Spencer Z. Transcript

Hi, my name is Dr. Spencer Zimmerman, I’m licensed as both a Nurse Practitioner and a Doctor of Chiropractic. First, I want to take a moment and say thank you for asking me to do this to Concussion Box and to share my experience. And I hope people not only better understand concussions, but have the best recovery possible. 

So I started working with concussion patients very early on in my training when I was in school. I was at a clinic where we saw patients that traveled in from all over the world. Worked with a lot of different pro athletes, whether it was NFL, hockey, and things like that. But we also worked with a lot of military veterans. Now, here I was, right, a student who had found his purpose, watching individual lives get changed, despite years of struggling to improve their own life and to get better, and I would come home and I would tell my wife: Man, I can’t believe it. You know, we just had someone else who’s been dealing with headaches and brain fog, and dizziness and concentration issues who seems so much improvement. And after doing this enough times, she eventually said that’s not normal to have that. That sounds a lot like me.

And I was like, wait, what? What do you mean that sounds like you? You know, so let’s go back to after I met her when I met her, she was having headaches, which her doctor told her well, you just need more salt. So just drink Mountain Dews, which she was doing every day. You know, I didn’t know much as a college student. But I still knew that didn’t seem right. So she stopped and that had improved. Then we ended up finding out that gluten was a major issue for her and her brain fog and memory also improved, didn’t completely go away, but it had improved. And so now, you know, we’re a couple years past that point in time. And it’s like, What do you mean? That sounds like you. And it turns out, there were all these symptoms that she’d been living with, on a day to day basis that she didn’t bring up because it had been a part of her life for so long. Now, you may be wondering, what does that actually mean? 

Turns out, when we did a deep dive in her history, and what happened, she actually sustained a car accident when she was a teenager, I believe it was around the age of 13. She was told she had a whiplash injury. And when she tried to bring it up that she was still dealing with stuff. It was, well, the doctor already told you, you know what’s going on, give it a little bit longer, and you’ll be okay. She then had another one in high school, and another one shortly after graduating. So three car accidents. Every single one told her it’s a whiplash injury, but in reality, these were all concussions. And she was having more brain fog and more memory issues, changes in, you know, some of her mood, which is very common with concussions. But there’s this thing that happens to those that are teenagers who sustained concussions, more so than any other age group, the only other group that gets the stigma to about same level are women when they go through menopause. And so what happened instead of acknowledging that maybe there was something else going on, her symptoms were just getting blamed on the fact Oh, you know, you’re transitioning from middle school to high school, Oh, you went from ninth grade to 10th grade, you know so you’ve got these changes in your life. But don’t forget, you’re also going through puberty. So puberty gives you a lot of confusion, you know, and you’re trying to figure out your body. So that also is impacting a lot of things. 

And so, after we dive through that, I feel like the ultimate failure, because here I am helping patients who once again, having flown in from all over the world – and it was such a privilege to help those individuals – but the person who I spent the most time with had been dealing with concussion issues for well over a decade long before I ever met her. But she had adapted it into who she was, and it became part of what her normal is. And so she didn’t even bring it up. So that’s one of the first things I want you to know is to never accept it as part of normal. There’s a difference between common – so you may commonly experience brain fog or dizziness or headaches – but that in and of itself is never normal. The other big takeaway is when I realized that she was dealing with it, but she didn’t even bring it up, I had this thought of, okay, so we have patients who are coming in to see us who know they have concussions. How many patients really do have concussions, who don’t even know that’s the cause of their symptoms? 

Now, over the past roughly 10 years that I’ve worked with patients, whether it was when I was in school or out of school, I’ve had a lot of patients come in, where they’ve had depression, anxiety, brain fog, chronic fatigue, chronic neck issues, and they were involved in car accidents or another type of injury. And they were told they had whiplash. But a lot of these actually had concussions that never resolved. So people chase the symptoms, but they forget what caused it or, more importantly, many of them are not actually diagnosed appropriately. And so they don’t even know that’s something they should be looking at.

So if you’re struggling with a lot of those symptoms, and maybe you don’t know you have a concussion, you’ve got to really go through your past because you don’t have to hit your head, you don’t have to lose consciousness, you don’t even have to have symptoms that have helped that day. They can develop in the next one, two weeks. Try something else, right? If you do physical therapy, or chiropractic and it helps your neck a little bit, but then a couple hours later, or the next day, it’s as if nothing happened. That’s because that’s not actually the right approach for you. I don’t want you to think that if you try it once, and what occurs that you should automatically stop. But if this is happening over a three or four week period, it’s not the right therapy for you. All of those therapies depend on the brain to be healthy to be effective. So if the brain isn’t healthy, we can’t expect those to be as effective as they should be. And I treat a lot of patients with chiropractors who are working on the musculoskeletal side. And universally, they will all say their care goes so much smoother and faster once the concussion is being dealt with. And as a result of working with concussions, a lot of my staff that’s worked for me at present or even in the past had suffered a concussion that we treated. 

