Re: My second 40 HBOT treatments finished today

[Guest guest]

Hi and others,

I have been in Destin, FL for the past month, receiving the second 40 treatments

for my mild TBI, of April, 2004.

To my astonishment, a well-established cognitive test used by the military which

I was given at the start of treatment, and again, at the end, showed

statistically significant improvement from either " below average to clearly

below average, " in three out of five areas of cognitive deficit. I believe it is

amazing that this evidence is showing up on testing immediately after treatment.

I anticipate that I will continue to see gains in the areas where I have

cognitive deficits--we know that nerve tissue takes time to heal. I present this

in case it may be of help to others with similar medical problems:

These are the ANAM results on two dates from test scores taken 6 years after my

TBI, April 21, 2004, using the ANAM4 TBI Performance Report. The first was done

April 20, 2010, before my latest HBOT treatment in Destin, Florida, and again,

May14, 2010, after 39 dives had been completed.

It is interesting to compare the summaries of the report from April 20th, at the

start of this HBOT session, to May 14, on the last day of the session, after 39

dives had been completed:

PERFORMANCE AT A AVG ORBELOW AVGCLEARLY

GLANCEABOVE BELOW AVG

sleepiness scaleFATIGUE X1 / X2

mood scaleMOODX 1/ X2

simple reaction timeREACTION TIME X2X1

code substitution-LearningLEARNING X2X1

Procedural reaction timePROCESSING SPEEDX1/ X2

mathematical processingWORKING MEMORY X1/ X2

matching to sampleSPATIAL MEMORY X2 X1

code substitution--delayedDELAYED MEMORYX1/ X2

simple reaction timeREACTION TIMEX1/ X2

I have combined the two tables, with X1 being April 20th, and X2, May 14th. I

highlighted in blue the cognitive areas which showed significant improvement:

reaction time and learning, which were " below average, " normalized, and spacial

memory which was initially " clearly below average, " also normalized. There was

no statistical improvement in the areas of working memory or delayed memory.

I think it is worth noting that these cognitive improvements occurred, with

hyperbaric oxygen treatment, six years from the date of the initial injury!

Best regards,

, MD

mild TBI survivor

________________________________

From: Freels <dfreels@...>

medicaid

Sent: Fri, May 14, 2010 7:10:58 PM

Subject: Re: [ ] Utilizing the First Amendment.

>Father to Trinity (DS Age 10)

Ron,

Does " (DS Age 10) " mean Downs Syndrome?

If so, has Trinity had HBOT?

If so, what was the response?

Freels

hbo-list: HBOT and SPECT scan

>Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 14:22:55 -0600

>BestServHost: lists.best.com

>MIME-Version: 1.0

>Sender: hbo-list-errors@...

>Reply-hbo-list@...

>hbo-list@...

>

>Dear List:

>Is it true that Spect scan can not be reliable when

>it comes to HBOT. A doctor in St.Louis Mo told

>me that the scan changes from day to day. The

>seizures make it change and he said that the changes

>we saw and Dr. Uszler reported on were really not

>improvements just I guess mistakes. If you take another

>scan the next day it would be different. What is the

>truth about this. This doctor was used by Georgia STate

>to determine if a child would get the treatements paid for.

>Of course he denied that it helped in anyway. He said the

>spects did not prove that a real change occured. Can anyone

>explain? This doctor was a Neurologist.Rhonda

>

>hbo-list@... is a public discussion forum for the field of

>Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy. For more information about this list,

>please see http://www.hyperbaric.com/list.htm .

>

>This post was made by a lady named Rhonda, who lives in southern Illinois. She

has a cp daughter (I think).

>

>Our son Jimmy first underwent HBOT in May, 1999 through July, 1999. He

underwent SPECT-scan imaging before HBOT and after his 21st treatment. The

second scan showed an increased cerebral blood flow of 25.4%.

>

>A few weeks later, in August, 1999, one of my neighbors who lives on my street

contacted a pediatric neurologist who used to live in Atlanta and was then

living in St Louis and on staff at Washington U. My neighbor used to attend

church with this guy. After witnessing Jimmy’s daily improvements from HBOT

throughout his initial 40-treatment regimen, she asked her friend if a cerebral

palsy child could improve via HBOT. In a phone conversation, he said it was

impossible, and in a follow-up, 2-page letter, he said it was " scientifically

silly. "

>

>Next, the hbo-list post from Rhonda showed up. She's a Jehovah's Witness, which

means she can't be a witness, i.e., testify against another person in a legal

action.

