WMH Season 4 Ep 4: A New Approach to Treating Trauma & PTSD
This is a transcript of Watching Mental Health Season 4, Episode 4 which you can watch and listen to here:
Katie: Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Watching Mental Health, and I am so excited because today I think we have a really interesting guest, somebody who is an expert in the field and who is going to come in and provide, I think, a really interesting perspective and I want to tell you a little bit more about and before we bring it on. So Dr. Eugene Lipov is a leading expert in treating post-traumatic stress, and he's the pioneer of using stellate ganglion block SGB to alleviate PTSD and PTSI symptoms. So we'll get a little bit more into that today, but he's been inspired by his own family struggles with trauma and has dedicated his career to restoring hope for those affected. Dr. Lipov has testified before the US House Committee on Veterans Affairs published extensively in leading medical journals and has been featured in major outlets including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Fox National News, and NBC. And today we're going to be talking trauma and we're going to be breaking down P-T-S-D-P-T-S-I, why Science Matters when it comes to treating mental health and these symptoms, and really how Advanced Brain Imaging proves that trauma is a biological injury. So I'm really excited to learn more about that. So with that, welcome to the show, Dr. Lipov.
Dr. Eugene: Thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it.
Katie: Thank you so much. Yeah, no, I appreciate you being here. You're definitely an expert in the field and you come, I think, with something that's interesting and a different approach to treating PTSD and trauma, which is an incredibly common, almost trendy thing that the world is experiencing right now in many ways. And so I think this is a really timely subject. But before we get into that, I always like to start off with asking my guests a little bit more about themselves. So tell me in your own words who you are and why this field, why this matters to you so much.
Dr. Eugene: Fair enough. Well, I'm a medical doctor, so I'm an MD and I finished medical school in 84. So my father was highly traumatized during World War II. He brought that trauma to our family, so he gave it PTSD to me, it's called secondary PTSD. He gave it to my mother who eventually took her life. So mental health is something that's a very personal condition, and I'm very interested in avoiding those kinds of problems for other people, families or individuals or whatever. And the way I come at this is physiologic. So I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't want to be a psychiatrist. I don't ride medications, psychiatric conditions. So I started a surgical resident, then I switched anesthesia after my mother's death. I became a pain physician and I was doing normal pain stuff. So through an interesting set of circumstance, I was able to figure out that Stella Ganglion block an injection in the neck. It's been around since 1925, works with PTSD, and that's where the interesting story for this podcast began. As you said, I testified in Congress, a lot of military people have followed my work, about 10,000 special forces guys have been treated and women have been treated. This procedure lives have been transformed. The great thing about what we do is what I tell my patients as I come in, they go like, do you want me to tell you what kind of trauma I had? I don't care. Makes no difference.
Just a mere fact telling about the trauma is traumatizing, it's unnecessary. It doesn't matter. Needle goes in the same spot, doesn't matter what kind of trauma head. I think that makes it very much better for a lot of patients. Also, the response time is very quick. A large number of patients will have response within 10 minutes. So the compliance is much higher because if you think about conventional therapeutic like medications takes six weeks, if ever, to have an effect. And then psychotherapy, there's all types, and there are certainly like, and a lot of 'em are traumatizing as well. Relieving trauma. Again, exposure therapy is one of my favorite things to beat up on. So if you look at the therapeutic efficacy of current therapeutics of gold standard therapy, which is defined as pharmaceuticals plus psychiatric or psychological in the va, the efficacy of that is about 40%.
That's Low. And a lot of it's due to lack of compliance and also you have to keep changing medications and all of that you find again, so that's why you alluded to the name change. We can talk about that. I'm trying to change the name PTSD to PTSI. Postic stress injury, meaning trauma causes real biological changes. For example, I was at the major fundraiser for military, and people are still talking about PTSD as an invisible wound or PTSD. The problem with that approach, it's not invisible. It's invisible. You have the wrong scanner. If you have the advanced scanners like FMR, functional MRI, ME scanner, PET scanner, you can actually see amygdala overactivation, and you can actually, when the patient gets better, you can see deactivation on amygdala. So the point is you can actually see the effects of it no different than broken leg. So I'm a clinical guy, so I look at everything physiologically. So that's kind of my thing.
