Taking Concussions Seriously with Dr. Michael Longyear
Show Notes:
While we are grateful that football has raised awareness for post-concussion recovery, there is a common misconception that only football players suffer from concussions. Joining us today on Post Concussion Inc. is Dr. Michael Longyear to discuss how his personal experience led him to become passionate about helping people who are suffering from post-concussion syndrome. Dr. Longyear is a chiropractor and functional neurologist who was told he would never walk again after a traumatic football injury. Today, he is defying the odds by doing what he was told was impossible and is working with athletes to train and recover after sports injuries.
Tuning in, you’ll hear all about a very important aspect of concussion recovery that is often ignored, the importance of supporting a concussion survivor’s mental health, how to notice if they are struggling, why we need to remember to be kind to them, and so much more. Dr. Longyear shares the interesting idea that post-concussion syndrome is just PTSD before he explains how PTSD fits into concussion recovery. Finally, he reminds us that any athlete (or any person for that matter) can suffer from a concussion and that you don’t have to have hit your head to be suffering from a brain injury. To hear this incredible conversation, tune in now!
Key Points From This Episode:
A brief overview of today’s guest, Dr. Michael Longyear and his unique brand of healthcare.
What led to Dr. Longyear’s interest in helping people with concussions.
What’s missed in athletes in concussion recovery and why: the emotional aspect.
What Dr. Longyear thinks we can do to help concussion survivors with their mental health.
Signs of struggle that families and coaches can watch out for in a recovering athlete.
Why some people believe post-concussion syndrome is actually PTSD.
Why PTSD is your brain trying to protect you by using symptoms it knows you’ll listen to.
Why we need to educate people on the fact that concussions happen in multiple sports.
Why we must remember that you don’t actually have to hit your head to have a brain injury.
The importance of being kind to post-concussion sufferers and why it’s a lifetime injury.
Get help from Dr. Michael Longyear: https://brainoi.com/
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[INTRO]
[00:00:00] BP: Hi, everyone. I’m your host, Bella Paige. After suffering from Post-Concussion syndrome for years, it was time to do something about it. Welcome to the Post-Concussion Podcast, where we dig deep into life when it doesn’t go back to normal. Be sure to share the podcast and join our support network Concussion Connect. Let’s make this invisible injury become visible.
[DISCLAIMER]
[00:00:32] BP: The Post-Concussion Podcast is strictly an information podcast about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. It does not provide, nor substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it, because of something you have heard on this podcast. The opinions expressed in this podcast are simply intended to spark discussion about concussions and post-concussion syndrome.
[EPISODE]
[00:01:14] BP: Welcome to episode number 83 of the Post-Concussion Podcast with myself Bella Paige, and today's guest, Dr. Michael Longyear. Michael has a passion for helping others and it comes from a personal experience having being paralyzed through a traumatic football injury during his sophomore year in high school. He beat the odds and did what the doctor said was impossible. His passion led him to Parker University to study chiropractic, where he graduated valedictorian and continued his studies and applied clinical neuroscience. Still searching for answers. He continued to study many disciplines, chiropractic, neurology, psychology and functional medicine, just to name a few.
These disciplines have all helped him design his unique brand of health care. Before moving to Jacksonville, Dr. Longyear was the director of the NeuroLIFE Institute of Life University, where he specialized in complex neurological conditions that other healthcare practitioners had given up on. While there, he was also a part of research with concussion and depression. In addition to clinically treating patients and participating in research, he was responsible for designing and teaching programs for doctors around the world in the cutting-edge field of applied clinical neuroscience and functional neurology. Welcome to the show, Dr. Longyear.
[00:02:34] ML: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have chat about this.
[00:02:37] BP: To start, do you want to talk a little bit about what led to your interest in helping others with concussions?
[00:02:44] ML: Sure. Well, I guess it goes into my story of getting into healthcare and really working with athletes, originally. I had a pretty bad football injury when I was in high school. I was actually paralyzed from hit that I took trying to catch a football. Originally, they told me in the hospital that I would never walk again. Thankfully, they didn't really know everything. The doctors weren't infallible. I was actually able to walk out of the hospital about a month later. That started me in my journey of going into health care. I really wanted to work in sports medicine.
In working with athletes, you can't, in the last 10 years you couldn't have gone into sports medicine and work with athletes and not been dealing with concussions on the front lines, just because with the whole Junior Seau, and all of that stuff that came out. It really started to shed a light on concussions and what they were doing to athletes' brains. We just started getting and treating a lot of them. We worked my first clinic, it was at Life University. We worked with a lot of rugby players, a lot of hockey players, things like that. We were right across the street from the field. We used to joke that we went over and made fresh ones to work on. But yeah, so that's in working with athletes and through my journey, got me into working with and seeing all that we saw really with concussion.