So you may be thinking, Well, what advice do you have? You know, I’ve taken a concussion recently, or I’ve taken a concussion a couple years ago, what should I do? Well, I want you to look in a different place and understand that symptoms are just symptoms. You can have a headache, but it can be caused from many different things. So if you find someone who’s great at headaches, but they have one standard edge protocol, they only are going to help a very small percentage of people because the concussion patient is never that simple. Now, with that being said, some of the therapies that we do may seem simple. But at a deeper brain base level, they are super complex. 

When we look at concussions, there are four big things that happen. Now, it’s very complex beyond this. But first, the brain doesn’t connect in the way it should. So you want to make sure that you’re getting your brain function evaluated. Your imaging is going to be normal with pretty much every single concussion. Some of the best ways to evaluate a brain function are using balance testing and eye movement testing. This is very different than having your prescription evaluated. This is looking at eye movements. Also something else that can be done is looking at brainwaves using what’s called a QEEG (quantitative electroencephalogram). Next, so we’ve got first, your brain doesn’t connect right? Next we’ve got the brain that does n’t produce and use energy appropriately. So you typically notice that as the day goes on: the more you do, the worse you feel. So the standard for helping the best recovery, if an athlete wants to go back to play or anything like that, as you should only do 80% of what causes an increase of symptoms. If you’re pushing through, you’ll actually keep yourself stuck. After energy, there are problems with the immune system within the brain. So there can be pre existing factors that come in that impact this, but there can also be factors as a result of the concussion that impacts the immune system. So for example, if you get sick and your symptoms get substantially worse, or you get stressed, and your symptoms get worse, or you eat certain foods, and your symptoms get worse. That’s a sign of an unhealthy brain and immune system relationship that ultimately is leading to lots of inflammation that will impact your recovery. So I don’t need you to know the little nitty gritty about this, that’s not your job. Your job is to know what to look for and to make sure that the provider you are seeking help from understands the nitty gritty. Because the more your provider can understand the nitty gritty and all the nuances, the better they can help you. And that helps you to find the best provider from the beginning. 

You may be wondering, okay, great, that’s awesome for me, but what about my friends and family? First off with the right care, your friends and family need to know that for the majority of everyone, your symptoms and your current function is going to be temporary, this doesn’t have to become the new you that they have to adapt to. They need to respect your symptoms, even though they can’t see a brain bleed in imaging. So they need to understand that, hey, if there’s too much stimulation going on between the TV conversations and everything else, you may need to leave the room, or they need to turn off one of those extra stimulations to help you feel good. Be patient with them and support them. Make sure they’re getting sleep, make sure they’re not pushing through their limits. Because one of the most common reasons that individuals push through their symptoms is because they’re afraid, or not only afraid, but they know that their friends and their family or their co workers think they’re faking, and are making more of it than they should. And so they’re trying to do more, to not get the push back from family. This was something my wife experienced, where they’re like, Oh, well, you can’t have issues with gluten. So she would cheat every time when she’d cheat she got a headache within a minute, brain fog, and other issues like that. So be a family member that’s supportive. Don’t be one that’s super judgmental, especially when you don’t understand. Having a family member go to Google for 30 minutes, or an hour be like, Oh, here’s what I found. It doesn’t exist, doesn’t matter, especially when clinical experience from providers and professionals who see it all day every day tells you to the contrary. 

Now, you may be wondering, well, can I recover? It’s been more than six months. Yes. So one of the surprising things about working with concussion patients is how well people can still recover even 20 to 30 years down the road. I’ve seen patients who are at a month recover at the same speed as someone down the road. Now, that’s not always the case, but that can happen. And we can still find issues within the brain that long into the future. 

So I hope you found this information useful, you’ve learned something, you’ve gained some insight to help you get the care you need. And realize that no one owns health. I don’t know everything about health, and neither does any provider, and only get advice from someone who is experienced with what you are going to do. So if patients ask me about something that I have no experience with, I don’t say negative things about it because I don’t have experience with it. And unfortunately I’ve seen far too many patients not get care whether it’s with me or at other places, because a medical provider who didn’t understand what was being done, gave an opinion that has no support or backing, but they gave it. So once again, I hope you found this information useful. I’m Dr Spencer Zimmerman and I’m located in Meridian, Idaho.