Matt C. Transcript

My name is Matt Campbell. I’m the owner of the Virtual Midwest Concussion Clinic. We are a clinic that specializes in the rehabilitation of concussions, acute concussions, and post-concussion syndrome for patients of all ages. 

Just like most people, when we kind of get into the concussion world, I fell in love with concussions based on my injury history going through college, I became obsessed with the brain. You know, my background is sports medicine, so I got a lot of time to sit and kind of work with concussions overall, mainly with division one athletes out of college. I worked the division three athletic world, worked the professional sports world, and the high school setting. And the one thing that I learned throughout that course of time is our small, small section of the country was very, very behind at the times as concussions were changing. You’d see a lot of times you get messages and notes from the emergency department, from primary care, from pediatricians that, you know, it’s not a concussion, it’s just a head injury that can play in 24 hours.

And we had a kid that couldn’t stand closer than, you know, his feet, shoulder, closer than the children for almost six months, but he was cleared to play basketball, like, that’s not, that’s not a thing. So, you know, I started to look at, how can I, you know, influence the time of the–or my small section of the world? So I decided to kind of dive into making my passion of helping people mesh with my passion for brain injuries. And the Midwest concussion clinic was born. We opened doors in 2019, we had a perfect inpatient, you know, in-person clinic. The idea was we were designed to help athletes, and then as I started to help athletes, I learned more and more, especially in our area, that the adult side, nobody talks about, right? Nobody works with the adults in our area. We would get calls all the time. That’s like, hey, you know, I’m 34 years old. I got into a car accident. They sent me your number. It’s like, well, why wouldn’t they treat you at our competitor? Well, they only take athletes ages 12 to 22, it’s like, that’s not good. 

So we became kind of the go-to for the adults in our area. My medical director at the time worked with work comp quite a bit, so it made perfect sense that we started to do the rehab side with his work comp employee or work comp patients. And it’s kind of grown from there. In January, I opened the Virtual Midwest Concussion Clinic, and one of the reasons we went virtual was kind of what we talked about with the drive, right? I had patients who were taking time. You know, we tell you, hey, don’t drive post-concussion, but hey, I need you to drive into my office. My treatment, or my kind of patient net, was about two hours each direction. So I have a patient who’s driving two hours in a car, gets into my office, and sits in the waiting room with all the loud noise and the movement and the people, and then we do therapy to stir up symptoms. And then I say, All right, good. You’ve got a two-hour drive home. It just wasn’t feasible. 

So you know, when you start looking at how we’re going to evolve opening up as a virtual clinic, to be perfectly honest with you, I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. I have no clue. I’m going to try, because I want to keep overhead low, but if I need to open if I need to open a physical location back up, I’m going to. And to be perfectly honest, for the last four months, it’s been great, because not only do we offer the services to a wider net, I have, you know, now about a two and a half hour stretch where I see predominantly adults. At this point, it’s also one of those that if I have somebody who either can’t leave the house because symptoms are too bad, is afraid to because they got into a car accident or on their work schedule, they’re only got an hour for lunch, I see patients at lunchtime, right? If I’ve got somebody who’s having a really rough day, hey, let’s schedule a patient you know for your work, you know, for your lunch break, and let’s do everything that we can to calm symptoms down so you can stay in work. Employers like it because they’re not sending people home. Our patients like it because they’re not losing out on wages and having to take another vacation day or another FMLA day because symptoms flared up out of nowhere at work, you know. So it’s been an interesting transition to the virtual world.

To kind of feed off of that, one thing that I wish most people knew when it comes to concussions is that it doesn’t only happen in athletics. You know, we look at the primary causes of concussions worldwide. We’ve got falls, car accidents, and sports isn’t until number three on the list. And then, if we truly knew the kind of scope that you know, intimate partner violence and domestic violence really were, that’s a whole lot higher than fourth on the list. So, you know, I wish that most people understood that concussions happen in a variety of different ways. And there is stuff that you can do right? There is treatment options available to you, the sit and wait approach that most people would be prescribed for years actually delays our recovery time. 

