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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
Operator Syndrome: The Hidden Cost of Service feat. Dr. Chris Frueh | Ep. 16
01:09:08
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- [00:00]
David Rutherford
You're listening to an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [01:00]
Dr. Chris Free
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- [01:04]
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- [01:38]
Ameca Insurance Representative
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- [01:49]
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- [01:51]
Dr. Chris Free
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- [02:40]
David Rutherford
Today is a day that hits me like a ton of bricks. It hits me in A way that it's really difficult to put into words. It's a thousand cuts across my heart. It's swimming through a river of glass in my mind, and it's being tied to a cinder block, being drowned in a sea of tragedy and sorrow. And that's what Memorial Day is for me, because as I imagine all of my close friends and teammates that have died over the last 20 plus years and the gwat, it's the memory of those men and what they've meant to me is inescapable, as is their death. Now, to compound that, it's also profoundly impactful that I think about all of my friends that have ultimately killed themselves as a result of their experiences fighting for this country. And I look at their tragic loss as, as almost identical or even more catastrophic than the men who actually died on the battlefields. And so as I welcome today an individual on the show, Dr. Chris Free, I want you to realize that this man has been personally responsible for my ability to manage that sorrow and that heartache. And he hasn't just done it for me, he's literally done it for hundreds of other men and women that are affiliated with fighting for your freedoms. So without further ado, I'm so privileged and honored to welcome Chris, Dr. Chris Free, to the show today to discuss Memorial Day Operator syndrome and what we can do to help our veterans. So welcome, Chris.
- [05:01]
Dr. Chris Free
Thank you. Thank you, David. Great to be here. Great to see you again and be continuing this conversation we've been having now for, man, nine years. Ten years.
- [05:14]
David Rutherford
Going on about nine. About 2016. Yep.
- [05:18]
Dr. Chris Free
Yeah.
- [05:20]
David Rutherford
Before we jump into all the aspects of the impacts, the specific medical and behavioral health impact impacts on veterans and your expertise on, on, on managing, treating, and we're helping guys work through those, coaching them. How does Memorial Day impact you and what does it make you feel? Because I know you have some deep ties to within your family as well.
- [05:50]
Dr. Chris Free
I remember my great, great, great, great, great grandfather Brocklebank, who was killed in the, in the, literally in the 1500s in the King Philip Philip Indian War. His progeny, my great grandfather, served in the Battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba in 1898. And he lived, survived that battle, came home, and I knew him. He lived to be almost 100 years old. So I knew him when I was 14 years old. He died when I was about 14. So I knew him quite well as a child and knew his story. And it was a profound impact on me. Not just his service, but how he was received and helped when he came home to Back to, back to the US after the, immediately after the war. And I, I don't know how deep you want to go onto those stories, but the essence of it is, is he was not doing well. None of the men were. They all had mosquito borne illnesses and they were dumped at a hastily built camp up at the tip of Long island and they were all sick with mosquito borne illnesses. And it was this muddy field. It was a national disgrace. The President, the United States went up to see what was going on there. And my, to the end of his life. My great grandfather always said that it was a civilian woman who saved his life, who went up. A wealthy woman from New York City went up in her horse drawn carriage with her butler, picked up four or five, six guys, it was five or six guys, took them to her home in the city and nursed them back to health for, for six or seven weeks and then gave them train fare to get home to wherever their home was. And so that was at a time when soldiers were taken care of by civilians. There was a civilian contribution to that, a recognition of a civilian duty to honor and take care of and help out our veterans. And I think we've lost that a little bit today. I mean, we thank service members for their service on airplanes. We do some fairly rote kabuki things here and there. But I do hope more Americans are thinking this month, this, this Memorial Day are thinking about those who made the sacrifices and the ultimate sacrifice on their behalf, because I think it gets lost in the, in the barbecues and the, and the social events too often.
- [08:25]
David Rutherford
I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [08:26]
Dr. Chris Free
Well, I'm just going to add. My father was a Vietnam veteran. And so I grew up. He was a physician, not a combatant, but he was in the Air Force. And so he was in Vietnam in 68, 1968. And so in the early 70s, I grew up, you know, as an adolescent kind of in the shadow of that war, his perspectives on it. I knew many of the Vietnamese, I don't even know what to refer, how to, how to describe it. There was a large Vietnamese expat community in Columbia, Missouri, at the University of Missouri, that, that my father kind of engaged with, to help them with their graduate studies. And so I had an awareness of that. And he, my father helped a man named Mr. Long who, who was working on a dissertation in something, I don't even know what. But in return, Mr. Long babysat for us, was our babysitter, and he was our favorite babysitter. However, tragically, he went back to Vietnam in 1975, after the fall of Saigon, hoping to find his wife and his two children, to bring them to the US and he was scooped up and summarily executed by the North Vietnamese government. And so that had a profound impact on my childhood. So part of my story is that was. That became my why, that became my goal. I've never served. I was raised primarily in a Quaker faith with a kind of a conscientious objector encouragement. But I went to graduate School in 1987 to become a clinical psychologist with the goal of working with veterans.
- [10:08]
David Rutherford
I mean, specifically, that's, that's exactly what you wanted to do. And what was it, was it to. I mean, obviously, you know, I think I, we, we all, I think if, if people take a moment and they, they allow their lives to kind of be pressed on, put on pause or all their own problems or own turmoils and they stop and they engage in, you know, these really intense stories about sacrifice and dying and overseas and, you know, and you process the numbers and you process the impact of war and it's the tributaries of suffering that it, it in ensue that ensue with, from it. You know, I think it does. It certainly sparks a, a generational idea to go back in and to serve, and it sparks other people to acknowledge that support, but, you know, to really lend to ignite a desire in a career in your field.
- [11:14]
Dr. Chris Free
Why.
- [11:14]
David Rutherford
Why was it like, what. What about did you think that you were going to. Able to do for, for vets?
