When we do memory exercises, there are two different ways that memory can improve. Physiological improvement where the neurons, axons and dendrites improve function would be considered a healing caused. The more common improvement is in learning better observation skills and focus skills so the concept needing memorization is sensed without distraction.

Prior to injury, memory skills often were at a high function because the brain could sort through all the distractions and find the concept needing memorization without any extra effort needed. With injury, we need to make a conscious effort to ignore the distractions and focus on the concepts at hand.

That is what brain training usually does. Because people do it routinely and often with a focus to do the best they can, they utilize more focus and learn to ignore distractions.

A prime example of this is in the educational setting. A student who could easily remember the subject matter and get high test scores suddenly has a mTBI that changes these issues. He now needs to learn a different way to study because memorizing no longer comes easy. He has not lost intelligence to understand the concepts. he has just lost the ability to be a lazy or passive learner and now needs to focus and be an active learner. I went though this exact scenario a few times from 5 grade through college. Unfortunately, there was no understanding of these issues I just just had to fight my way through.

I've had communications with BrainHQ/Posit Science since they were first getting started. They admit they are a skills development program, not a brain repair program. Lumosity and FitBrains have the same understanding.

Brain training is still good even though it does not affect healing/repair because the skills learned enable us to improve in many areas.

We also need to understand there is a difference between stroke recovery where an area is not damaged but rather forced into a dormant state due to a lack of blood supply and mTBI were the cells and fibers are damaged. Repetition will awaken dormant cells and nerve channels but it will not cause a damaged cell or fiber to heal. Getting blood to that area will be beneficial.

Look up Victoria Arlen and read about how long it took to wake up dormant cells. Six years of hours each day trying to push nerve signals through the nerve pathways in some areas. The cells were there and minimally alive. Those nerve cells just did not know how they were supposed to function.

If CogFX has such a good protocol, they would be replicating it in clinics all over the country. Are they afraid that bringing new people into the proprietary data will expose the weaknesses of their science? Are they afraid of peer review?
Dr Daniel Amen has replicated his protocol.

The Benefits of Infrared, Low Level Laser Therapy (LLLT) and Photobiomodulation - Selfhacked

I bought one of those cheap CCTV lights. Used it 3 times recently. Not a cure all, but I think it's doing something.

Mark in Idaho: I appreciate all the wisdom and time that you bring to this board and to those in need. There is so much ambiguity in this field of post concussion syndrome and potential treatments. That said, let's make sure we acknowledge when we are stipulating about something, verses proclaiming to have the answers when we don't.

btw - strokes involve the death of nerve cells, as blood supply has been cut off due to an event and they starve. Now there are some strokes, called transient ischemic attacks in which the nerves recover as blood flow quickly returns, but with these strokes symptoms fully resolve in 24 hours or less. CVA (long term) stroke patients often recover by shunting the neural workload to other healthy areas of the brain to take over these deficit areas. They are not able to reawaken the dead tissue. Stroke is a interesting pathology to compare PCS against, as both involve the damage/destruction of nerve tissue, yet only one tends to be responsive to rehabilitation. Why? I stipulated a potential response to that in my earlier post.

"Arlen, at the age of eleven,[3] developed two rare conditions known as transverse myelitis and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis. "
So she had a profound inflammatory event of the brain and muscle tissue, also leading to peripheral nerve damage. This is comparable to PCS recovery how? lets not use this single separate case as justification that PCS should behave similarly. They are likely two very different pathologies entirely.

JBuckl - be sure when you purchase a device that it indicates a high power density. Red light man seems to have a good guide for dosing. "Light therapy studies tend to use power densities of ~10mW/cm² up to a max ~200mW/cm²."
search: red light man complete-guide-light-therapy-dosing

There is far more to a stroke, either aneurysm or blood clot, than just the focal dead cells. Recovery involves restoring proper blood flow to any damaged but not dead cells but also restoring signaling to the systems those dead and damaged cells normally communicate with. The brain can sometimes connect around those dead cells but it takes thousands of repetitions to strengthen those new routes. Plus, those systems that were used to communicating with the dead cells will become dormant until they have functioning neural cells and systems to restart communication with.

At least that is how it has been explained to me by the experts who address my brain injury support group at a neurorehab hospital. We have many who have suffered severe TBO and stroke and spent weeks in a coma and needed months and even a year or more of concentrated therapy to wake up those nerves that lost connections.

This fits with the neuroscience specialists who report on the nitty gritty of neuroplasticity and not the pipe dreams of those trying to sell treatments, supplements, or get grants. It also fits with what my neurologist brainiac told me.

But then, that is just what was told to me or that I read in the research articles. When an organization selling a product or therapy makes a claim and refers to a research study, it is not uncommon for the study to be grossly overstated.

LLLT, Low Level Light Therapy, makes amazing claims but the research they rely on only shows a 5 to maybe 20% better improvement over the control improvement. If the untreated injury recovers 20% and the LLLT treated injury recovers 22%, if you show a graph that only shows the top 5%, it looks like the 22% is 66% better than the 20%. That is marketing, not science.

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)

Hi DavidUser

Welcome to NeuroTalk .

The TBI/PCS forum is very active so I am sure that you will get lots of helpful suggestions from other members.

Best wishes.

Hi DavidUser

thanks for sharing your story and experience at cognitive FX. Its wonderful news that you are feeling so much better. Hopefully you are one of the lucky ones that experience lasting relief. Some people at cognitive FX seem to get miraculous relief that endures. Please inform us how you are doing now and if your symptom relief has endured past the first week post treatment.

In my experience, most of the patients claim to be feeling a bit better immediately post treatment, but many aren't completely sure. Possibly more hopeful than anything. I myself, certainly felt different right after my week there, like my head felt more clear and lighter. After a few days of being back home post treatment, my hopefulness receded as the clear head feeling went away and I realized I still had all the same old PCS symptoms.

My hope is that you are the former, and continue to experience relief

Thank you, Mark; I appreciate all you have shared. This is one of the frustrating things I still experience after having gone through a long slow recovery of PCS (9 years out).

Do you have any insight on how to differentiate this from age-related memory issues? I'm hoping I will see improvement with more mental activity. In the meantime, it's very disconcerting how much my memory has declined when I don't make that deliberate effort to remember something.

Thanks!

You treat the symptom, not the cause. It does not matter what the cause is.

Mental activity only improves reaction times. It does not improve memory. Memory disciplines are the best way to improve memory.

Plan on your memory failing so you do not expect your memory to be successful. Then, use focus and other accommodations so you have a greater likelihood of remembering.

Limit conflicting sensory stimulation when you need a reliable memory.