So we need to make sure the information that we need we will do the education side. You know, the primary focus of our clinic is education. Every initial evaluation is about an hour to an hour and a half long. We spend the majority of the time talking about what’s going on. On what symptoms that you’re dealing with. We go through the education side on what the ups and downs are. I meet people where they have to be. So I have, you know, if I’ve got somebody who’s really struggling with X, Y, and Z, that’s what we’re going to start with. If I have somebody who’s coming to me, going, Hey, you know, I’m a health care provider. I know enough to get me in trouble. We have that conversation like we’re two professionals. If I have somebody that’s like, I have no idea what the brain is, we have that conversation like we’re somebody who doesn’t know what in the heck’s going on. Right? If I have somebody that’s sitting here going, alright, we’ve got, you know, we’ve got an amblyopia on the right side that causes diplopia when we’re looking 30 degrees to the left. Like, that’s great. If I have somebody that’s like, hey, we have a little bit of lazy tracking on the left side. When I turn my head to the left, I see better. Like, that’s how we can meet you. And we have to meet you where you are. 

Okay. Side of it, be quick to say, I don’t know what’s going on. Right? Don’t drag somebody along. Don’t bury them in like, oh, you know, because you didn’t get better with my treatment. There’s nothing I can offer you, there’s nothing left to do. If you have somebody who you think, hey, look, they’re outside of my scope. Don’t be afraid to let the ego get cast aside and say, All right, let’s look at this. I have patients that come into my clinic, that I’m like, hey, look, this is not concussion-related. We need to figure out what else is potentially going on, right? Do we have something with, you know, neurodegenerative disease? Do we have something along the lines of, like a Parkinson’s or an Alzheimer’s that’s starting to develop, you know? Or is it something that, this is thyroid-related, this is not head injury-related?

We have to have that mindset, like we can continue to improve and continue to evolve, you know, it may take a while, but we can get back to our normal self, and that’s where I wholeheartedly believe that everybody who gets injured, as long as they’re putting in the right type of effort and the right type of treatment, they will get better. Now, it’s hard to get the right type of treatment in the healthcare world when you get, every corner, you get downplayed, or you get told that this, oh, it’s not in your head, you know, it’s not a brain injury. It’s in your head. It’s anxiety, it’s depression, like, yeah, that stuff doesn’t help. And any normal person, you hear that you’re, you know, you hear that you have anxiety, that you’re full of it, too many times, you start to believe it. Now, all of a sudden, I spiral into that mental health cocoon where I’m not going to get out of bed, I’m not going to go out, I’m not going to do anything. Of course, if I have somebody who tells me all day that I’m banking this, I’m not going to, I’m not going to bounce back. I’m not going to get better either. So, you know, we have to remain optimistic. We have to remain positive. 

You know, for me, personally, I spend so much time on the education side that I am giving out freebies on a regular basis, right? I do a monthly webinar where I, you know, talk to healthcare providers, talk to support systems, talk to patients, to make sure that, you know, they know what’s going on. You know, with our social media accounts, I take common themes that I see with patients. I used to actually call it the theme of the week, and would put out a video each week about what’s happening with the clinic. You know, now, you know, I’ll look at, I have a patient who struggles to see, they need to hear it a second time. I’m going to put out a post that kind of lengthy, explains it what’s going on, to make sure that number one, they see it. And if I have a patient that’s struggling with it, somebody else out there is also dealing with the same problem, right? They’re not alone. It’s not something that will only benefit this one person. I can’t say, hey, John, this post is about you. There are other people that will benefit from it, too. 

So, you know, in the in the big picture of my soap box with concussions, if people truly understood the totality of the injury, the world would be a better place. I had a blog post and a series that I’m working on that I’ve gone through, and it’s called the perfect world in concussion management. And I say it a lot with my patients, yeah, in a perfect world, we could do this. You know, I work in the medical world, but I live in the real world, and very seldomly do the perfect world, and the medical world line up. Very rarely do the real world and the perfect world line up. But what does the perfect world and concussion management look like? And when I started to sit down and think about it, you know, eventually, at some point, I’m sure it’ll be a book that I write in, you know, just me personally, it’s the more I think about it, the more it kind of like flows, right? But when I started to look at what the perfect world and concussion management looks like, I thought I was going to go into like, alright, we’re diligent with our sleep patterns. We’re diligent with our exercises. We’re diligent with X, Y, and Z, and the more I sat down and looked at it, it’s like 90% of the perfect world in concussion management happens long before somebody gets injured, and it has nothing to do with the person. It has everything to do with the people around them. People understanding the healthcare world, what concussions are, everybody being updated and on the same page. On the healthcare side, people in the general public, knowing that, you know, once somebody has been injured, not sitting here and saying, Oh, well, you looked fine yesterday, why aren’t you fine today? You know it’s why don’t you want to hang out with us? You just hate us now? It’s like, no that has nothing to do with it. The perfect world in the concussion management has nothing. To do. I shouldn’t say that has very little to do with the the actual post-injury side of things. It all happens before somebody gets hurt. 