- [11:22]
Dr. Chris Free
My father talked about the psychological cost of war a lot when I was a child, and I'm never really sure how much of his own experience he was talking about, but he certainly talked about kind of the toll on men's psyche who'd been to war and come home. And so 1987, when I started graduate school, I had never heard of ptsd. It was a disorder that had just been added to the psychiatric nomenclature in 1980. So it was a brand new disorder. There was almost no research on it. I learned about it early in graduate school and I was like, I want to, you know, that's what I want to do. I want to study that, I want to get involved in that. But I would say even before that just had a sense that there were profound effects on the soul, which I today would refer to as existential, existential, you know, thoughts and, and concerns that have powerful impacts, not necessarily psychiatric symptoms even. And I think that may be something we could get into today. But I don't, I don't like the idea of turning every, everything into a psychiatric symptom. You know, you have grief about the men you lost, the brothers, the comrades you lost. I don't view that as necessarily a psychiatric symptom. You have thoughts about, you know, humanity and the horrors you've seen, the, you know, the incredible feats of bravery and honor that you've seen and, you know, all of that. I don't think of that as psychiatric symptoms necessarily. We talk about shame, guilt, survivor's guilt. The phrase moral injuries is often used today. Are those psychiatric symptoms? I'm not so sure that they are. Maybe, maybe there's a Venn diagram overlap and maybe they kind of move into it for many, many people. But I don't think it's as simple as we've come to believe. And so maybe just to put this right here at the very beginning of our conversation, while I am considered by many to be a so called expert in ptsd, and I've done published hundreds of research studies on ptsd, I think we have way over relied on this diagnosis to the detriment of so many other things. And in part that detriment is about. Once we identify you as having ptsd, we think we immediately have the answer for what, what's needed. And we prescribe you antipsychotic, anti psych, antidepressant medications, psychiatric medications. We assign you to therapy or we refer you to therapy and then we kind of stop there. We don't test your blood for hormonal levels. We don't necessarily do a sleep study. We don't necessarily go deep on the chronic pain that you're likely to be experiencing in your body. We don't necessarily ask you or talk to you or work with you about perceptual impairments to vision and hearing and balance. We may not go deep or even at all into cognitive dysfunctions, headaches, things related to traumatic brain injury. And so maybe I'll take a breath there. That's kind of where, that's kind of where I'm at today and that, that's kind of where I started early on in my career.
- [14:56]
David Rutherford
It's, it. Well, I mean, when you think about, when I hear the term PTSD and then I think about the Iliad, or I think about the stories from World War I and shell shock, or I think about, you know, similar stories from the Battle of the Ardennes, you know, these ideas within combat have been, are eternal, right there is there as old as combat, as old as combat itself. And so what I, what, what I love about how your assessments have emerged, and we'll get to the specificity of how that took place with your coaching and your counseling. But it's like, it's like. And this is something that I've really been thinking a lot about over the last, you know, couple years in particular, as after I lost one of my closest friends, Dan Cirillo, died of a heart attack at 50, I was like, well, you know, why is my life so perpetually infused with death? And I get it. I understand that death is an inevitability for us all, but we really have this concept, this, this idea, this, this culture of death that we exist in. And it. And it's relative to the, the training we go through, the mission sets that we go on, the experience of war itself, what takes place afterwards around it, you know, this culture of death. And I was wondering if it, if you could just talk a little bit about that as you referenced that a lot of the subsequent challenges that we suffer from are not definitive psychiatric diagnosis or they can't be shoved into some type of paragraph in the DSM 5 or whatever it is. These are, these are much broader. And that culture of death is, Is a much larger thing. Could you, could you just talk about that a little bit and then perhaps lead into what you learned when. After you. Actually, let's just talk about that first.
- [17:12]
Dr. Chris Free
Yeah. Okay. Well, can I read a. Can I read a sentence first, please? And this is, this is from a book that I wrote last year that you. That, you know. Well, to my brothers. This is the quote. To my brothers, the season of death is again upon us, and once again it is incumbent on us to thwart its grasp. Those are your words, brother. You wrote the, you wrote that in the foreword to the book. And I think this has been. I mean, we are talking about a generation of men and women when we talk about the global war on terror and specifically about military special operators who have had, you know, many of whom have had 10, 20 years in the war. But of course, not only, not only operators, and I use the word operator a little bit loosely. We have intelligence, paramilitary, we have swick boat operators, we have EOD technicians, We have all of those who served in the combat arms and did tours of duty and trained with, you know, anything that exploded and made loud booms. And so we've. We've had a generation of men and women at war for over 20 years now, which is unprecedented. A word I don't like to hear very often, but in this case it's actually true and it's probably true. Certainly true for Americans. And it's probably true for, you know, if we look back through the history, the ages of our. Of humankind. 20 years at war is just, you know, is just a massive thing. So the level and the amount of death that you and your comrades have seen have been a part of training deaths, combat deaths, and then the deaths of men and women who died, you know, after they came home, after they were done with their service. Some of that is suicide, a lot of suicides. We've had far more suicides than we've had in combat deaths in the global war on terror. We're losing 6,000American veterans a year, which is just an ultimate tragedy. We're losing people to substance abuse. We're losing people to just. Dan Cirillo, he died of a massive heart attack. I mean, then you think about the incredible level of stress and anguish and physical pain he had been living with up to that point. Can we call that, that death? You know, and it's, you know, a result of his combat. I, you know, I don't think, I don't think you could argue against that. We were at a funeral a few years ago. Tyler Black died of a blood clot after a routine knee surgery, which you go, well, that's not combat related. Except that it was his 20th orthopedic surgery. You know, he rolled the dice so many times, and his orthopedic injuries certainly came from his military career. So the death is ever present and it's continuing. We're losing men every day, every week, every month. Every Every month I hear I get a phone call from a friend from somebody I've talked to, worked with, know well, and they're calling because they're at a service or they're driving to or from a service. I think twice in the last 10 years, I've called you randomly out of the blue, and you were at a service or had one. You were in a. You were in the funeral. Progression. Funeral, you know, progression for Scotty Wirz. And another time you had just come out of a service for, for Dave hall, who had taken his life. It's just, it's ever present and it's massive.
