Recovery After Stroke

Someone in our community recently asked me about GABA for sleep. They’d seen it recommended online, understood that sleep was critical for their recovery, and wanted to know whether the supplement was worth exploring or just noise.

It’s a genuinely good question. And it deserves a proper answer.

In this post, I’m going to walk you through what GABA is, what the clinical research actually shows about its effect on sleep, why the blood-brain barrier debate matters (and why it might not derail the whole argument), and what the evidence says about the relationship between sleep and brain recovery. By the end, you’ll have enough to have an informed conversation with your medical team.

I’m not a doctor. I’m a three-time haemorrhagic stroke survivor who has spent years researching the science of brain recovery and interviewing hundreds of clinicians and survivors on the Recovery After Stroke podcast. What I offer is a careful read of the evidence, not a clinical prescription.

GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is the brain’s primary inhibitory neurotransmitter. If your nervous system were a car, GABA is the brake pedal. It reduces neuronal excitability, quiets cortical arousal, suppresses the brain’s primary arousal centre (the locus coeruleus), and modulates the HPA axis, the stress-response system that drives cortisol.

Most sedative medications work by amplifying GABA activity. Benzodiazepines, for instance, bind to GABA-A receptors to increase chloride channel opening, producing their calming effect. GABA isn’t doing something unusual here – it’s doing something fundamental.

The question with supplemental oral GABA is more specific: Does taking GABA as a capsule or powder actually produce meaningful neurological effects?

A 2015 clinical trial published in the Journal of Nutritional Science and Vitaminology by Yamatsu and colleagues used EEG measurement, actual brainwave monitoring, rather than self-reported sleep questionnaires. One hundred milligrams of oral GABA shortened sleep latency (time to fall asleep) by 5.3 minutes compared to placebo.

That might sound modest. But for someone lying awake for 30–40 minutes each night, it’s a meaningful shift. Crucially, this was objective neurophysiological data, not a survey response. (PMID: 26052150)

A 2024 randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial published in the Journal of Dietary Supplements (Guimarães et al.) gave 200 mg of GABA daily for 90 days to sedentary overweight women also undergoing an exercise program. The GABA group showed significantly improved Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) scores, significantly reduced depression scores, and improved heart rate variability, a marker of parasympathetic nervous system activity.

The HRV finding is particularly interesting. It suggests GABA may be doing something broader than simply reducing sleep latency – it appears to support the overall physiological state that makes rest restorative. (PMID: 38321713)

Here’s where intellectual honesty matters. A 2023 Dutch RCT (de Bie et al.) published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition gave participants 500 mg of GABA three times daily, 1,500 mg/day total, and found no significant effect on self-reported sleep quality. Fasting plasma GABA wasn’t significantly elevated either, raising real bioavailability questions at that dose.

This isn’t a reason to dismiss GABA entirely. It is a reason to pay attention to the dose. The evidence base supports 100–300 mg, not 1,500 mg. Higher is not better, and the non-linear dose response is clinically important. (PMID: 37495019)

The most common objection to oral GABA supplementation is this: GABA is a zwitterion at physiological pH, meaning it has low lipophilicity and poor predicted ability to cross the blood-brain barrier via passive diffusion. So if it can’t get into the brain directly, how does it produce neurological effects?

The emerging explanation involves the gut-brain axis.

The enteric nervous system, your gut’s own neural network, has GABA receptors. When oral GABA activates these enteric receptors, it can signal the brain via vagal afferents without needing to cross the BBB at all. Think of it as a side door rather than the front entrance.

Supporting this: a 2024 RCT (Li et al.) found that a probiotic strain engineered to increase gut GABA production significantly improved objective sleep duration as measured by wearable devices, alongside reduced cortisol and suppressed HPA axis activity. The mechanism wasn’t direct CNS access – it was gut-brain signalling. (PMID: 39385735)

The BBB debate doesn’t negate the clinical effect. It changes how we understand the mechanism.

This is the part that I think gets underweighted in recovery conversations — and the research is unambiguous.

A 2026 large retrospective cohort study (Muhtar et al., Sleep Medicine) matched over 35,000 stroke patients and found that post-stroke insomnia was associated with a 29% higher risk of post-stroke cognitive impairment and a 30% higher risk of all-cause dementia. The association with Alzheimer’s disease was also significant. (PMID: 41924789)

A 2024 observational study from Monash University and Alfred Health (Smith et al.) found that in stroke rehabilitation patients, poor sleep quality was significantly associated with higher fatigue severity and lower salivary BDNF gene expression. BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) is one of the primary molecular drivers of neuroplasticity. Less BDNF means a less receptive environment for the neurological rewiring that rehab is trying to build. (PMID: 38802847)

And then there’s the glymphatic system: the brain’s waste-clearance mechanism that is most active during deep sleep. Poor sleep means reduced clearance of metabolic byproducts, including proteins associated with neurodegeneration. This is not a theoretical risk. It is an active, ongoing process.

Sleep is not passive recovery. It is one of the primary mechanisms of recovery.