[00:04:02] BP: I think it really helps when you have a background in what you're treating or a different – because then you get the other perspective of like, I've gone through this in a different way, but I understand what you're not saying to me as a patient, because I know for myself a lot of the time a lot of medical professionals I did see were athletes and trying to explain to them that I wasn't very good at telling them the truth. I would hide symptoms. I pushed myself way further than most people would because I was so addicted to being an athlete playing a pro-life type career and you just can't stop.
[00:04:44] ML: Yeah. We always said, athletes want to play, right? They're never – if they think telling you all of their symptoms is going to keep them out of even one game or one extra play, they're going to hide that from you. Working in athletics before even going down the rabbit hole with Chiropractic Neurology and all that stuff, it was like pulling teeth trying to get athletes to tell you what was really going on sometimes.
[00:05:06] BP: I remember I would say like one thing. I was about 15 at the time when it started. As the years got on, my mom would just like, look at me, and be like, “Talk.” Do not say it was not that bad. Just like, be like sitting there, like looking at me shaking your head. Like, you're saying you've had a headache and then you act it wasn't a big deal, but you might have managed to go to school, if you did or go ride a horse and practice, but then you're sleeping or complaining or crying in pain. She's like, “You're not okay. Stop telling people you are.” That thing. But it is really hard. So what do you think is often missed in regards to concussion recovery with athletes, other than just them hiding a lot of it?
[00:05:56] ML: Yeah. Well, I think that's a big part of it is they hide a lot of what's going on, but one of the things we've got all of these tests and a lot of testing that will measure everything from cognition, to balance testing, to looking really closely at the eyes. We've got some really good objective findings at this point that gives us a lot of information. However, the part that and the easiest part for the athlete to hide is the emotional aspect. I've worked with athletes at a really high level for a while, and again they want to play so they're going to keep everything they can from you.
We had one kid who was on just to leave the house and drive to the end of campus. He had to be on 100 milligrams of sertraline, which is an anti-anxiety medication. Otherwise, he'd have a panic attack and he'd freak out, he'd have to get out of the car and walk around the vehicle and touch it and make sure he was still on this planet. He had been cleared to play. To me they completely ignored that mental health aspect and cleared him to play, because he was able to do a one-legged stand. He was able to follow the doctor's finger. He could remember five words backwards or whatever the test was that they did for him, but when he complained about the anxiety and talked about that piece, they just gave him a medication for it. In my opinion, that's something we don't focus in nearly enough on. Even though the original reason that we really started paying attention to it was depression, mental health, and actually suicide, is what brought the focus really with football players.
[00:07:30] BP: Yeah. It's really important to talk about the emotional part. I know for myself, when I was younger, I convinced myself that if I got my physical health better than the mental health would fix itself. I just thought, if the headaches stopped, then all these emotions like, “I don't want to be here.” All those types of things of like extreme anxiety attacks. All that would just go away because that was my biggest problem. In my head was, if the pains gone, then everything will improve. I learned that that was not the case. I am an attempted suicide survivor, as many listeners know here. That's not how it worked. I did not address my mental health for years. I hid it from everyone. They would send me to the OD specialist, and that would, I'd have one conversation with them and I'd quit and never go back.
All these things do need to be fixed. The emotional part is huge with athletes. I think it's that desire to play like we've talked about how you just want to get back in it, you don't want to miss out, especially if you're in a team sport. You have all your friends. No matter what sport they're continuing on without you, maybe moving up in the ranks depending on what you are in. How do you think that can be fixed? You said they can pass those tests. I could pass those tests, because I got good at passing those tests as bad as that sounds, because eventually they're not that hard. You can pass that test for five minutes, but if you had me on a bad day, I wouldn't have passed it. What do you think we could do to help fix that?
[00:09:03] ML: Well, I think it's got to be multifactorial. It's funny. We've had 13-year-olds that we were doing concussion baselines or concussion screens with that knew how to game the test, right? I had this one kid walked up. He's like, “What are we doing today?” I'm like, “We're doing concussion baselines.” He's like, “Oh, I know what to do on this.” Then he looked at his buddy, and he's like, “Do really bad so that if you get an injury, you can still pass it.” I was like, “Dude, you're 13. You shouldn't be trying to game this test.” But the testing’s got to get cleaner. It's got to get better as far as that goes so that we don't have testing that maybe people can game. I think the other thing is I love the phrase, “It takes a village.” I think we need everybody involved, because if you're just asking the athlete, you're going to get the answer that the athlete wants to tell you, which is why one of the big things is we go to their teammates.