Katie: I love that you take that approach, that clinical physiological approach. I think that it's a little bit different from what is happening right now, really trending in our treatment of mental health conditions. But frankly, more and more people are struggling, right? There's more and more people who are experiencing suicidal thoughts, who are experiencing trauma and struggling to get through that anxiety and depression and all of these various conditions. And it seems like really no one's getting better. So this is a different approach, but in some ways it's not new because you said that SGB has been around for decades, since the twenties, I think is what you said.
Dr. Eugene: It's been a hundred years. In fact, I'm writing a textbook medical textbook for doctors like me, and it's called stel gram Block, A Century of Progress. So it's going to have a lot of specific things, but still Y and block has been, the first time it was used for psychiatric condition was 1947, the Cleveland Clinic for Depression. But it was lost. People forgot about it.
Katie: I found textbook. So it's not just PTSD or PTSI, it's not just trauma. It's many different conditions. So that's really interesting.
Dr. Eugene: So lemme tell you some of the condition that has been described as effective ELLA has been effective for PTSD, near and dear to my heart, anxiety, depression. There was a paper out of Canada of schizophrenic. His voices went away after stellate. So I'll tell you the one we just described, which is interesting to me at least. So this woman went through a lot. She's had a lot of childhood abuse, and she had all type of issues. So she had three diagnosis, PTSD, psychosis, multi personality disorder. She had 13 personalities. The dominant one was, she called it the monster because she was so nasty. So she had three stellar Indians in three years, no psychotic breakdowns. In three years, she went from 13 to three personalities, and now the new personality is very pleasant and polite. And her depression, her PTSD got better. That weird.
Katie: That is so interesting. I mean, that's cool. And it feels like the rates are much better than what we're experiencing on the other side with medication treatment and therapy and things like that. Yeah,
Dr. Eugene: No, very much so. The other thing is, again, the compliance is a huge thing, meaning taking medication is hard. But the other part, if there was an article written, I think it was New York Times, and they talked about Deadly Cocktail, that veterans are taking seven different drugs, psychiatric conditions in the VA right now.
Katie: Wow.
Dr. Eugene: You take one drug to do this. Another one gives sedation, another one. This atypical ONP psychotic is one of the commonly used drugs, and those cause heart attacks and increase suicide rates. So those are dangerous drugs.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about that a little bit more on veterans and just step back into PTSD and PTSI. So what exactly is PTSI?
Dr. Eugene: So that was a term that was pioneered by Dr. Frank Berg. It was a very famous psychiatrist. He came up with a term Stockholm syndrome. You've probably heard that term. So he was one of the part of the committee that came up with the term PTSD in 1980. But through his exploration and what he was finding is that it was stigmatizing. So he felt if he can change the name, that it's an objective physical finding that it's real, there'll be less stigma. So then he got connected with Peter Elli, four Star General, who was in charge of suicide prevention for US Army in 2012. They both went to the A American psychiatric station and said, please change the name to PTSI. And they said, no, thank you. So then I got connected with Dr. Berg. He's 87 now. So he passed this hot potato to me now, and I did a study in 2023 based on 3000 people. And we ask them what would happen if PTSD changed to PTSI? So the answer is the word couple. One, stigma will get better, two, there'll be more hope three, they will be seen by clinicians. All good things. So I take all the information. I went to the A PA in 2024, and I said, this is what we have in order to change the name, the requirement change. The name is to show that current, the current name is causing problems, potential harm for them.
So I showed them my research and they go not enough data. So it's one thing that I would ask you listen to do is potentially go on my website, its ptsi.com, ptsi.com, and fill out a survey. I'm trying to do 10,000, a hundred thousand, a million people to do it. I'm trying to get a large number of people to give me that information. Then I'm going to try again to change the name because I really think PTSI term will save a bunch of lives. One letter, right? I'm going to be doing a TEDx talk specifically about that in San Miguel in Mexico on January 15th.
Katie: Oh, that's fabulous. I'll look out for your TEDx. That's exciting.
Dr. Eugene: Thank you.