Here are three practical steps if you’re exploring GABA for sleep:

Use the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (freely available online) before you make any changes. Understanding whether you’re struggling with latency, duration, or quality will determine what you actually need to address.

Look for PharmaGABA — naturally fermented GABA, derived from Lactobacillus hilgardii, which has the strongest clinical evidence base. A dose of 100–300 mg taken 30–60 minutes before bed is consistent with the positive studies. Avoid very high doses; the null result at 1,500 mg/day is important context.

Important drug interaction note: If you are taking benzodiazepines, anticonvulsants (gabapentin, pregabalin, valproate), or any other GABAergic medication, discuss GABA supplementation with your prescriber before adding it. The additive sedative effect is a real risk. The same applies if you drink alcohol regularly.

Sleep hygiene interventions, consistent sleep and wake times, a dark and cool room, and no screens in the 60 minutes before bed, are consistently among the highest-leverage sleep interventions in the literature. GABA may provide a genuine incremental benefit. But it cannot compensate for a fundamentally disrupted sleep environment.

The evidence for GABA and sleep is more substantive than I expected when I started researching it. The EEG data is real. The 90-day RCT showed meaningful clinical outcomes. The gut-brain axis mechanism is biologically plausible and now has direct RCT support. And the consequences of poor sleep in neurological recovery are not trivial – they are quantifiable, significant, and, to a degree, addressable.

GABA is not a guaranteed fix. Individual responses vary. The research is not yet definitive at the level of large multi-centre trials in neurological populations. But as one tool in a comprehensive approach to sleep quality alongside good sleep hygiene, appropriate medical support, and consistent rehabilitation, the case for cautious exploration is reasonable.

The next step is a conversation with your neurologist, GP, or rehab physician. Take the research with you if it’s useful.

All studies cited in this post are retrievable via PubMed:

This post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your supplementation or treatment plan.

If you or someone you care about is recovering from a stroke, brain injury, or any neurological condition, the Recovery After Stroke podcast and this blog exist for you. Subscribe on YouTube @BillGasiamis, or visit Recovery After Stroke to find episodes, resources, and community.

The post GABA, Sleep, and Brain Health – Neurological Recovery appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

For seven years, a woman lived unable to remember faces. She had developed prosopagnosia, a condition that turned every person she met into a stranger, no matter how many times they had been introduced. She kept notes. She took photographs. She built systems to compensate for what her brain could no longer do on its own.

Then she sat down for a single laser therapy session with Dr. Robert Hedaya. One session later, the problem was gone.

“I can remember the face of the person I worked with this morning and his wife and the dimple on his face,” she told him, describing something she hadn’t been able to do in nearly a decade.

What Dr. Hedaya witnessed that day and what he now works to replicate for stroke survivors, people living with aphasia, early dementia, and Parkinson’s, is the result of a therapy called photobiomodulation. And the principle behind it may fundamentally change how you understand your own recovery ceiling.

When a stroke occurs, conventional medicine draws a clear line. Tissue that is destroyed is gone. Deficits that persist beyond the early recovery window are considered permanent. Survivors are told, sometimes gently, sometimes bluntly, that they have plateaued.

Dr. Hedaya challenges that directly.

In his clinical experience, there is often a population of neurons that survived the stroke intact but are no longer functioning. They are alive. Their cellular architecture is preserved. But they have lost their energy supply, specifically, the ability to produce ATP, the molecule that powers every cellular process in the body. Without energy, these neurons go quiet. They stop firing. From the outside, this looks like permanent damage. But it isn’t. It is dormancy.

This mirrors the concept of the chronic penumbra explored in hyperbaric oxygen therapy research, where viable tissue sits in a suspended state, waiting for conditions to change. Dr. Hedaya’s approach is different in method but identical in premise: the brain has not finished recovering. It is waiting for the right signal. Photobiomodulation provides that signal.

“After the first laser treatment, the problem was gone. Gone. She told me — I can remember the face of the person I worked with this morning.” — Dr. Robert Hedaya

Photobiomodulation, also called transcranial laser therapy, delivers precise wavelengths of near-infrared light to targeted areas of the scalp. The photons penetrate through the skull, meninges, and tissue to reach dormant neurons, where they act on the fourth complex of the mitochondrial electron transport chain, the site where nitric oxide accumulates and blocks ATP production.

The photons dislodge that nitric oxide. The mitochondria resume normal energy output. The neuron now has what it needs to resume its function.

The downstream effects are significant: new synapses form through a process called synaptogenesis, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is produced, inflammation decreases, and misfolded proteins associated with cognitive decline begin to clear. Given energy, the brain begins repairing itself, not because the laser forces it to, but because the cells already know what to do. They were just waiting for the fuel.

Not every stroke survivor responds to the same laser parameters or needs treatment in the same regions. This is where Dr. Hedaya’s approach clearly separates from consumer LED helmets or generic light therapy devices.

Before any laser is applied, he conducts a quantitative EEG, a brain mapping process that measures electrical activity at 19 points across the scalp. Unlike a standard EEG, which relies on a clinician reading scrolling waveforms visually, QEEG uses AI to analyse thousands of data points and reverse-engineer the source. The result is a functional map: which networks are underperforming, which are overactive, and where pathways between regions have broken down.