>

>You see, I suspected the doctor Rhonda was referencing could have been the same

friend of my neighbor's. The same guy who had already rendered a decision about

Jimmy’s likelihood of improvement from HBOT even before he'd seen the

evidence, which were Jimmy’s before/after SPECT scans.

>

>(The tipping point for Harch to testify for Jimmy in 2000 was when I faxed him

Rhonda's post. What that doctor told her was a lie. He lied to her, which also

meant he lied to Georgia Medicaid about Jimmy. It ticked off Harch, and he

decided to testify. That St Louis doctor was essentially calling Harch a liar,

and because Harch is a man of great principal, he wanted to set the record

straight.)

>

>What the St Louis MD didn't know was that my neighbor already saw with her own

eyes the improvements Jimmy made. She was asking her friend the pediatric

neurologist because her husband experienced complications in a 1993 surgery to

remove a tumor on his brain stem that sent him into coma. When he emerged four

months later he was 70% incapacitated. My neighbor really wanted to know if HBOT

would help her husband. When her friend the pediatric neurologist told her it

was impossible for HBOT to help, that's when she decided to take her husband to

Dr. Perlmutter in Naples, FL. He got 80 treatments, and his gains were

documented with before/after SPECT scans. He emerged about 20% incapacitated

instead of 70% incapacitated. This was seven/eight years after the initial

injury, an improvement the pediatric neurologist said was not only impossible

but " scientifically silly. "

>

>(My neighbor's improvements were so dramatic, he became over confident. In

mid-2000, he lost his balance and hit his head, which induced a stroke. He

already had a couple of shunts in his head from the 1993 surgery. In hospital,

his wife requested an Rx for HBOT. Because of his success from the previous

HBOT--as documented by his before/after SPECT-scan imaging--Kaiser agreed to pay

for 80 more tx of HBOT. He made almost a total recovery, to where he was with

Perlmutter and still holds the record for quickest recovery at Emory Rehab.)

>

>At our first ALJ hearing in 2000, the Georgia Medical Care Foundation (GMCF)

employee who coordinated the review of our request mentioned Rhonda's doctor's

name on the stand. It was the same friend of our neighbor's: Edwin Trevathan.

That's when I pulled out Trevathan's follow-up letter to my neighbor and

attempted to enter it into evidence. Though it wasn't admitted, if you read the

transcript, you can see the case coordinator is horrified: Trevathan should have

recused himself from the case since he'd already made a decision about the very

same child in August, 1999 some three months before Georgia Medicaid asked his

opinion for the same child in November, 1999.

>

>Since he knew this was for the very same child, i.e., Jimmy Freels, this action

alone is highly unethical and could subject Trevathan to some sort of sanction

or even revocation of his license to practice medicine.

>

>We lost the first ALJ decision in December, 2000. We spent several months

preparing an appeal. The one hole was Trevathan's statement that SPECT-scan

imaging was unreliable. I emailed every expert I could find, asking when and

under what circumstance is SPECT unreliable. I emailed Maxfield and Neubauer,

Harch and Philip . I reviewed everything I could find on Medline that

hinted at unreliability. I read every text on SPECT scans at the Emory Medical

Library.

>

>(I did find several papers by Denays of Belgium where he used SPECT to

assess, predict, and diagnose cerebral palsy. My question was, if you can use

SPECT-scan imaging to assess, predict, and diagnose CP, then why can't you also

use SPECT to demonstrate improvement in CP from HBOT.)

>

>In June, 2001, I emailed Trevathan as a last resort, asking him to document his

claim to Rhonda and Georgia Medicaid that SPECT-scan imaging is unreliable. He

wouldn't even acknowledge the question. We exchanged three or four emails, and

he told me to not contact him again until a controlled study was published that

proved HBOT efficacy in pediatric brain-injury--at which time, he said, he would

admit his error.

>

>In March, 2009, Dan Rossignol et al published " Hyperbaric treatment for

children with autism: a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, controlled trial "

found at http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2431-9-21.pdf . His

treatment group? 1.3 ATA air, the same protocol Collet claimed was a placebo.