- [21:11]
David Rutherford
There was a point where you had decided that you weren't going to work with the VA anymore, and you, you kind of moved away from them and then you started coming back. You wanted to work. Can you describe kind of that, those transition points? One, walking away from the VA and then two, coming back to wanting to serve veterans again.
- [21:38]
Dr. Chris Free
Well, okay, so I started. I Finished my degree in 1992 and my first job was right there at the VA in Charleston, South Carolina Medical University, South Carolina. I was a full time clinician there in a PTSD clinic for seven years, did a little bit of research. At about the seven year mark, I applied for and was awarded a federal NIH research grant to do more research. That shifted the allocation of my time more towards research, although not 100% towards research. So for the next eight years I continued to be a part time therapist and largely doing research related to trauma and PTSD. So I had 15 years at the VA and I left in 2006. And at the time I left and the reasons I left, a lot of it's been chronicled in a book titled Wounding How Policy is Making Veterans Sicker and Poorer. And that really explains why I left. There's several chapters in the book that just that are about my own experience. But much of my research was showing the ways in which the VA itself was harming veterans at the policy level. So we have policies that were harmful. We had, you know, just HR policies at the level of every employee where accountability was not, was not good. I had colleagues that I worked with immediately around me who were phenomenal. And so I want to give, give that shout out. I worked with great, terrific people. I loved working with my patients. But the system was brutal and it was so much bureaucracy, so much waste of time, so much nonsense. And I could see it, it was just, it was harmful to the, to the veterans who are our patients. And at the point where my research was coming under scrutiny by central office at the VA and the powerful machine that the PTSD industry is, and it is a powerful machine. There's a small cabal of so called scientists who run the PTSD national centers. They hold a lot of power in terms of their immediate budgets, but they also are decision makers who make decisions about what treatments are going to be allowed in the va, what research is going to be supported. And although I was a very successful, you know, I've got hundreds of research, I got a thing yesterday from GPS Scholar congratulating me that I'm the 28th ranked all time PTSD researcher in terms of my. Wow, my research, all time ever.
- [24:27]
David Rutherford
Congratulations.
- [24:28]
Dr. Chris Free
Well, who gives a shit about that? But my point is I was an insider from one perspective and at the same time they were slapping me, I was being slapped around for questioning the system and I was being threatened. I had a very powerful colleague who's at one of the leaders of one of the national centers who Called me, said, if you publish this paper, we'll throw you under the bus. You're scientific. You literally threatened my career. Your career will be over. We'll make sure you never get grants, that your papers are never accepted, et cetera. And that's when I decided to leave. Um, and I. By leaving, I was then able to speak because I had had a. Basically a. A block. The VA blocked me from being allowed to speak to the media unless I had permission from them. And. And that required having a PR handler. Her name was Tanya, present at every interview, and she had the. She had the anointed ability to strike questions that were posed to me by journalists, as well as the ability, the power to strike any answer I gave after the fact. And that's when it was just. Just untenable. So I left 2006, and I probably was away from being very active in veterans research for about eight years, and then. And then slowly came back. Not in a research capacity. I came back and I say came back. I made some friends in Houston. I had a job at Baylor College of Medicine. And there was a small foundation there called Quick Reaction Foundation. And so it was set up for operators. It was by operators, for operators, not a specific branch. And so through that, just through going to some of their events and meeting with guys, I started meeting and talking with guys who weren't doing well. And I. You know, I think maybe a part of the story is. Even at that point, I still had this arrogant idea that, oh, I'll be able to help these guys. It's probably ptsd. We'll figure that out. We'll get them help, and they'll be doing better. You know what? Guess what? It was not ptsd. No, that's not what they were struggling with. The things they were saying were very vague complaints. I don't feel well. I don't feel right. Something's wrong with me. I don't know what it is. I can't put my finger on it. Most of these guys had recently separated or retired. They were late 30s, early 40s. And over the course of several months, maybe six months or so, it became trial and error as I was like, holy cow, they don't have ptsd. Not even close. No fear reactivity. No avoidance. Yeah, some. Some nightmares at times, but not the debilitating nightmares that you. That you see in the movies or that you hear about. They weren't bothered by fireworks. They were not avoiding things related to military service. They could talk about their experiences very easily without getting, you know, the rapid physiological Arousal and such. But guess what they did have. And you know, because we found it with you as well, they had low testosterone, they had sleep apnea. Every single one of them had sleep apnea. So these are things I was not prepared for. I was not expecting these in young fit men. And they certainly all had chronic pain, headaches, cognitive impairments. And the big whammy that we really came to appreciate was traumatic brain injury.
- [28:09]
David Rutherford
Yes.
- [28:10]
Dr. Chris Free
And none of them had been blown up per se. They didn't have the big, you know, the signal event where they were in an IED explosion and were out, you know, unconscious for an hour or so. It was from training, blast exposures, breaching, training, shoulder fired rockets, training the diving, the thousands and thousands of rounds of rifle fire. And just came to realize that we've injured these men and these men, mostly men, but some women as well, in ways we didn't even realize. And then a year or two after that point, when I'm still struggling, understanding this is brilliant paper came out in 2016. It gave a name to the type of brain injury that blasts cause. And this is still not on the radar for very many people, including VA clinicians. But blast exposures don't cause the same kind of damage that a concussion causes. They have a shearing effect, goes through the soft tissue, including the brain, and they scar the glial cells. So this was named interface astroglial scarring. Glial cells are the support cells in the central nervous system. They hold the neurons in place, they insulate them, they protect them, they carry out the toxins. And they're scarred, they're messed up, they're not working properly. So we have this constellation of physiological injuries that lead to a whole range of impairments in functioning. But it's the physiological, and I think that's what my entire field of psychology and psychiatry has completely missed the boat on since 1980 or since forever, since World War I probably, when we probably had it right when we called it shell shock. That was probably the best, most appropriate conceptualization of what was happening at that time. And we kind of went backwards since then. Now we're coming back around, I hope.
