From: hounddog23x@gmail.com   
      
   The Washington Post   
       
      
   â€˜Brain zapping’: Veterans say experimental PTSD treatment has changed   
   their lives   
      
      
   Former Army staff sergeant Jonathan Warren recounts his struggle with   
   post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq and his experience with   
   magnetic resonance therapy at the Brain Treatment Center. (The Washington Post)   
   By Richard Leiby January 12     
   NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — The headquarters of Oakley, a maker of recreational   
   and military gear, looks as if it belongs in a war zone. It’s a massive   
   bunker with exposed steel pipes, girders and blast walls. Even the dais in the   
   auditorium is armored.   
      
   But on a recent afternoon, the talk inside the building, set atop an arid,   
   inland hillside in Orange County, is not about fighting wars but about caring   
   for warriors. Doctors, scientists and veterans approach the podium at a   
   conference to present some of    
   the latest tools to help vets recover from wounds both mental and physical:   
   bionics, virtual reality, magnetic waves.   
      
   A session called “Healing the Warrior Brainâ€� features a trim, bleach-blond   
   former Army staff sergeant named Jonathan Warren, who recounts on video his   
   struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq. His   
   flashbacks, panic attacks    
   and booze benders were well chronicled: For a year, the Los Angeles Times   
   tracked Warren’s efforts to find peace, including via Department of Veterans   
   Affairs therapy.   
      
   It didn’t work, he says. But now a different Jon Warren is here to say that   
   he is finally free of symptoms, one year after that 2013 story ran. No longer   
   does his worst memory of the Iraq war — failing to rescue his best friend,   
   who nearly burned to    
   death after their Humvee hit a roadside bomb in 2006 — grasp his psyche and   
   inflict guilt.   
      
   That’s because of a revolutionary new treatment that retuned his brain, he   
   says, and set “my frequencies right.â€� Now he’s able to proudly embrace   
   his military service, “to keep the memory, to be able to go there,â€� Warren   
   tells the audience, †  
   œand not be controlled by it.â€�   
      
      
   The Brain Treatment Center recorded eight weeks of magnetic resonance therapy   
   with a four-year-old patient. (BTC via YouTube)   
   The 32-year-old veteran, who also suffered traumatic brain injury in the   
   blast, credits his recovery to something called magnetic resonance therapy, or   
   MRT — a procedure that pulses energy from magnetic coils into his cortex. He   
   and scores of other    
   combat vets have been drawn by word of mouth to a private clinic here for what   
   some of them call “brain zapping.â€�   
      
   The unproven procedure is offered at the Brain Treatment Center, located in an   
   unremarkable office park, free of charge to former service members. The vets   
   exit telling of a miracle cure, a transformation to tranquillity that they,   
   their buddies and    
   families can hardly believe.   
      
   â€œIt saved my life,â€� they say, one after another. “I got my husband   
   back,â€� their wives say.   
      
      
   Glowing testimonials also flow from the parents of autistic children treated   
   here, who say they’ve seen breakthroughs beyond all expectation: children   
   who are truly communicating for the first time, learning normally, behaving   
   like other youngsters    
   instead of dwelling in unknowable private worlds.   
      
   Is this a product of science? A matter of faith? Or simply a mystery?   
      
   Yes, yes and yes.   
      
   Miracles sometimes require all three.   
      
       
   Iraq war veteran Jon Warren is among the success stories for treatment of PTSD   
   at the Brain Treatment Center in Newport Beach, California. The center has   
   shown a high rate of success treating PTSD, traumatic brain injury and autism   
   based off    
   electroencephalography (EEG) readings, paired with a new method to correct   
   brain wave patterns utilizing Magnetic Resonance Therapy. (David Walter   
   Banks/For The Washington Post)   
   Unexplored frontiers   
   As doctors take on stubborn, baffling neurological disorders such as PTSD,   
   autism and Alzheimer’s disease, they are turning to esoteric treatments that   
   require journeys to unexplored frontiers.   
      
   â€œAs humans, we can identify galaxies light-years away, we can study   
   particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of   
   the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears,â€� President Obama said   
   in launching an initiative    
   to understand and map the brain.   
      
   The goal of the brain initiative is to harness private, academic and federal   
   research along the lines of the Human Genome Project, this time using experts   
   in physics and medicine to focus on the brain’s nearly 100 billion neurons   
   and 100 trillion    
   connections — the circuitry that governs thought, learning and behavior.   
      
   Some doctors think the plan is too focused on mapping and not enough on   
   exploring potential cures. One of them is Yi Jin, the Brain Treatment   
   Center’s medical director. The affable, China-born psychiatrist has plowed   
   ahead with MRT for PTSD, autism and    
   other disorders despite limited evidence that it works.   
      
   â€œWe are not claiming efficacy, but we are seeing clinical responses that are   
   positive,â€� the doctor says cautiously in an interview, offsetting some   
   bolder testimonials of swift, remarkable improvement in quality of life.   
      
   In 2008, the Food and Drug Administration approved the magnetic procedure —   
   applied through what is called transcranial magnetic stimulation — for   
   drug-resistant major depression. Published studies in recent years — one   
   with 20 PTSD patients,    
   another with 30 — reported significant reduction in symptoms in patients   
   receiving this TMS care. The procedure has been shown to be safe and is   
   offered for depression at medical centers including Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.   
      
      
   Jin uses the treatment off-label, customizing it, he says, to realign and   
   synchronize the firing of neurons in each patient’s brain depending on the   
   condition: People with Alzheimer’s, anxiety, sleep and eating disorders,   
   addiction and tinnitus (   
   ringing in the ears) have gone under the coils that emit the magnetic fields.   
      
   He calls it “noninvasive neuromodulation.â€� In May, the clinic became a   
   research affiliate of the University of Southern California’s Center for   
   Neurorestoration, whose director touts MRT’s potential as “a real   
   game-changer for the treatment of    
   neurological diseases.â€�   
      
      
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