First off I want to thank all the users on the NeuroTalk forum for their earnest effort in helping find treatments for people suffering with concussion symptoms or post concussion symptoms. (ShaneBox and Mark in Idaho specifically)

I suffered from a concussion in January of 2017 it happened as I was cleaning out my garage a box of camping supplies fell on my head. I vaguely remember being hit by it. After the initial accident I visited an urgent care to see what was wrong they diagnosed me with a concussion. At the urgent care the doctor prescribed rest and told me the symptoms should resolved in a two weeks. Unfortunately this was not the case after three weeks I still was suffering from the following symptoms: Brian Fog, Irritability, Poor Sleep, Inability to focus. I scheduled an appointment with a Neurologist he did an electrical study and reconfirmed the diagnosis of concussion. He said I may need to start taking medication if the symptoms didn't resolve to my satisfaction. A month later the symptoms were still present and my ability to work was starting to really suffer. Prior to the injury I would regularly come home and go for a bike ride or run or do something. After the injury I would be exhausted at work by 1 and unable to do anything other than sit when I got home. I knew I had a major problem at this point because it had be almost three months and my symptoms had not resolved.

I live in California near some really high quality research universities and hospitals. I went to both Stanford and UCSF concussion program. Both had me meet first with a sports medicine doctor who asked me a bunch of questions about my symptoms and injury then handed me off to a P.A. to handle the rest of my care. At Stanford they scheduled me with sessions with a cognitive therapist where I went and did therapy twice a week for a month. This didn't really move the needle for me in terms of getting better so I schedule an appointment with UCSF. I meet with I believe a neurophysologist their and did a bunch of paper test to diagnosis what I was going through. Then it was off to see another sports medicine doctor, P.T. and psychologist. This is now July almost six months past my injury date and I had not improved. I felt like the doctors I was seeing started thinking of me as a mental case. But I knew what I was feeling and how it impacted my work I had never felt like that before.

I was lucky enough to work at a company that had a reduced work schedule for new mothers and fathers. I was neither of these but because of my injury they let me participate. I began to worry that if I didn't get better I wasn't going to be able to work anymore because of my inability to focus and accomplish tasks that would have been second nature to me. I began to share my story with my co-workers and one of them told me that there cousin had a similar problem to me that they had been in a ski accident and weren't able to return to school. He said they went to a clinic in Provo and after spending a year unable to go to school was able to enroll the following semester and was doing well. My initial thoughts were where is Provo and why are they able to fix people when world class research hospitals can't. I learned that the clinic was called CognitiveFX.

I spent a decent amount of time researching their site (much longer than most people I imagine because reading was a chore and so was comprehension). It appeared to me from reading their information that their secret sauce was the functional MRI scan. I learned that this measures the brain oxygen usage level to see where the brain is located. They have a database of normalized brain scan that they compare your scan to. From that scan they diagnosis and prescribe a treatment protocol that last for one week. It appears that they main researchers behind this approach were Dr. Mark Allen and Dr. Alina Fong I read a good amount of the summaries of their published work they seem legit (not some chiro quacks). Dr. Allen had a PHD from John Hopkins (very well regarded medical school) Dr. Fong(BYU - mormon religious school)

After getting comfortable with their technique I called and scheduled a consult. Dr. Fong spent about 20 minutes asking me about my injury and answering questions about the technique. One of the first questions I had thanks to this forum was why if the scan is so powerful is it not in more places. She said that it was licensed to the Department of Defense hospitals and they were using it for MTBI research and treatment purposes for soldiers. After the consult I scheduled just a scan at their facility in Utah. I flew out two weeks later and got my scan.

What is the scan like? Well you go into an MRI machine but they just put your head inside it. Then you begin the test I think there were 6-7 tests. They are supposed to approximate different types of cognitive functions that you preform on a daily basis(executive reasoning, pathfinding, picture recongition, etc) you provide your answers with a small keypad. The scan took about 1 hour in the magnet. Then I left an came back in the afternoon for a report on how my scan turned out. The scan revealed that my brain had some serious deviations from the normal brain scans that they use for their base lines. I was 3 standard deviations outside of normal in 17 of the 60 regions that they look at. Interestingly enough I was both hyper and hypo activated. Dr. Fong stated that the areas of my brain that were not functioning well were hypo activated and that the hyper activation was the brain trying to compensate for the disregulation in the brain. The hyper activation was probably why I was reporting the brain fog, fatigue and poor sleep. She recommended the week long EPIC treatment I went home and told her I would think about it.

At this point it had almost been 10 months since my injury I had visiting three hospital programs two of them at tier one research universities I was getting desperate for help. Two weeks after my scan I called back and scheduled treatment. The EPIC treatment at CogntiveFX cost $8,000 this included the price of the previous scan and the follow up scan.

Their were 8 patients at the clinic the week that I attended. I finished 4 days ago and I am feeling great it truly restored me to the person that I was before the accident. I will write an in depth review of the treatment week but I will say of the 8 people 7 told me on friday that they were feeling much better and had seen significant improvements. One patient didn't feel better or worse.

TO BE CONTINUED. (Must return to work)