- [30:20]
David Rutherford
When, how many guys had you worked with? You know, and overwhelming majority of the individuals that you've had these talks with, you know, can you describe, you know, how many. And then the wave that started approaching you and what you started, when you finally started to go, oh my God, there's patterns, there's a pattern to this. And then what did you do and who did you do it with to really start to open up. Oh wow. We need to talk to a cardiologist. We need to talk to neurologists, we need to talk to endocrinologists. When did that kind of tipping point happen for you? Forgive the interruption. I just wanted to acknowledge one of our core speakers sponsors, Firecracker Farms. My good friend Alex and his family have put their heart and soul into developing what I consider to be the best hot salt there is on the market. It really has changed the way I enjoy my food every morning, the evening when I eat my steak and my chicken. The quality of this product is one of the best that I've ever had. And I know that every single shaker that comes to you through the mail is made with love and sincerity and also just an overwhelming commitment to veterans. What you don't know is how much Alex supports veterans in Operation 300 as well as other charities out there. He is a wonderful human being and he really, truly cares about vets and those who have given all for this country. So please visit Firecracker Farm. Type in your promo code of RUT15. That's Romeo Uniform Tango 1:5 to get your discount. And I just want to thank you, Alex and all of you at Firecracker Farms. Oh yeah.
- [32:24]
Ryan Seacrest
While others are sitting in lecture halls, you're already building your future at Ferris State University. Hands on training starts from day one. With real world skills that lead straight to careers in construction, engineering, automotive tech and more. You're not just learning, you're earning. Building a life you can be proud of. And with in state tuition for out of state students, success is within reach. Ferris State University. Unleash your potential. Register now at Ferris Edu. That's Ferris Edu.
- [32:54]
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- [33:49]
Thrivent Representative
For some of us, personal finances aren't just personal. They include a lot more people than ourselves. Loved ones, neighbors, the communities we call home, and the causes of we hold in our hearts. At Thrivent, we help plan your financial picture with the bigger picture in mind. Because even though our business is helping guide your finances, our ambition is to make it mean so much more. Thrivent, where money means more. Connect with us@thrivent.com At Ameca Insurance, we.
- [34:21]
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- [35:47]
Dr. Chris Free
Well, at first it was just me having informal conversations with some guys over coffee, over a beer, over pizza. And then as they started to feel better and do better, then it was their friends. So it was 100% word of mouth. And that's how we met, right? Through Tyler. Yeah, I met you through Tyler and I met Tyler through this group. And so it was all word of mouth. And I wasn't charging people, I wasn't filing paperwork, I wasn't billing anybody. And I'm not in any Command structure. So what happened pretty quickly was I was talking to a lot of guys who had never really opened up to anybody. In part, I was safe, I was not within the system and I had a credibility from having, from my academic work, I had some credibility that lended itself to this. And so I'd say over the last decade I've probably worked with 300, 350 individuals operate mostly operators and some related, you know, SWIC EODs, paramilitary. And then in addition to that, I've worked more formally with about 300 private defense contractors, a majority of whom are either operators or they're a former law enforcement, SWAT types. Also a lot of private defense contractors were, are Iraqi or Afghani interpreters or cultural liaisons. So I had the privilege to do quite a bit of work with maybe, I don't know, 40 or 50 of them, some still in their home country, some in the US and now I would say the last five years, some of my consultations have been with law enforcement and firefighters. And so the operator syndrome framework, I guess we haven't even mentioned that word yet. Really, it relates to them as well. Right. And so some of the law enforcement, tactical law enforcement, especially swat, DEA tactical, FBI tactical, but even patrol, patrol, police and certainly firefighters have a similar constellation of tbi, hormonal disruption, sleep disruption, pain, headaches, cognitive impairments, psychological addiction issues. And these all go together. They're very physiological. And for the first responder community, we see the same thing as we do in military and veterans, it's oh, let's hit that big red easy button that says ptsd. We go boom. And then we're done. Now we can just give pills and therapy pills and, and that's it. And that's it. And so in 20 so I guess just to say a little bit more about kind of the progression of things, one of the other things that I started doing, probably Circus 2015, 16, 17, was starting to talk to and meet with some of the other medical providers in the community. There was a really good group of psychologists and social workers out at Virginia beach working with the seals. And I mean they were Navy, they were Navy Naval officers providing mental health services. And so I got to know some of them and learn from them. They even started referring me some of their active guys. So guys that they didn't feel like they could help for, for a variety of reasons, Fitness for duty being one of them. Everybody knows, you know, soldier that says, hey, I've got an issue, they're going to be taken off the line, they're going to be pulled out of training. They're going to not go on the next deployment potentially. So they don't, they don't talk. So I got a handful of referrals there, some from Fort Bragg. So when I say I've worked with probably 300, 350 operators, that includes a lot of active duty and it includes Canadian operators. I've done a fair bit of work there. So what happened was, is I was just in a learning, steep learning curve. What emerged was this pattern that I kept seeing over and over and over again. It was just every single guy had similar tbi, low testosterone, sleep apnea. And now it's just like you assume it, you assume it. It's inevitable given the type of training, the damage that blasts cause, the damage, that circadian disruption of working at night, traveling across time zones, the sleep deprivation, the physicality on the body of running, rucking, diving, jumping, falling, tactical driving even, it's inevitable.
- [40:57]
David Rutherford
You know, for me, I mean, as I, as we, our friendship grew and grew and you know, I kept referring people to you, we kept having the conversations. And then, you know, that really magic moment was when you and Alok and the other authors of the paper kind of put this thing in and wrapped it together under that term operator syndrome. Was that. It doesn't seem like it was probably an aha moment, but was it a seminal moment for you? Because it was a way to be able to discuss this now that would potentially make sense for those who were suffering.