What are we doing to optimize the brain, to get better? What are we doing to make sure, mental health wise, that we’re in a good place to get hurt, right? Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, You know what, I feel like I’m going to get a concussion today. I need to make sure I took my vitamins, and make sure I slept really well, and make sure I’m really hydrated that way when I fall in six hours, I know I’m ready. Like that’s not the way the world works. So we have to make sure that we’re establishing, you know, the world of concussion recovery long before somebody actually gets hurt, heal more efficiently, more effectively. Their their recovery tends to go well, right? Because concussions are isolating, right? They are very, you know, the phrasing of an invisible injury. It’s not only the CT scans, X rays, MRIs are negative. You know, looking at somebody, you can’t see the symptoms that they’re dealing with, but it’s also, you know, the internal feelings of, I feel abandoned, you know, my friends say I’m mean to them. My family wants to know why I’m not going to Easter dinner. My employer wants to know how I could come to work and be bubbly yesterday, but today I’m laid up in a bed for the next three days. So like that isolation that people, that people feel, is very real. Now you add the fact that there’s a hormonal imbalance that’s going on in the brain, there’s a hormone regulation imbalance that’s going on, and you add potentially pre-existing depression, anxiety, on top of all of that going on. 

And we hope people get better, and we hope that it’s like, you know what? Good luck. You’ll get better eventually. Don’t be sad that you’re, no longer have family and friends. So, you know, it’s, it’s a wild world when it comes to kind of working with concussion patients, because we have to establish that, you know, I call it a concussion care team, and it not only has your medical staff on board, but it’s that support system that you have at home, right? So if you’re working or you have somebody that you know has been dealing with a concussion, I mean, the first thing, and the most important thing you can do is be there, right? If you have somebody who’s, you know, struggling, make sure that you understand. Like, hey, look, just because you were good yesterday doesn’t mean you’re good today. You know, if you’re all of a sudden, you’re, you’re like, your wife or your husband is sitting here saying, hey, I need to go lay down. Understand. Like, okay, that’s fine. You can go lay down. Be reassuring. Be present. Don’t abandon them. You know, if you’ve got somebody as a friend who, you know, hey, you know, I’ve been dealing with a concussion for three days. I’ve been out of school. You know, that helping hand to reach now, saying, Hey, we missed you. You know, the team misses you. My, you know, we we’ve got your homework, or we got the notes for class that you missed, like that kind of stuff. You’d be surprised at just how being there is the first step, you know, being positive, remaining optimistic. You know, because self-doubt happens to all of us, right? The meanest person I know is the person that sits between my ears. I have that person who talks to me all day who tells me, man, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know how any of this is working. You don’t know how anybody gets better. But then I have my wife who tells me, hey, this is great. Or I have a patient who tells me, like, Yeah, this is, I don’t know what I would have done without your clinic. Like that kind of stuff keeps you going. 

Now, imagine you have somebody who’s losing everything, trying to sit here and focus on a 24/7 job of brain injury recovery. And they have somebody who sits here and says, You know what you’re doing great today. Yeah, you may you may not feel great today, but you got out of bed, you went to work, you got up, and you went to school today. That’s fantastic, man, I had to go home after, you know, I only had a half day, and I had to go lay down in bed, and great, you went to school for a half day, right? That’s all massive. Having somebody there who’s there, and just that positive reassurance is, is, you know, invaluable when it comes to concussion recovery. And most people don’t think about establishing that. They either don’t have people in their life that understand, or the isolation side makes them pull away from those relationships, when really you know you’re trying to push a ball up a hill. If I’ve got 12 people behind me pushing with me, life’s going to go great. If I’m trying to sit here and push up a hill by myself, or there’s 12 people on the opposite side of that boulder pushing back down, good luck. That’s just not going to happen.