“You Gave Me My Husband Back”: Neuroscience for the Combat Soldier
During his time in the military, special operations veteran Brandon Soleau was tasked with providing care for some 300 Navy SEALs, each worth, in his estimation, $15-20 million.
“That’s a huge caseload,” he recalled. “We were throwing the kitchen sink to keep these guys on target.”
In 2014, Soleau estimated that most combat soldiers would see anywhere between eight and 14 deployments. That number, he said, is more like 17-20 currently. However, he said back then everyone suffered from some or all of the VA Poly Trauma Model — traumatic brain injuries, anxiety or depression, sleep issues, and self-medication on top of being medicated by the hospital system.
“Without getting into specific numbers we had to medically retire a lot of these guys,” Soleau said. “Where each one is worth $15-20 million apiece, once you get past 10, 15, 20 medical retirees, that’s a massive loss financially to the command and the community. It’s not easily replaced.”
How do you heal soldiers from the neck up to ensure they’re properly equipped for battle? There are plenty of options in human performance medicine to measure everything from the neck down — blood biomarkers, 40 times, bench presses, HRV, for example.
But an area for improvement lied in measurable readiness from the neck up. That’s when Soleau was introduced to Wave Neuroscience, a non-invasive technology that reshapes brainwaves to improve brain health for general well-being and performance.
He was shown a video of these severely autistic children — some non-verbal, others suffered stemming, and aggressive toe walkers — undergoing treatment with Wave Neuroscience technology. After six weeks of sessions, some of these children were walking flat-footed, stemming had decreased, and some who haven’t spoken in nearly a decade were speaking for the first time.
“I thought this had to be absolute snake oil,” Soleau, now the executive director of Wave Neuroscience, said.
Dr. Erik Won, a former Navy flight surgeon and current president and CMO of Wave Neuroscience, was also skeptical of this technology. Then the chief physician and CTO at the Boeing Company, Won came across the company and decided to vet them and see for himself.
“I sent my first Marine who had a profound change, so much so that his wife came into the clinic in tears saying we gave her her husband back. She said he was the man she married 10 years ago,” Dr. Won recalled. “We’re always looking for disrupters in the industry that will really invoke change, and this was kind of the influxion point for me.”
He added, “Not only did we have an understanding of why this person was struggling, but we could also close the loop and give them something that may help.”
A few years after Dr. Won began working with Wave Neuroscience, he was approached by a two-star general who praised his work on healing wounded soldiers. But he had a question: can you make my guys better on target?
“At the time, I didn’t have an answer,” Dr. Won said. “But over time we’ve collected the data and the answer is pretty clear we can help in some of those dimensions.”
How It Works
It all starts with a 10-minute brainwave recording to create your personalized Braincare™ plan. Your brainwaves are recorded and measured using a (BMD) Brainwave Measuring Device. The Brainwave Measuring Device (BMD) reads, measures, and reveals precise brain health insights showing your brain’s unique strengths and weaknesses.
“The device itself is now very ruggedized and Bluetooth-capable, so it can essentially be done in a Starbucks if you want,” Dr. Won said. “That capability is a game-changer because it helps with the conversation to be able to get this in the comfort of your home instead of having to go to a hospital.”
The Brainwave Recording Session is then analyzed providing deep insight into each patient’s brain health. The analysis combines expertly-honed algorithms with years of historical data to create an actionable cognitive report that can help your doctor determine the best path moving forward. Sonal (Personalized Braincare™ Device) uses cutting-edge, non-invasive technology that reshapes your brainwaves to effectively improve your brain health for general well-being.
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“If a brain injury occurs from a physical, emotional, or chemical trauma, we can see clusters of neurons that start to misfire. So with these, we can see any standard deviations from your brain function and then target a plan to get you back to your baseline levels,” Dr. Won said.
Using ground-breaking, non-invasive MeRT technology to create a personalized path to exponentially improve your brain health through targeted treatment that is doctor facilitated and at the supervision of a clinician.
“In a nutshell, we’re taking your brain and your heart and putting it in coherence,” Soleau said. “If you can get everything in coherence, a lot of these symptoms we see — depression, anxiety, PTSD, human performance aspects — we can make you better. We know that now. And it’s scalable.”