- [41:46]
Dr. Chris Free
Yeah. Yes. There was no name for this, but it was a clear pattern that we were seeing over and over again. And to reinforce an important point here, it's very physiological. And all of our physiological systems in our body, you know, our neuro, neurological, our nervous system, our endocrine system, our metabolic system, our skeletal muscular system, all of our systems are connected, they're all working together. So you affect one system, you're affecting every other system in some way. And what became really clear was this fit the pattern of a syndrome, meaning it's not just one diagnosis. We can't just go PTSD and stop. It's PTSD there a little bit. But more prominent on the psychological side of things was depression, anger, general anxiety. When we put all this together and seeing it in operators, which was really the only group I was directly working with at the time, the phrase operator syndrome just came into my mind and it was just what I had, what I was calling it in my head and I met other people along the way. There were others that, that had, that had a Similar phrase or the same phrase. Kirk Parsley, who'd been working with seals for years, in his head he was calling it SEAL syndrome. We put this together in a descriptive paper that had originally been something that lived on my laptop for years. And it was something that at first it was a one page document that I probably gave to you and said, here's a sleep manual, read this and we'll talk about it. And it has some of these things in there. And as I was learning, I just kept adding to it. And then after several years, somebody that I showed it to said, man, you ought to publish this and share it with everybody, share it with the world. So we did. Some of the people I was talking and working with, we took it, we fixed it up. There were the team of authorship on it included one operator who was in a, in a doctoral program in neuroscience, PhD program at university of Texas, helped out. He's now in Congress. Former Navy SEAL Morgan Luttrell, who, you know. Well, he, he was a co author on this and that got published in 2020. And you know, one of the things that happens for us nerds in science is you publish a paper and usually you kind of forget about it and you go on to the next paper and you hope some other scientists read your paper. And what happened in 2020 for me was completely unanticipated, unexpected. It essentially did the equivalent of going viral in the operator community. Suddenly, I think in the first three months I got about 400 requests for the paper. And so eventually we just took the PDF and we put it up. It lives on the Internet in a variety of places. Anybody who wants to see it can find it. And because it's just a simple description, descriptive paper, it's pretty easy to read. Anybody you don't need. There's not a lot of medical jargon in it. You can download it, read it and share it and educate your family, yourself, your own doctors who probably don't know how to approach your complicated medical problems. And then it also got picked up by law enforcement and firefighters. And so that was 2020. And then last year we published and.
- [45:30]
David Rutherford
Let me just interrupt. The thing that really got me was, I mean this was the seminal moment that for us it was like, oh my God, there's a way to psychologically manage in, in and label this, this perpetual sensation of, of low performance, right? Our inability to operate at the level we'd once operated. But, but it happened right in the middle of COVID And and so as soon as this thing beginning of COVID.
- [46:05]
Dr. Chris Free
The Beginning was February, same month that the world shut down.
- [46:09]
David Rutherford
That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so I. I believe that that muted the. The. The potentiality of. Of what this ultimately has been doing, but it's been this slow, gradual thing. And so could you discuss that, that the gradual nature of. Of it and maybe some of the challenges that you've confronted and what ultimately drove you to write the book and release the book a year ago?
- [46:39]
Dr. Chris Free
Okay, well, yeah, I don't even know where to start there. We could talk about that for hours. One thing that happened was I got a lot of messages. A lot of people reached out to me. So I was getting a lot of validation. People were reaching out to me going, holy moly. This really. This is me. And I get that every time I present. I presented last week over at Pearl Hickam on Oahu and to a summit of Air Force Senior Enlisted Explosive ordinance disposal technicians. EODs talk for an hour. At the break, five, five or six guys came up to me, was like, you just described me in my life. How did you know? I get that all the time. And in fact, I may. Can I read a.
- [47:26]
David Rutherford
Please.
- [47:27]
Dr. Chris Free
Just another quote from the book. This is so emblematic of things. So this is the book that you and I wrote. You wrote a powerful forward to it. And so this is a quote at the top of chapter one from Clay Jensen, a U.S. army master sergeant, retired Special Operation Team 7, Special Forces Group, CIA contractor. And I won't read his whole quote, but this is what he said. Every time I see a new primary doctor, VA or civilian, they're completely overwhelmed by the sheer number and severity of the different medical issues I have. Nobody knows how to treat me. I'm completely different from any other patient they've had. For over 10 years, I struggled to understand why I am the way I am and to know what was really wrong with me. Then I came across an article on operator syndrome, and I was like, holy shit, I'm normal. Close quote. I went from feeling totally alone to being part of the tribe again. And that. I put that at the start of the book just because it's so emblematic. Guys are suffering in silence. They're suffering alone. They think they're the only ones. There's this often, this shame of all my brothers are crushing life. But I'm sitting here in despair, in pain, with low testosterone, not sleeping, drinking too much, and I can't get my act together. But I can't tell anybody because it doesn't make any sense. And so part of I think the message here is these physiological injuries are inevitable for combatants, for first responders, for anybody who has one of these high risk professional careers for, you know, especially for multiple years or decades.
- [49:19]
David Rutherford
Well, I think that the critical thing I also want to bring up is that as, as you have really kind of taken this and run and you know, obviously there's been some negative reactions within the different units. Yeah. You know, I think you've confronted multiple senior ranking people. Right. Is that, is that correct?
- [49:42]
Dr. Chris Free
Yep.
- [49:43]
David Rutherford
What was their points they were trying to make to you?
