Brain zapping: Veterans say experimental PTSD treatment has changed their lives

Provided by Washington Post

NEWPORT BEACH, CALIF. The headquarters of Oakley, a maker of recreational and military gear, looks as if it belongs in a war zone. Its a massive bunker with exposed-steel pipes, girders and blast walls. Even the dais in the auditorium is armored.

But on a recent afternoon, the talk inside the building, set atop an arid, inland hillside in Orange County, is not about fighting wars but about caring for warriors. Doctors, scientists and veterans approach the podium at a conference to present some of the latest tools to help vets recover from wounds both mental and physical: bionics, virtual reality, magnetic waves.

A session called Healing the Warrior Brain features a trim, bleach-blond former Army staff sergeant named Jonathan Warren, who recounts on video his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq. His flashbacks, panic attacks and booze benders were well chronicled: For a year, the Los Angeles Times tracked Warrens efforts to find peace, including via Veterans Administration therapy.

It didnt work, he says. But now a different Jon Warren is here to say that he is finally free of symptoms, one year after that 2013 story ran. No longer does his worst memory of the Iraq war failing to rescue his best friend, who nearly burned to death after their Humvee hit a roadside bomb in 2006 grasp his psyche and inflict guilt.

Thats because of a revolutionary new treatment that retuned his brain, he says, and set my frequencies right. Now hes able to proudly embrace his military service, to keep the memory, to be able to go there, Warren tells the audience, and not be controlled by it.

The 32-year-old veteran, who also suffered traumatic brain injury in the blast, credits his recovery to something called magnetic resonance therapy, or MRT a procedure that pulses energy from magnetic coils into his cortex. He and scores of other combat vets have been drawn by word of mouth to a private clinic here for what some of them call brain zapping.

The unproven procedure is offered at the Brain Treatment Center, located in an unremarkable office park, free of charge to former service members. The vets exit telling of a miracle cure, a transformation to tranquillity that they, their buddies and families can hardly believe.

It saved my life, they say, one after another. I got my husband back, their wives say.

Glowing testimonials also flow from the parents of autistic children treated here, who say theyve seen breakthroughs beyond all expectation: children who are truly communicating for the first time, learning normally, behaving like other youngsters instead of dwelling in unknowable private worlds.

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Brain zapping: Veterans say experimental PTSD treatment has changed their lives