When you get to work with the whole team, you can ask people well, how are they acting outside of here? You can talk to family members. You talked about sleeping more than usual or sleeping when you might be able to get through your sport, but then you're going to have to take a three-hour nap at the end of it quiz people on that. You'd be surprised at what gets normalized by these athletes that are going through this stuff. Even their friends are just like, “Well, he's just shaking it off, or he's just rubbing it off.” Or whatever it is. We've got to be okay and have the ability to reach out to the people around the athlete and the people that make up their inner circle, especially.
[00:10:31] BP: I really like that, because it is really important. That's why I said having my mum in those meetings or appointments often saved me because sometimes I would - I couldn't really say anything. A lot of that was just to do with being in so much pain. The other aspect of – I didn't really know how to explain what I was feeling, or how to really get it across because admitting that you don't want to be here when you're a teenager is really difficult when things like that. I think a lot of it is you don't understand the risk of ignoring it. You don't really – I didn't get it. People told me you'd hear the odd thing about concussions. In my mind, it was pro-football players who had had like, I couldn't even count how many head injuries or head knocks.
I thought that's what you needed to do to get something like CTE. I was like, “Well, I have no risk. I'm okay. I've only had a few.” I never really thought much about it. I had a lot of headaches and just told myself that eventually they would go away. I never understood that it could change my entire life. I think educating young people, that it is not good to rig baseline tests or any of those types of things would be also very, very important to helping athletes getting back into the sport, because if they get back in properly, it is also a lot safer.
[00:11:52] ML: Yeah. I love how you brought that piece. It’s educating young people, which can sometimes be like, beating your head against a wall, right? Because, first of all, if it comes from an adult, then chances are they're going to take it with a grain of salt anyway. Yeah. Educating them on the fact that this is something that you really need to take seriously, because you're not going to be remembering your friends names in high school. That's a big thing. I've seen athletes that have had that significant of an issue after one or maybe even – But you're right, too. Like everybody thinks, oh, it's football players. Horseback riding is actually the most common sport to have a head injury per capita. Soccer is another huge one that people don't think about. So we've got to be better at educating where the risk is and what sports the risks that are really involved in.
[00:12:39] BP: I think it's the media of really plays it off as football, football, football, which is in some ways, it's good, because there's a lot of money going into the research now of concussions, because of football, but it's missing a lot of other sports. Yeah, like you said. I was a show jumper for horses. That's where almost all of my concussions were from or they were just from being a kid snowboarding down a hill. I crashed once, those types of things. It wasn't always, even in my sport. It is really important to understand the risk, especially as a young teenager who's super stubborn, who doesn't believe you. I get what you mean when you said you've had athletes not remember names.
I'm missing about two years that I remember mostly from what people have told me. Then I have glimpses of things. For example, there's pictures. You get memories on social media now. Almost all of my high school memories, I couldn't tell you where they were, what I was doing if I see the picture with no context behind it. It's because I have no memory of those years. It is definitely something that we need to address. We are going to talk more on signs that families and coaches can watch out for, but we're going to take a quick break before that.
[MESSAGE]
[00:14:00] BP: Cognitive FX is a research-driven clinic that has successfully treated 1000s of patients who have long lasting symptoms from concussions or other brain related injuries. Cognitive FX has an innovative approach to recovery that uses an advanced fMRI scan to map the function in your brain. Treatment and Cognitive FX takes five days to complete and uses your fMRI scan as a guide and baseline to ensure that your treatment is personalized and effective. This means that you won't need to schedule and keep track of multiple specialists locations, dates, times or therapies, because they will all be prepared for you when you arrive.
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[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[00:15:11] BP: Welcome back to the Post-Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today's guest, Dr. Michael Longyear. One thing I wanted to talk about a little bit before we get into PTSD are what are some of the signs, families and coaches can really watch out for? I know, we mentioned friends, but what do you think are some of the bigger ones that are often missed that maybe they can keep on a list or keep in the back of their head to watch out for athletes who are struggling?