- [49:48]
Dr. Chris Free
Well, you know, I think I'll put it in terms of COVID You had a powerful guest on recently, Dr. Robert Malone, who talked about the COVID the way in which the COVID narrative was presented. And anybody who criticized it, questioned it, was silenced. They were chilled, they were denounced, they were deplatformed, they were shadow banned, they were excluded. And they were also, you know, attacked in ad hominem ways. Their character were, you know, their reputations were, were, were, were gossiped about. And, and, and I've experienced all of that. I experienced all of that in the early 2000s when I was still at the VA with my critique of the VA as a system. And, and, and, and again, you know, more recently with operator syndrome, it's, it's not been picked up by the VA broadly, although I'm starting to talk to people in the VA who are listening, who are, who are using it. I'll give a shout out to Shane Adams at the Palo Alto VA who set up a program out there. He's a psychologist and research director of their program treating operators using this framework. He'd be a good guest for this show someday. I've given one invited presentation to one va, the Orlando va, their, their mental health program, just, you know, at a local level, just said, would you come do a, would you do a zoom presentation to us? Which I did. And that's been about it. Wow. I've been, I don't, I won't say I've been harassed, but I've certainly been ignored. When I have had a couple of meetings, I've been told that some of the leadership at the VA have said to me pretty openly or pretty pretty, frankly, we don't think what you have to offer is meaningful. It's really just ptsd and anybody, any soldier who says they don't have ptsd, they're in denial. And so they're ignoring the physiological aspect of things. I did present at a closed door meeting of one of the larger foundations for operators and A retired officer who had previously had three stars on his shoulder stood up and denounced me. He said, and this was just a year ago. He started by saying, I have not read your book. And then he proceeded to tell me all the reasons he thought my ideas were dangerous and wrong and off base. And really what his concerns came down to is worried that it would hurt recruitment and worry and. And the concern or the. The accusation almost that I'm not a real scientist, I'm not part of the scientific club, and I need to be listening to the real scientists. And he had a. He was in a room that had a lot of, you know, Ivy League neurologists and psychiatrists in the room. And he clearly didn't know that my background, my academic publication record probably surpassed that of everybody in the room that he was referring to. So it feels like. And I think it is similar to the COVID We have our narrative. Shut up. Stay in your lane. We're not going to entertain your ideas, because we don't have to. We already know the answers, so we're not listening. What's beautiful. And I've kind of done my piece now, and you helped me with this book, which is a book for. Not for the medical community, but for operators, for the responders, for the combatants, for those in the combat arms. It's a practical book. It's a guide. It's a short book that guys and gals can read, spouses can read to say, okay, this helps understand me, understand what's going on, and here's all the solutions, most of which are not being provided by va, dod, or organized medicine. We have so many good treatments now that we're not really providing to people. And so now I think what I see happening, I think you share this view probably is it's no longer about what the military leadership, VA leadership, the people who are at the top of the medical field or psychiatry or psychology fields are thinking. It's about what's coming from the ground up. It's about. It's about that DEA agent who's hurting and coming forward and say, I need enough of this. I don't need therapy for PTSD. I need to have my hormones treated. It's the EODs, it's the retired SEALs. The SEAL Future foundation has created an entire program run by SEALs for SEALs using the operator syndrome framework and providing treatments that are consistent with, you know, with what's needed to address these injuries and impairments. And there's other foundations out there. The Marine Recon foundation, the All Secure Foundation. There's just there's so many of them now. There's many really good ones. Oh yeah. And wait, isn't there another foundation that, that may be new on the scene, the Operator Syndrome Foundation?
- [55:21]
David Rutherford
I, you know, I though can. There's so many different angles to approach. You know. One, my first comment is to the, the guys who have the stars on their shoulders to the bureaucrats at the va we are not trying in any way, shape or form to alter, reduce or change the necessary training profiles in order to get the individual from the time they roger up and raise their hand because they want to serve this nation, because of the heritage of those that have come before them, because of those who have died for the, the patriotism that founds this. The. It is. Which is the cornerstone of. Of. Of America. You know. You know, they have to go through what they have to go through. We do not want to change it. I, I have not talked to a single operator that suffers from Operator Syndrome, from os that wants to change anything they had to do. Maybe put some gaps in between, you know, the, the breaching charges they do per week or you know, the shoulder fired rockets or whatever it might be. Maybe they, you know, they, they actually can take some, some medications that stabilize the metabolic imbalance. Maybe they can address the orthopedic injuries with better physical therapy in the midst or go do hyperbarics after a deployment. Which that's what we want, right? We don't want to stop operating from young men becoming young men and women.
- [57:08]
Dr. Chris Free
Not at all.
- [57:09]
David Rutherford
Not at all at all. What we want to do though, is we want to make sure that the next time we ask these people to go down range and to possibly sacrifice their lives, but definitively to sacrifice their health and mental health in the future, that there's a program prior to a predicate, something for transition. And then as you had suggested, the various programs that are out there to help them to give an estimation to the audience of the numbers and what's taking place. Can you describe how many phone calls the SEAL Future Fund receives annually once they discover the potent. The framework which, which, with which they can be helped through their system?
- [58:03]
Dr. Chris Free
I can't give you an exact number, but I think within the, in the last three years, they have served 20% of the entire Navy SEAL community. Every among every SEAL. Not the active, they don't work too much with the active. But of all the retired SEALs, all the, all the separated SEALs who are now veterans, I think they've served 20 to 25% of them in the last.
- [58:26]
David Rutherford
Three years, that's massive.
- [58:28]
Dr. Chris Free
That's just gone up every year. So the next two years they'll probably serve another 20, 25%.
- [58:36]
David Rutherford
When you and I have had these discussions about all right, how many. So at any one given time, I think in SOCOM there's roughly 70, 75,000 people or some number. It's around, it's, it's that high. Right. And I think it actually flexed and was bigger during the gwat. Might be bigger now, but, but you know, within that you have a dedicated group of door kickers, what they're called, right. People that are going downrange doing the work out of that last the G Watt. Can you give an estimation in your mind of, of how many guys are, are afflicted? Right with, I mean I think everybody's got some semblance of operator syndrome in some, in something. Right? But, but what, what is your rough estimate of, of, of how many veteran operators are struggling, really struggling with these, this collective group of challenges? Once again, I apologize for the interruption, but I just wanted to remind you that this Saturday on May 31st at 11:00am Eastern Standard Time on Patreon, I will be giving a live motivational event. I'm going to be discussing the 30 years that I have really been trying to understand the human condition through all of my incredible experiences as a seal, a CIA contractor and a world championship performance coach. Please join us by visiting our Patreon account at David Rutherford show. It's a $2 monthly subscription fee. I'll be giving a one hour presentation about the core frog logic concepts and then I'll be doing a one hour Q& A. So if you want to enjoy this, please join us at our Patreon account at the David R. Show this Saturday, 11am Eastern Standard Time.