The Rossignol paper not only proves HBOT efficacy in autism, it also proves HBOT

beneficial for CP children, whether 100% O2 at 1.75 ATA or 1.3 ATA Air. Because

of Rossignol, both groups of the Collet study are now proven treatment groups.

>

>So I emailed the link to download the Rossignol paper to Trevathan, only he's

no longer in St Louis. He's not at Washington U anymore. He's back in Atlanta.

He's now the National Director of Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities

at the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention. See

http://www.cdc.gov/about/leadership/leaders/trevathan.htm

>

>He's in a position to pick up the phone and call the President of the United

States and say, 'Mr President, I think we've discovered something that might

lead to a cure for not only autism but also cerebral palsy, but we're going to

need a billion dollars to research the full potential.'

>

>After I emailed the link to Rossignol's paper, at 3 that afternoon two FBI

agents were at my door accusing me of harassing, stalking, and making physical

threats to Trevathan. I explained HBOT and my history with Trevathan. I told

them about Trevathan's request for no more contact until there was a controlled

study.

>

>They advised me to hire an attorney if I wanted to contact Trevathan again. " I

have to hire a $500 an hour lawyer to send this guy an email? "

>

> " That's what we advise, sir. "

>

> " And where's the free speech in that? "

>

>I thought about it for about another 24 hours, then wrote him back, reminding

him the Third Reich went out of business in 1945, and he really had no

justification for sending the FBI to my house.

>

>Instead of the FBI, three days later a deputy from the Dekalb County

Sheriff’s office served me with a restraining order. A few weeks later in

magistrate court, where the judge had 30 wife beaters who genuinely did need

restraining orders otherwise they might genuinely kill somebody, in preliminary

meetings with my attorney and Trevathan's attorney the magistrate judge let it

be known she was not going to " waste " any time reviewing emails from 2000 or

talking about the Medicaid law for children or letters to neighbors or Medicaid

ALJ hearings or decisions. Nor did she care that he was a public health

official, and there's this document out there called the United States

Constitution that includes a First Amendment right to free speech.

>

>All she cared about was the FBI told me not to contact him again, and I did.

The reasons for the contact didn't matter.

>

>This meant (a) the judge believed I was guilty of stalking (, I couldn't

present my side, © which meant I couldn't present evidence, (d) which also

meant without evidence in the record, I would have no grounds for appeal when I

lost. Plus (e) I would have to pay for Trevathan's attorney fees, which (f)

totaled $22,000 at that time.

>

>So I settled. I took the restraining order. My attorney advised me to not even

mention it or discuss it.

>

>My attorney is a different attorney than our attorney, though

he did represent me pro bono. He's a retired metro Atlanta district attorney

who's well-known as he's put away many of this area's most notorious criminals,

particularly murderers. We attend the same Sunday School class, where he'd

always made jokes about paying his annual law license renewal fees since he

never went to court anymore.

>

>So I called him and asked if he'd be interested in putting that license to

work. At first he said no. So I met with a couple of other attorneys. My friend

called back and said he'd take it. He came over and asked me a ton of questions.

I had the distinct impression that he didn't believe anything I told him. So I

had him watch the Curt video at

. Well, that elicited a

raised eyebrow, but he never let me know what he was thinking.

>

>Next, he spent three or four days reviewing all the documents

from 1999 through 2009. Finally, it was his conclusion that Trevathan is an

inherently dishonest person, and I had not only discovered his dishonesty but

additionally, with that dishonesty Trevathan had squarely placed himself in the

crosshairs of eventual self-destruction that would most likely end his career.

>

>Further, my attorney believed the Georgia stalking law is unconstitutional. If

I have a restraining order against me, the restraining party can contact the

police with a claim of violation of the order, and I would be immediately

arrested and jailed. It was then up to me to prove myself innocent before I

could be released from jail. He believed Trevathan's goal was to put me in jail

so I could not talk about what I knew.

>

>So I've been silent until the restraining order ended, which it did a few weeks

ago.

>

>But here's the thing about Trevathan that I believe is truly evil. If you read

the transcript from the 2000 hearing, he claimed the SPECT scans were not only

unreliable, he also advised Georgia Medicaid to not cover HBOT because cerebral

palsy is a motor disability and Jimmy’s " unreliable " SPECT scans didn't show

improvement in the area of brain that controls motor function. Instead Jimmy’s

second scan shows primary improvement in the temporal lobe--which just controls

speech, language, and cognitive function.