Katie: Very cool. And yeah, I mean, language matters and it's so important how we define things, how we explain things,
And in some ways, you're almost helping to, this approach gives us more control, right? It's saying that this is a biological disease, that we can actually do something to treat this versus saying something like, this is an invisible wound that is perhaps going to be with us for the rest of our lives without any sort of getting better. So I do, I like this approach, and it's very scientific, and from what you're saying, the results are there. So I think that that's really exciting. So tell me more about the work that you've done around veterans. It is veterans awareness month, veterans and military family. At the beginning you mentioned a little bit kind of what are the treatments that you've done and what have you seen in that veteran population?
Dr. Eugene: Well, keep in mind, I have a Jonas perspective because everybody I get to see have PTSD. So I'm interested in, so I've treated active duty as well as veterans of all branches, specifically had an honor to take care of a lot of special forces guys, SOF. And they're a special group in a sense that I did SOF training with them one weekend. I mean an old guy running around blowing stuff up. Anyway, so what I found is that through the training they do breaching, which is blowing holes on walls and taking down doors, all of that, that leads to BTBI, which is blast traumatic brain injury. They also have TBI, obviously they're being thrown, whatever happens. So what we were able to successfully treat PTSD symptoms in them and their spouses, because I believe been demonstrated that people can get secondary PTSD. So the guys go to war, they come back, they give it to the wives typically, and children. So we've treated that. So what it has, the main, I think you're asking what kind of symptoms have you helped? I think let's start with that. It seems to work very well on nightmares, impulsivity. Somebody touched you in the shoulder on the whack inside the head feeling of doom. Also, I wrote a chapter in a textbook about that 85% of men have sexual dysfunctions secondary to PTSD. So if you can treat PTSD, the equipment works better, which has been a really lovely thing for a lot of the people we've treated.
Not just the men, but the whole family structure. So those are kind of results we've seen as far as people who had BTBI blast met, rate injury and PTSD. So I came up with something called SOF Method, special Operator Force Method adds ketamine and cell together. There's a synergy between the two of them, and we've used it success, but it's actually being studied now in Northwestern and Fort Bragg. So they followed some of the research I came up with, which it is really great to see because it really helps people a lot.
Katie: And our veteran population really, really needs it. Suicide numbers are much higher at the top of the show. You mentioned your own personal experience around being a family member. So it's something that we really need. And it's so interesting because it's been around for a hundred years. The results seem to be good. There's research to back it up. So why do you think that it's not as mainstream? Why are people still kind of fighting this or it's still a novel concept to say that oh, PTSD is a biological disease versus a mental health condition?
Dr. Eugene: Well, if you think about the Plank was a great physicist. I'm going to give you an answer. And he got Nobel Prize in physics for planks, constant, I think 17, 19 22, something like that. He said, science moves ahead at funerals. The current people who are in charge have a particular thing they're interested in, and you need new blood in there. That's one. Two, I had a colonel come in from joint chief of staff. He looked around and he said, you have a problem with your project. I said, what your wrong results? He said, no, no, my guy's been treated. They've done great. You're asking people who are currently in charge to be in charge of a second best thing. So whoever just follow the money and prestige. Do you think they're going to let it go of that easily? Probably not so much.
Katie: Yeah. So that's tough. It's an uphill battle. But that leads to my next question, which is, yeah, what's the future? Is this where your book comes into play? Is it about teaching that next generation? Is it about educating the community? What are the next steps? Yeah.
Dr. Eugene: Well, there are a number of steps. Step one is science. If it's real, it should be able to figure it out. But the right scientific thing that should have been done a long time ago was FMR functional MRI test before and after to sell it. It's not that complicated because there's still a lot of debate as a T, is it placebo? Is that lies, whatever. So it's interesting. I applied that criteria to what I'm talking about. While the stuff they're talking about, the drugs and all this, nobody uses that, which is interesting. So let's let that go. No problem. So in 19 2017, that was my suggestion to the va. That should be a study done like that.
