and depression and anxiety. I also did use the 5 setting hoping to have the results from the brain injury study.
I definitely have had improvement. I also definitely still have brain problems. I have serious executive function problems still. It is so hard to accomplish anything. My sense of time seems to be improving. I still forget names and words sometimes, but I had blanked out on so many of those things before and I feel like there has been some improvement in that area, too.
One thing, which is recent is that I was able to clean rooms of my house and 3 rooms got cleaned and they haven’t gotten cluttered again. What is ridiculous to me is that I apparently don’t ever know what I have and I shop and buy the same things over and over again and end up with 4 instapots, for instance. That is improving now that I am aware of it. I realized that I would get to the store and not know how to make decisions, so I would buy one of each of things. I look at it now and think, “What were you even doing?” But I am so happy to have 3 clean rooms.
Sorry that was so long.
I left out that I hadn’t been supplementing D vitamins and hadn’t gotten any sun for years between caretaking and working. I hadn’t been eating fruits and vegetables and know that I was severely nutritionally deficient. I worked with the ICES to change my food preferences by stimulating my vagal nerve while watching videos on healthy foods. I will put that topic over someplace else because it deserves its own topic.
I also have been using the ICES for brain plasticity based on watching the documentary The Brain That Changes Itself (which is on YouTube) and based on stroke research. I won’t be able to explain it but for years, I was going back and forth, “Did I have a stroke?” or “Do I have a brain tumor?” or “Is it early onset Alzheimer’s” and I was researching each thing and trying the things I found.
I honestly don’t know what went wrong with my brain, but from near what I can tell, it was lots of things.
A few years after my brain went bad, I found eczema on one nipple and a lump on my breast and I did Gerson’s and turkey tail mushrooms. By then, I just didn’t want anything to do with doctors because everybody was mad at me and I couldn’t handle authoritative personalities and before my brain was broken, my family had been through so many “abuse of authority” things with doctors and I was a little more paranoid after the brain issues and didn’t trust that doctors would let me try things like nutrition and products like the ICES. I felt like I would have lost my rights and like they wouldn’t give me the chance to do research and see what I could figure out.
I will put my using the ICES with my dog’s cancer elsewhere, too. I have used the ICES for so many things with excellent results. Looking forward to getting to try the Brain Gauge. I know my brain is so much better than it used to be so that I won’t get to see the full result, but I will get to see the truth about my brain and that is something I am so grateful for.
No, pressing on the impact spot does not cause flashbacks. However, for about 10 years after the accident, driving in rain and having a truck passed me on the left, I would have a flashback. The first time I flashed back, I had to pull over because I started shaking and broke out in a cold sweat. After that, I avoided driving in the rain because it was so bizarre. I still always think of the accident when I hear trucks on the highway (my car was hit by a truck, in the rain), but I no longer have a dramatic reaction.
Just an opinion (we cannot make medical claims), but TOJ is related to frontal / pre-frontal cortex, which means coil placement might be more optimal for that area from left to right. Front to back placement would be most appropriate if there were problems with timing perception which is cerebellar predominant activity (back of head) though that orientation would still be somewhat effective (just not optimal). It is confusing because both metrics target different aspects of timing/coordination that are predominantly handled by different parts of the brain.
Just in case it is not perfectly clear, the “Mark” who responded is Dr. Mark Tommerdahl, my close colleague and inventor of the Brain Gauge. He is a neurophysiologist and he has the unique distinction of being even more curmudgeonly than I am. He can untangle the practical meaning of Brain Gauge results in many cases, but bear in mind that this is an active and highly contested area of ongoing research.
Mark would never say this, so I will say it for him: He is the one of the most respected experts on the quantification of brain injury issues for the Department of Defense, and very often they defer to his opinion rather than the garbled nonsense that seems to stream out from everywhere else. He can not give clinical advice, and we are all still researching this area, but I think it would be very useful to take his opinion on these matters very seriously indeed. Just my opinion.
Thank you so much, Mark.
I had been playing with coil placement and was wondering the placement because of my 5% TOJ score from this morning. I also do have consistent timing perception issues, but that tested 27%, which is still so much better than 5% and the timing is less important in my life. Pre-frontal cortex issues are what I have told people that I think I have. Though not always. Interesting that stress and anxiety can change the reading. I am wondering how that will relate to executive function and social appropriateness. When I had the major brain breakdown about 6 or 7 years ago, I was so socially inappropriate and didn’t understand that. I also broke down so much in executive function. I fell 2 years behind at work, but got extensions, and eventually caught up, but it is like I sometimes still shut down, so seeing the 5% score there interests me.
I still don’t know what happened diagnosis-wise and my brain has been improving, so I am just less interested in what happened and I am more interested in improving function.
I am going to do both placements daily and see if I can improve timing and TOJ, but TOJ is the one which I bought the Brain Gauge because of.
My brain was so bad 6 or 7 years ago. I was up all night emailing people Vincent van Gogh theories and all sorts of odd things. It was so scary.
Wow that is quite a journey - wishing you the best!
Thanks! That is really nice of you.
Yes, I am years into the journey now.
It is exciting to have tools to help.
I was reading that Bob wrote a book on brain plasticity and that he had a stroke. (If I read it properly) I feel like this will take a while, but it is such an important process.
Yes, I had two strokes: One about 5 years ago (cerebellar) and one in July 2018 (pons). I did a lot of neuroplasticity exercises that I developed. Very simple to do but nobody was giving me good advice, so I figured it out myself with help from Mark Tommerdahl.
What I did was so simple and so effective, I felt I needed to put it in a book and get it out there for everyone. That kind of advice certainly was not readily available when I had a stroke, when I really needed it. I put the critical points in the front matter of the e-book, so that anyone could read the key points on the first few pages immediately and for FREE so they can start immediately using neuroplasticity to their maximum advantage.
I would have to say, strokes are definitely a bad deal, but by maximizing my neuroplasticity after my second stroke (the first stroke was undiagnosed until I had the second), I ended up recovering from both strokes pretty strongly, and I am now way better off than I was before the second stroke.
Thank you for sharing. That is very inspiring.
My step-mother had a stroke 2 years ago. She went in right away with balance problems, but the hospital waited 2 weeks before they diagnosed her with a stroke. They actually told her that they were releasing her and then basically said that before they released her, they should check for a stroke. She can walk, but falls and can’t be left alone and lost her independence.
Unfortunately, she has a stent in her brain and couldn’t use pulsed magnet. I looked at a list of other things to try like cold laser, electric foot massage, acupuncture and ultrasound, but my father wasn’t willing to try things because of her stent. I don’t have complex understanding, I just knew to stimulate the nerves to the brain and to try to increase angiogenesis. And I was looking at VEGF and BDNF. She is on a Parkinson’s drug to try to improve function, but without stimulating the nerves, it is such a slow process and not very effective.
I read it in a patent application for using ultrasound for stroke. They said, that stroke recovery without the technologies assisting the process tends to have disappointing results and hers has been.
Right now though, it isn’t about her. I really am trying to use the principles of neuroplasticity on my own brain.
I am so grateful for you. I highly respect what you are doing. Thank you.
I did not get much benefit from directly using PEMF for my stroke, but I used PEMF a lot for the secondary things that really helped my recovery and activity: serious pains elsewhere, such as in my neck and hips.
That is interesting.
I have seen people who claim to have gotten function back with PEMF.
You never know with things on the internet, but one of them looked pretty real.
Well, I guess I will have to read your book and find out how to increase plasticity.