>

>Whoa. Let's think about that one a minute. Most children suffering from spastic

quadriplegia cerebral palsy also suffer from cognitive impairment (like 90%),

and here's something that improves cognitive abilities, and this Nazi named

Trevathan says, " No! "

>

>And now we also have a national epidemic where more than 1 in 100 children are

suffering disfunction brought about by their nonfunctioning or poorly

functioning temporal lobes (called Autism), and because the CDC's National

Director of Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities said no to HBOT 11

years ago, declaring it " scientifically silly " , his ego will not allow him to

admit error (even though he said he would to me in his email), and so here we

all sit.

>

>Well, I've had a year to think about this, and I've got some ideas.

>

>While this event was difficult for me personally, in the end, this may be a

good thing for the entire off-label HBOT community. While the medical

traditionalists keep saying we have to have more studies, the history of HBOT

does not have studies when new indications are added. They're added when

evidence is accumulated that HBOT works for certain situations, such as

Decompression Sickness--which, by the way, is an hypoxic-ischemic

brain-injury--just like cerebral palsy and autism and stroke. So if the evidence

exists that people suffering from hypoxic-ischemic brain-injury improve from

HBOT, then historically, HBOT for these brain-injuries should be added.

>

>But what happens if there's a sneaking suspicion that the decision-makers in

charge of making policy decisions have a prejudice, a bigotry against HBOT. What

if there's an active discrimination against the use of HBOT for our most chronic

conditions--despite the documentation of efficacy.

>

>Well, that situation now exists. The big cheese at the CDC has known for 11

years that there is an FDA-approved intervention that improves function in the

frontal lobe of brain-injured children suffering from cognitive disorders. In

fact, if and when a controlled study is published to move that knowledge from

anecdotal to proven according to the standards of evidence-based medicine, and

you make him aware of it, the record indicates he'll take legal action against

you to shut you up so as to keep it swept under the rug.

>

>Well, here's the deal. Here's what I'm thinking. First and foremost, no matter

what you do--do not--under any circumstance contact him directly and quiz him on

it. If you do that, we lose our advantage.

>

>Instead, I'm thinking, we still have this thing called a United States

Constitution. We still have a First Amendment right to free speech. And each one

of us still has two United States Senators and a member of the United States

House of Representatives. Plus, we also have a President of the United States

who just twisted the arms of enough members of the House and enough members of

the Senate to get a 1-vote majority in each house so as to reform the way that

healthcare is administered in the United States.

>

>That means, there's an inherent commitment to doing business a different way.

>

>My idea is for each one of us to sit down and write a letter to our senators

and representative and president and (a) document HBOT efficacy for brain-injury

( include an explanation of the Medicaid law for children and how it mandates

HBOT coverage for brain-injury © as evidenced by coverage now in 20-something

states, (d) next detail Trevathan's history of denying HBOT efficacy at the

detriment of hundreds of thousands if not millions of children--not through

honest difference of scientific opinion but instead through deceit and

dishonesty. Therefore (e) a full review of policy governing access to and use of

HBOT for brain-injury is in order, and (f) specifically somebody needs to be in

charge who will fully explore and implement the use of HBOT for

brain-injury--not only at the CDC but also at all other government agencies.

>

>At one time, I had the 2000 transcript and copy of the letter from Trevathan to

my neighbor on the files page at

medicaid/files/ . I just went through there

and couldn't find them. In the next few days I'll put that back up there, along

with Trevathan's 2009 complaint. I'll also include our email correspondence from

2000. All these will include a list of his dishonest statements and assertions.

>

>I would really like to coordinate this so that all our letters hit the desks of

our senators and representatives at the same time. I think that would create

more impact and generate more leverage. This group has over 2000 members. Let's

take advantage of our size.

>

>Let's discuss this some more as a group. Maybe there's a way to refine the idea

even more.

>

>

> Freels

>2948 Windfield Circle

>Tucker, GA 30084-6714

>770-491-6776 (phone)

>404-725-4520 (cell)

>815-366-7962 (fax)

>

>http://www.davidfreels.com

>

>mailto:david@...

>

>

>

>

>------------------------------------

>

> " So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find;

knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who

seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. " [Luke 11: 9-10]

>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

>