Ofcourse. No, they wouldn't go. No, I don't think so. Why? Just because I went to the number of forts, specialty PTSD, I don't think so. We have other place we want to spend our money. So then I ran into an amazing couple, Linda and Glen Greenberg, they have a huge foundation, and they gave us money to be able to do real study, which we gave to the NYU organization. So they've been doing the study for three years now. Hopefully first or second quarter of next year, the results will be in. And I think that's going to be a significant change because there's nothing like a real big organization like NYU with real scanners, with real psychiatrists, with real, everything actually demonstrated differences. That's what it's going to take. And I think we are close. I think we are maybe six months away from publication and all of that.
Katie: That's so exciting. That's so cool.
Dr. Eugene: I agree. Tell me, I've been applied for a while.
Katie: I bet. I bet. And you've probably been writing your book for a while too. So tell me more about your book. You said that that's also coming out next year, right?
Dr. Eugene: Yes. The book's coming out January, I'm sorry, February 17th. So the name of the book is cool. Let me tell you the story. It's called The Dead Shot. And the reason that name came about, I took care of a marine guy, and one of his buddies had Stella before, and he said, you should go get the gut shot because it changes lives. So I love the name, that's why we use it to name the book. But the Gutshot basically talks about, there's one chapter about my life, why I'm interested in it at all, because it's weird for a doctor to actually have an opinion about PTSD, let alone come up with a new section of it. And then we talk about secondary PTSD. But ultimately, it's a book of hope, meaning it's possible to get better. There are going to be things that you can do to get better. Nobody killed themselves. They have hope. So that's why I'm big into promotion, hope, promotion, and everything else like that.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. That's amazing. It sounds like a really good story. Are there
Dr. Eugene: Any It's well written, not by me. I had somebody else write it, but Lauren wrote it, but I think she's a beautiful writer and she's done an amazing job.
Katie: Oh, that's beautiful. I love that. Alright, so I'll look for that to come out early next year. And is it for doctors or is it for the public? Yeah, so it's for
Dr. Eugene: The public.
Katie: Yeah.
Dr. Eugene: I've published about 22 articles for doctors. I think I've done a pretty good job and there's going to be another textbook coming out. No, I call this type of writing, sciencey, sciencey in the sense that there's enough science to keep it interesting. But there are anecdotes and she keeps it light and she describes things beautifully. It's not also, it's not long. It's about 200 pages. It's not like a tone that you cannot get through because the idea is to get through it, and actually you do something with that. Right. So I'm a clinician. I do interventions. I don't just talk about things.
Katie: Yeah, exactly. Are there other clinicians who are doing what you're doing in this space who are offering this service around the country?
Dr. Eugene: There's a couple of, yes, absolutely. There's a number of people who followed our work. So I'm a CMO, chief Medical Office for Stella Mental Health. So we have 24 sites in United States. We have one in Israel and three in Australia.
Katie: Okay, great.
Dr. Eugene: There are other doctors who do stellate as well.
Katie: Absolutely. Some
Dr. Eugene: Better than others. I mean, I know some very good clinicians and some
Katie: Sure, probably. Yeah.
Dr. Eugene: So you got to be careful. You want to make sure people are trained and they use the right guidance systems and all of that.
Katie: Yeah, do your research. Definitely.
Dr. Eugene: Yes.
Katie: Yeah, definitely. Well, so I want to ask you another question here that I always like to ask my professionals, and I think I have an idea of how you're going to respond to it
Dr. Eugene: Maybe,
Katie: But we'll see. Yeah. The question is really is do you think that a mental health challenge or diagnosis is something that somebody can overcome? Or is it something that really needs, that they have to deal with for the rest of their life? And it can be trauma, but it can also be maybe something like having psychosis or dealing with depression. But I kind of think I know where you're going with it, but I want to get your answer.
Dr. Eugene: Well, I'll give you three answers to that. How's that?
Katie: Okay. Yeah.
Dr. Eugene: So PTSD and mental disorder is not a lifestyle. Number one, don't give up. Keep fighting until you win. I think that's one. Two, when I've done pain for years, and I always tell people, think of your brain as a car. If you close your eyes, you're not going to stay in the road. If you keep your eyes open, you're more likely to get where you want to go. Point is if you want to get out, keep looking, try to figure it out. So I personally had suicidal thoughts when I was six. I don't have any of that now. I don't. I mean, I have normal mild stress, but I don't have a extreme stress, depression, all that, all got treated and all went away.