- [60:38]
Dr. Chris Free
Thank you.
- [60:38]
David Rutherford
Back to the show.
- [60:43]
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- [64:06]
Dr. Chris Free
Man. There's, there is no epidemiological studies right there that have been published or that I even know of. So it's really impossible to answer that question. I would say, however, I would say an operator syndrome, like every medical condition can be occur on a continuum. Not everybody had the same experiences or the same training exposures. Not everybody has the exact same manifestation of symptoms and effects. But if you go, well, we have 70,000 working at SOCOM right now, plus a third of the DOD is combat arms. And so that's, what is that another, I don't know, half million men and women. Then you add up all the firefighters and all of the law enforcement officers. I think it becomes, you know, we're talking, you know, we're not talking about small number of people, we're talking about a couple of million, 3, 4 million people even maybe if we, when we add veterans in there. And then it's on a spectrum. And part of that spectrum is the nature and the intensity of the training and the deployments as well as the number of years. So I met last week my host Jason, 27 years in the Air Force as an EOD. 27 years. He's going to have things that somebody who's only five years in isn't going to have yet. So I think an important piece about the operator syndrome framework, and that's what it is, it is a framework, is to understand it can be used from the beginning of a career as a way, as a perspective to help pay attention to monitor developing injuries and impairments as well as to mitigate them. And then downstream it can be a framework for treating more acute severe injuries. So if I'm Talking to a 20 year old soldier in the combat arms or who's going planning a career in special operations. Get a baseline on your hormones. Do it now. Know what your hormone baseline is, track it every few years, pay attention to where it is. After certain guys come back from a six month deployment or a year deployment or even a three month deployment, we're seeing the entire platoon or the entire units. Testosterone has gone way down. Now that doesn't mean they need replacement therapy, time, rest, you know, making some changes and bring it back. It will come back up naturally. If they're young, the older they get, the harder that that becomes and the more evolutions of that, of those trainings and deployments, the harder it becomes for it to restore itself naturally. But that would, that's just one example. And if I Were, you know, somebody asked me recently, what are the like, what are the three, four things that, that I would recommend to everybody. So this is just by way of practical solutions. Can I give you those things now? Please. So first of all, the two things that are just easy, they're just assessments. Get a sleep study. If you snore or you have sleep problems or fatigue problems, get a hormone check. Check your hormones. Men and women should be tracking to get their hormones checked. A third is an intervention that is not well known about, but is powerful clinical benefits. And that's stellate ganglion block. That's a very simple five minute outpatient procedure. It involves injecting medicine into the sympathetic nervous system. What it does is it just brings down that fight or flight physiological arousal. This brings it down from a baseline of, you know, eight, nine down to a two or a three. And it will last for months, two months, six months, 18 months even. And that opens the door because guys feel immediately more relaxed. Gals too, they are able to concentrate better because they don't have all that noise in their physiological system. They sleep better, which just brings a whole cascade of amazing benefits. Sleep is so important. They're nicer, their families like them. Again, I've heard spouses refer to it as the anti asshole treatment. And it can save lives and marriages and families. And then the fourth thing I would put on the list is dial in your own habits, your own lifestyle habits. Prioritize sleep, learn what good sleep habits mean. There's programs that can help teach you that and develop those habits. And then develop an anti inflammatory lifestyle. Meaning reduce alcohol and tobacco or eliminate altogether eat whole food diet, don't eat processed foods, junk foods, fast foods, hot saunas. Hot sauna is a very powerful anti inflammatory for the body. Anything that reduces inflammation is going to be good for every part of the system. It'll help reduce pain, it'll help with the neuroinflammation in the brain associated with tbi. So it's a brain healer if you do those four things and do them from the beginning of a career all the way to the end of life. Track your sleep, track your hormones. Wear a sleep monitor, something, some kind of fitness tracker to figure out. Pay attention to your sleep, massive gains. And then from there, yeah, there's therapy, there's maybe psychiatric medications if you need it, but hyperbaric oxygen therapies, vestibular therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy, psychedelic plant medicine, journeys, not microdosing, that's not what I'm talking about. But a true Medically supervised journey. Powerful, powerful interventions that we have. So we're not giving these treatments to people. Very, very often. We're not allowing people even to know about them. Your average psychologist or psychiatrist has never referred a patient to get a hormone check, has never referred a patient to get a stellate ganglion block. Even if they may not even know. Most probably don't even know what stellate ganglion is. Well, that's all.