[00:15:37] ML: That's a great question. I mean, the big ones are out there, right? Everybody knows if your kids sleeping more or less than usual, headache, but some of the little ones that people might not catch. I've seen some athletes do it. If they got a hat on all the time, or they're always pulling their hood up to block out the sun, or you see them wearing sunglasses quite a bit, or sunglasses with a hat. They don't have the ability to block out some of that sensory input, so they're doing it on their own. I've seen guys that will just they start wearing headphones all over the place. The big noise-canceling ones not because they're listening to anything, but because they need to block out that sensory input.
If you see little things like that, other things is if they're just acting differently. We had a woman one time bring us her son who was 16. They came in because her kid is literally what she said, “My kid is a jerk like he's acting out against his brother and sister. He's not the big brother that he used to be.” All of those kinds of things are big signs and symptoms to say maybe this head injurie’s lingering. He was four weeks post-injury and had been back playing football, back playing soccer, but he was still a jerk to his family. Then when he started to talk to him, it was a lot of “Well, yeah, I hate myself.” Like just negative on him that he finally opened up about after that, which is why he was mad at his family. I think those things if you can pick out those little changes in personality and start to see if they're changing a lot, anger-wise or emotionality, but the hiding their head, hiding from sun, hiding from light is another big one, too.
[00:17:13] BP: I really liked that. It's actually something we've talked about a lot on here is I used to go out with my hat because I didn't leave the house with that one. I didn't even sit in the house without one. It was more of like a safety net. I called it my false sense of security because my head was in so much pain that if I had a hat on, it felt like there was a barrier between me and the rest of the world. Things like light sensitivity and stuff like that really helped as well, but I live to I would sit at the kitchen table and my head would be up. I would walk out the door and there would be a hat on my head. I didn't go anywhere without anything on my head for a few years. It took some time to actually – I did slowly. Once I realized like the headaches aren't here anymore. You don't always have to be wearing this.
I started going out of the house without one. It actually was nerve-wracking at first, because it feels like everybody could touch my head. It was so sensitive at the time that I was really like I had a lot of anxiety about it. Then I liked that you mentioned the emotion because I was horrible. I know I was to my mom. I'm glad I don't remember at all, because I don't think I want to. I know actually close friends of mine. I'm good friends with their mom. They mentioned that their son was being weird, not acting like himself. I'm good friends with a sister. She said, “He's just really angry. He lashes out at us for no reason. Storms off from the table, like little things that they noticed that don't match his personality. They're like, “That's not him.” Usually, he's really calm, really polite and friendly. Now he's not.
You could shrug your shoulders and say they're being a teenager or you could maybe acknowledge that something isn't right. It is always important to double check those types of things. What I really want to get onto next was PTSD. So Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is something athletes deal with, military deals with, everyday people deal with. It is everywhere, for example, athletes deal with it. Myself, I had some of it. A lot of the time it was doing other sports, for example, snowboarding with my girlfriend on a hill and the hill was covered in ice. I had to sit down and I was like, “I can't.” She was like, “You've been snowboarding since you were four.” I was like, “I know, but my heart is pumping.” Like I wear my Apple Watch and it notifies me when my heart rate gets really high.
I was like, everything's going off and she's like, “Well just go slow. You don't have to go as fast as you want to go.” I had to be like, “I just don't want to hurt my head.” That anxiety got really big of like, I don't want to get hurt again, because I know what that can feel like. I know what the setbacks are. It became terrifying to go backwards in my recovery. I've gotten over that throughout the years, but there has been the moment where I'm like, “I can't do this. There's no way. I cannot get hurt again. No, thank you. I'm out.” I think a lot of players feel like that, as well, in the middle of playing which is very difficult. So what type of PTSD have you dealt with? Yeah, I'll let you go from there.
[00:20:27] ML: Yeah. I've been fortunate to work with some really cool athletes as well as military veterans. So PTS has been at the forefront of a lot of those cases. Again, I think it's something that gets looked over. There's been some research in the past. I don't know that I necessarily agree with this, but I liked that it shed a light on things that they don't necessarily believe, or at least in this research article, they didn't believe that there was what they call post-concussion syndrome. They believe that PCS was PTS and that it was the way that your brain had manifested the emotionality of the concussion.
Again, I don't necessarily agree with that, but I liked that it shed a light on that. That a lot of what – if we look at the brain, if it's been injured, or if it's been through a traumatic event emotionally, it knocks down your brain's resilience. So you don't have as much of an ability to deal with stressors in your environment. Whether it's an athlete who's dealing with post-traumatic stress from the injury or to a soldier who's dealing with post-traumatic stress from a bomb going off next to him, it affects the brain in very similar ways. It decreases your brain's resilience to be able to handle traumas or handle future traumas.