Katie: Sure. Treated with it was Stella.
Dr. Eugene: Stella helped my, Dick Schwartz and his organization has done a beautiful job helping me. So all of that meditation, losing weight, all of that helped me a lot. Being married to an amazing woman, all of that stabilizes people, all of that. So the point, and the other part is I'm looking at some new waves of diagnostic PTSD and psychosis using autoimmune assays, and maybe there is a way to do immune modulation to take away mental conditions. So the point is that it's getting more biologic by the moment. So the answer, absolutely, it's not a lifestyle. There's all types of things that can be done. It should be done to get better.
Katie: That is so interesting that you're saying it's getting more biological, and we're taking more of that scientific approach by the moment, because I think in some ways in the last 20 years, it almost feels like we stalled out on SSRIs and really just that's our only approach is talk therapy and antipsychotics and antidepressants, and it's just there's got to be something better and there's got to be a different something out there. So I like that is it seems like theres
Dr. Eugene: More. I think you're right as far as still out, but I don't think people are tolerating that anymore. All of this thing of, okay, fine, I'm going to be sick the rest of my life. People are getting tired of it. And that's true across the board. It's not just psychiatric conditions. Regular medicine, there's a lot of people doing alternative medicine, they're doing complimentary medicine,
Holistic medicine. But the point is, I think people are becoming, since everybody's talking to each other, they're going, well, this didn't work for you. Well, it didn't work for you. A million people telling you it's like it's not going. Maybe it's time to switch something. Let's do something different. Let's get rid of all the pills. I'm not suggesting that, but I'm saying some people take that approach. Just get a dog and go walking in desert, and that could work for this sector population. It let's do TMS, let's do immune infusions. And people are like, oh my God, this worked for you. Oh, wow. Psilocybin is becoming a big deal, right?
Flash news, it's been used for depression and mood improvement for three, four, 5,000 years. Wow. Wow. That's crazy to right there. So the point is, people are starting to go, well, I'm not willing to be depressed the rest of my days. I don't want to be miserable. Unfortunately, on top of everything else, we have social media that scared the hell out of people. That's a problem. Also, everybody, or there's a lot of people who are addicted to various things, and that's a problem. And addiction is being looked at. We can talk about addiction forever, but the point is, I think people are getting to the point that they're looking for something that actually works. It's not all sales job. There is real biological things which are coming online, and there's going to be new sensors and all of that.
Because right now, psychiatric assessments, I think you got PTSD have a feature of anxiety, depression, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sure. What do you do with all the information? Okay, it depends on...
Katie: The professional you're in front of too. One day you have this, the next day you have that. Right.
Dr. Eugene: But also the therapeutics are also not specific. Lithium is used for bipolar disorder, for example. Dium is a great drug, but it has a lot of downsides. But my point is most other things, depression, anxiety, the same drugs are being used, and some of them like benzodiazepines are addictive. I'm not a psychiatrist, so as I said, I don't ride those kind of medications certain times. You can use medications certain times people do well, that's marvelous. But people who don't try something different. Ketamine infusion has been shown very well by Dr. Crystal from Yale that it works well for depression. Stellate, I think it works well. TMS takes a while, but it seems to work well. Psilocybin not legal in this country. It's legal in some states. I think it's kind of grayish right now, but some people have great results there. The only drug I don't like is NDMA. I'm opposed to that drug. Rest of them, they certainly have a place.
Katie: Okay. That's so interesting. I really like that. Again, that approach where it's like, let's stop taking things off the table. Let's look at what's been on the table for thousands of years and apply some research to that and really see what works.
Dr. Eugene: Yeah, exactly. For example, iga, amazing Drug for Addiction, amazing Stanford setting right now for TBI and other things. However, if you're going to do it, don't do it in a cave because it can stop your heart and give you arrhythmia. So it needs to be done by people who know what they're doing. They're going to give you magnesium to stabilize your heart. They're going to monitor you, and it should be safe. The point is, you need to know, and that's what the stuff is in the book. That's simple type of advice. It's like this, okay, but be careful of this. Okay, but be careful of this. Right,
Katie: Right, right. Yeah. I mean, information is power and science is power. And I think that people have not given science, it's due diligence in the last few years, in 10 years or so. So yeah,
Dr. Eugene: That's another story altogether. That is totally different topic. Everybody's an expert, right? Everybody's an expert at everything,
Katie: Which again goes back to social media. It can be harmful on an information perspective, but then also just on a mental health perspective. So there's pros and cons to the world that we live in.