- [70:54]
David Rutherford
That's what I found. I mean, I, I started working with veterans charities in 2012 or 13, and, you know, it's like, all right, how do I give back? How do I, how do I, you know, support veterans? Friends of mine, you know, because I, I really. We started feeling the suicides around 2008, nine. They started picking up. And, you know, by. By 15 or 16, we're just exploding. And so it's like, all right, I want to contribute. But what I ended up finding is that a lot of the charities that I was affiliated with were not going after these targeted and specific treatment modalities, right? These very specific things that were going to address the full spectrum. And I think, you know, that's why organizations like, you know, the ones you had mentioned in particular, what, what are. What we started in terms of Operator Syndrome Foundation 1. As you know, we started, you and I, we wanted it to be education. So offering a free education course for anybody who wants to learn about this in detail and some ideas and suggestions and all that. But then obviously it morphed. Like, we just kind of. I mean, I know I got sick of the organ, you know, having all of this be so separated to try and figure out how to quarterback this for the individual. And, you know, I think that's why, really, why, you know, what spawn, you know, John and I, with your help, to. To initiate, you know, this pilot program for these five different guys from five different units, but really all suffering from the same thing and in different stages of their careers, you know, but it, It, It's. It's focusing on metabolic stabilization, right? It's focusing on neurogenic, you know, support, behavioral health support, and then orthopedic, you know, managing pain. And it's nice that we have identified. But the real problem that I still see is that it's still so fractionalized. It's still so different. You have to go to, like you said, you walk into your primary healthcare doctor, and he looks at you and he's like. And you ask him, do you understand blast wave exposure? And he looks at you like, what are you talking About. Or then you go into someone else and it's like, oh, I've. I've got this from all of this. And they're like, well, wait, what do you mean all? I don't understand all of this. And. And then, like. And then I'll never forget. You know, I. I went, you know, we're working with Kevin Lace, who's a PA In Pensacola, Florida, and Trident Medicine with our metabolic stabilization aspect. And I remember my first panel I went in was 36 vials of blood, right? And I remember that the technician being like, I've never seen anybody get this many. What's wrong with you? And I was like, you ever heard operator syndrome? And they're, you know, and they're like, no. You know, and so I think the challenge is now, how do we. How do we teach people out there to help quarterback so people that are suffering.
- [74:05]
Dr. Chris Free
So the excellent question and excellent point. Yeah. So just to kind of recap, medicine is ignorant and arrogant. We already have all the answers. We don't deviate from what the algorithm of our field tells us to do. We're a fractionate. We're fragmented. You know, your psychiatrist never talks to your sleep doctor, never talks to your primary care doctor, never talks to your oncologist or whatever. Maybe they look at the medical record and go, oh, yeah, this diagnosis is there and these medications are there, but there's never really any deep thought about all of that. So there's no recognition that all of these physiological systems are interconnected. So education is critical. We. The Operator Syndrome foundation has an online training program or online curriculum. So that's free, that's available. The Seal Future foundation has a website titled the Operator Health Index. You can go to the Seal Future Foundation's website. It's free. Anybody can access that. The Operator Syndrome medical paper is on the Internet. If you just put into your search engine operator syndrome medical paper, it'll come up. What I often tell people is print it off on paper, go through with a highlighter, circle the things that are relevant to you, take that to your doctors, take that to your prime, to your providers, your primary care docs, whoever. Educate them. Oftentimes people say, well, my doc won't give me a hormone blood panel. When they take that paper in with that circled, it usually changes the story. So that's one effective way to kind of. I won't say manipulate, but educate your providers. And then we also have this book that is literally a thin, easy, quick, practical read, practical guide to learn to understand as well as to understand. Not just the injuries and the impairments, but the solutions, the treatments, the lifestyle habits that can be developed. So there's a lot of, a lot of ways to learn about this. You're right, learning about it and I would say spreading the word because if you're listening to this and you've learned about it and I don't, this isn't meant to be all about self promotion, but share with your buddies because they probably haven't heard.
- [76:25]
David Rutherford
For sure. Well, Chris, you know, just, I can't thank you enough from, not only from, from the bottom of my heart and the immediate friends of mine that you've, you've saved their lives, but to all the other work that you're doing in the, in the tireless, you know, banging on doors and giving zoom calls and more importantly, those middle of the night calls of guys in crisis. I just can't thank you enough. And hopefully when people listen to this, they'll recognize that the toll of warfare is much, much, much deeper than just the war story or the sacrifice on the battlefield. It reverberates for generations, across families, across units, across doctors who treat and people and physicians and nurses and all of those people. It impacts as it comes across, you know, the impact of that, that higher level sacrificial service. So thank you for everything you've done and you know, just wish you all the best, man. Where, where can people go to buy the book and how can they pay attention to what you're doing in your life?
- [77:43]
Dr. Chris Free
Well, the book's easy to find. It's on Amazon. Operator syndrome. It is. You can get it directly from the publisher, Ballast Books, they publish, they've got a whole suite of really terrific books written by military. It's kind of, I wouldn't say it's all military, but it's got a strong patriotic focus. I do have a website, chrisfree.com easy if you know how to spell my name. And I'm not on social media. I did that for a year to support the book and hated every minute of it. So I disappeared from social media a few months ago. Awesome. Yeah, thank you brother. This was great conversation.
- [78:21]
David Rutherford
God bless you. Thank you, brother.
- [78:29]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [78:58]
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- [79:54]
Thrivent Representative
For some of us, personal finances aren't just personal. They include a lot more people than ourselves. Loved ones, neighbors, the communities we call home, and the causes we hold in our hearts. At Thrivent, we help plan your financial picture with the bigger picture in mind. Because even though our business is helping guide your finances, our ambition is to make it mean so much more. Thrivent, where money means more. Connect with us@thrivent.com Ugh.
- [80:24]
Dr. Chris Free
Come on. Why is this taking so long?
- [80:26]
Walton Goggins
This thing is ancient.
- [80:28]
Lenovo Representative
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- [80:42]
Walton Goggins
Whoa.
- [80:42]
Dr. Chris Free
This thing moves.
- [80:43]
Lenovo Representative
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- [81:01]
Ryan Seacrest
As America's most trusted movers, Mayflower has seen it all from big dreams and new beginnings.
- [81:07]
Dr. Chris Free
All right, here we are.
- [81:09]
Thrivent Representative
Oh, it's perfect.
- [81:11]
Ryan Seacrest
To first steps and fixer uppers from starter homes.
- [81:15]
Dr. Chris Free
So guess what? We're having another. Another. We definitely need more space to more practical homes.
- [81:22]
Ryan Seacrest
Yes, Mayflower has been there for it.
- [81:24]
Dr. Chris Free
All and will always have your back.
- [81:26]
Ryan Seacrest
Every moment, every move, every step of the way. Schedule your move now by going to mayflower. Com.
- [81:32]
David Rutherford
You're listening to an iHeart podcast.