I had a soccer player one time that we worked with and we did a lot of work to rehab him from a really bad concussion. He really wanted to play soccer. We were able to do just about everything with him in the office. We got him heading balls in the field across the street. We had them doing all sorts of stuff. He was symptom-free. I mean, he could handle - he would have passed any return-to-play program that anybody put together. As soon as he stepped on the field with the lights on game time, all of his symptoms flooded back. It brought him back to that place when he got injured, and everything came back, the dizziness, the headache, the difficulty with balance, everything came back almost immediately. He wasn't able to play in the game. We never really got back onto the field after that, because what he realized was, it was time to retire and hang it up. It wasn't worth going through all of that again.
That's a real thing, right? I love your story. As soon as you saw I took you back to that event. The way that we often teach about PTS is there's nothing post-traumatic about it. Your brain is actually going through that event again in real-time. The limbic brain, which is the part of the brain that deals with emotions, it doesn't own a watch and it doesn't have a calendar. When it starts to freak out, it doesn't know the difference between five years ago, or right now. It just knows that it sees similarities and it wants to survive and keep you safe. Those symptoms are ways to get you to sit down or stop and take a break. I found that fascinating with that PTS aspect. It is your brain to protect you by using the symptoms that it knows you'll pay attention to.
[00:23:27] BP: Yeah. It actually reminds me we had a podcast guest almost two years ago now, who had PTSD from a bad snowmobile accident. She always explained it as she would feel like, she was ice, she would be shivering in the middle of summer when the symptoms came on. That's what it shows that your body thinks you're going through it. Like she said, she'd be like teeth chattering in the summer. She was like, it's because I was really cold during the actual event. She had to do a lot of grounding techniques and mindfulness and all those types of techniques that are out there to help her ground herself to be like, where I am right now is okay. I am okay, things like that.
It does prove that a lot of the concussion stuff is just as much of a mental game as it is a physical one. I think it gets missed a lot. We focus so much on our physical symptoms that we forget that our mental symptoms are there. They catch up with us like my mental symptoms overly caught up with me. I had my headaches almost gone. Everything was very good except for like, they came back from showjumping horse because the up and down movements and certain things were too much, but otherwise, they didn't really exist. Then all those mental health issues that I had developed over about seven years of treatments and therapies didn't go away overnight. I thought they would. So it is really important to talk about them and I love that we're talking about them now. So is there anything else you'd like to add before we end today's episode?
[00:25:04] ML: Just that we really need to pay attention to this. I think we brought up a good point earlier and that everybody thinks it's football and that that's the injury or that's the sport that you get injured in. But the reality is, is it’s multiple sports. I've had people who are extreme sport athletes, and most of their concussions actually didn't come in their extreme sport. Concussions happen in a lot of ways. They happen in car accidents. That's something that has been overlooked a lot is we'd get a lot of patients with whiplash. They do all this rehab for the neck, but nobody ever paid attention to the head. So they would end up suffering and cases getting closed, and they're still suffering because the whiplash was better, but the head injury never even got looked at.
Even in cases like that, where we're not even necessarily handling athletes or talking about athletes, specifically, we can have a head injury. The other piece is, remember that you don't actually have to hit your head to have a head injury. It's the brain sloshing around on the inside. Even if you think that it wasn't a head injury, and you're like, “Well, I didn't hit my head. I just got hit really hard and going really fast.” Those things can all cause it as well. People who aren't dealing with a head injury, but you have a friend or a family member. One of the things that I've seen is just be kind to them, because and I know you've talked about this in other podcasts and stuff about it being the invisible injury.
It would almost be better if it was a fracture or a broken bone of some sort because when the cast is on, everybody knows you're injured. They believe you're injured. When the cast comes off, then everybody knows you're not. But with a head injury, there's no cast. It's impossible to see, but it also it's what we're realizing is a lifetime injury and something that has to be managed forever. So the cast never truly comes off. There's always going to be some things that might limit or might bring on those triggers, if it's PTS. So just be kind to the person that you're dealing with that's gone through, especially multiple head injuries, because a lot of times there's those little triggers that bring that stuff back. That I think is the biggest message for me in leaving.
[00:27:06] BP: Yeah. No, it's great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing some of your experience with post-concussion athletes and others.
[00:27:16] ML: Thank you for having me.
[OUTRO]
[00:27:21] BP: Need more than just this podcast? Be sure to check out our website postconcussioninc.com to see how we can help you in your post-concussion life from a support network to one-on-one coaching. I believe life can get better because I've lived through it. Make sure you take it one day at a time.
[END]
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