Dr. Eugene: I'll give you my suggestion.
Katie: Yeah.
Dr. Eugene: This is why during COVID, a lot of people ask me for advice. So here's my advice. It's really simple exercise. Expose yourself to nature. Turn off all the dingling, ding of all those things. Don't get continuous alerts. Do social media one hour per day, only do it in the morning. Don't do it at night.
Don't be exposed to screen time at night if you don't sleep, mental health will deteriorate and don't drink a lot of energy drinks and things like that. That's a problem. It can cause its own type of anxiety. The problem. And then people go up, oh, I can't sleep. I have take it down or up, down, up, down. It's all bad for the brain.
Really simple advice. People know to do it, but they're like sewing caution. It's like, oh my God, I missed this update. Oh, unless, if you are running the army and you need to be informed, that's a different story. If you are somewhere and you don't have responsibility of that level, one hour a day is planted to find out all the bad news, it's not going to change. If you know moment by moment ain't changing nothing, it's going to change. Nothing. Supreme Court decision will change. Nothing in your life. It's just not going to happen that quickly. You can find out tomorrow and be discussed or be happy tomorrow, but you don't have to be paying attention by the ding ling ding, all that. And the thing that's really cool about this iPhone can do this. I have five numbers that if I put it to private time, people can get to me short of that, no, this is my private time. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to take care of me. Right. Got to take care of you.
Katie: That's the best of, I love that. And I fully, fully agree. I think that we don't need to be digesting news 23 hours a day. No. It's not healthy for our mental health. So it's important when you're struggling to have these other solutions. But it's also important, like you're saying, to apply these good life techniques to get enough sleep, to go into nature, to put yourself first. In many ways. And we are constantly putting the world, I think, on a pedestal versus ourselves.
Dr. Eugene: Well, the other thing, if I may, PTSD increased around rate of heart attacks by a factor of two. It causes sexual dysfunction in men in up to 85% of the time.
So just PTSD. I'm not talking about other issues. The point is mental health. There is a price people age faster who have mental health dysfunction. It has a price. So the point is it's possible to do and it's well worth it. Also do monitoring. This is ordering, monitor your sleep, monitor your heart rate, monitor your HRV, know where you're at. All of that is not that difficult to do.
Katie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We have those technologies at our fingertips,
Dr. Eugene: Literally.
Katie: Literally. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for your time. This was such a great informative episode. You mentioned a website earlier, but I want to ask you, how can people get ahold of you? I believe it's ptsi.com. What would you like people to do there? And yeah, if people want to reach out and learn more about what you're doing in your services or maybe have you come out and speak and teach, how can they get ahold of you?
Dr. Eugene: Perfect. So I'll give you a few website if that's okay. Yeah. Well, the first thing is I think the name needs to be changed. The PTSI, if people can go with the itts ptsi.com, there's a survey, it's I rrb approved survey. I want to get 10,000, a hundred thousand, maybe a million people to fill it out. And then I'm going to go back to the P, try and change the name one two dr eugene.com if people want to get ahold of me about science and all of that stuff. Also, all the papers that I've written and other people which are relevant are on that. So you want to do science, not science C reading. That's the way to go. If you want to look at the book and pre-order it, it's called the gutshot book.com. And the last thing, if people want to get treatment, if people want to go to stella mental health.com, they can set up an appointment either with me or my colleagues, closer to you.
Katie: Okay, fabulous. Yeah, you said that you are all over, so that's so great. So thank you so much for your time. Again, this was a really, really powerful episode and I appreciate it. And this was great for November as well. So with that, thank you. Yeah, I definitely will want to have you back anytime. But we are live every first and third Wednesday of the month. So for anyone who's tuning in, join us next time and then join us on katie rose wecter.com to see this episode afterwards or wherever you listen to podcasts. We will be there and well that we'll see you next time. Have a good one, everyone.