This is paired with a neuroquant MRI that measures 30 to 40 distinct brain structures volumetrically. Together, they function as a GPS triangulating exactly where the laser should be directed, at what wavelength, power, pulse frequency, and joule delivery for each individual patient. These parameters are adjusted as the patient responds, session by session.

This level of precision is what distinguishes clinical photobiomodulation from anything available over the counter. A half-watt LED helmet delivering diffuse light through hair and scalp is not the same intervention.

Roughly 30% of stroke survivors experience depression in the aftermath. This is not simply an emotional response to a difficult event – it is a physiological outcome with identifiable drivers that conventional psychiatry often does not investigate.

Dr. Hedaya’s model, which he calls whole psychiatry, treats post-stroke depression as a downstream expression of broader disruption: hypothyroidism, hormonal imbalance, B12 deficiency, elevated mercury from dietary sources, gut dysbiosis, chronic inflammation, and unresolved neurological stress all play measurable roles. In one of his current stroke cases, treating low thyroid function triggered seizure sensitivity because post-stroke tissue is more vulnerable to excitatory input. That kind of complexity is precisely why a comprehensive functional evaluation must precede treatment.

For survivors too depleted to engage with lifestyle changes, Dr. Hedaya will now often begin with laser therapy directly. Once cellular energy is restored, the motivation and capacity to make further changes typically follow. The jump-start, he has found, enables everything else.

If you have been told you have reached your ceiling, the core message of this episode is worth sitting with: the plateau is often not a biological fact. It is frequently the consequence of underlying conditions that haven’t been identified, and dormant tissue that hasn’t been activated.

“The brain is incredibly plastic,” Dr. Hedaya says. “When you challenge it and give it everything it needs, nutrients, light, hormones, and remove the toxins, great things can happen. There is hope. There is so much hope.”

His practice, the Whole Psychiatry and Brain Recovery Center, offers initial consultations via Zoom for those who cannot travel to New Jersey. For survivors with a local physician willing to collaborate, educational consultation is also available. Reach Dr. Hedaya at wholepsychiatry.com.

If this episode opened something up for you, Bill’s book – The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened follows the full arc of what recovery can become when you stop accepting the ceiling and start questioning it. Find it at recoveryafterstroke.com/book.

If the Recovery After Stroke podcast has supported your journey, you can support the show at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

A laser pointed at the right spot in your brain can restart neurons that stopped working. Dr. Robert Hedaya explains how and who it can help.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction – Photobiomodulation Stroke Recovery

Transcript:

Dr Bob Hedaya (00:00)

says, can’t remember faces. I have to write down everything that I do and take pictures of everything and every person. I said, my God, it’s gone, gone. that’s when I went home that night and I was like, this doesn’t make any sense. How could this be? There’s nothing about a neurological condition being turned around in one minute. It makes no sense.

Bill Gasiamis (00:41)

of what was driving his patient’s symptoms had nothing to do with their medications and everything to do with their biology. In more recent years, Dr. Hedaya has added a tool that very few practitioners anywhere in the world are using, QEEG, guided transcranial photobiomodulation. That’s laser therapy, precisely

using a functional brain map to reactivate neurons that survived the stroke but stopped working. In this conversation, we get into the science behind photobiomodulation and what it actually does inside the cell. How QEEG brain mapping removes the guesswork from treatment, why post-stroke depression is so often mismanaged, the role of nutrition, hormones, and toxin load in recovery.

and why Dr. Hedaya believes the plateau most survivors are told about is not the biological sealing they’ve been led to believe it is.

Now, before we get into this episode, if you found this podcast helpful in your recovery, my book, The Unexpected Way That a Stroke Became the Best Thing That Happened goes deeper into the tools and mindset shifts that support long-term recovery and personal transformation. You can find it at recoveryafterstroke.com/book. And if this show has supported you, you can support it at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. Now let’s get into it.

Bill Gasiamis (02:38)

Welcome to the podcast.

Dr Bob Hedaya (02:41)

Bill Gasiamis (02:43)

Dr Bob Hedaya (03:01)

Bill Gasiamis (03:13)

Dr Bob Hedaya (03:26)

kind of summary of the situation, but it was ⁓ profound. She still has work to do, a lot of work to do, but she’s doing it and she’s progressing nicely. So that’s, he basically, I guess, decided this needs to get out. And so he contacted you, et cetera, et cetera. In terms of my journey, ⁓ that could take a few hours. So let me try and summarize it.

I will say I basically went to medical school, took off six months to study medicine on my own after two years because I really, lot of reasons, but one of them was I just was memorizing things and I didn’t really understand what I was doing. And so I took off six months and I really learned about the human body. I studied, I had a schedule, a very fixed schedule, about 10 hours a day of studying and exercise and eat. was very, you know, I was young and regimented.

And I had six books, six subjects that I wanted to get through and I did. And I learned all about the body and different parts of the body, how they interact with each other. And also I was able to understand and predict even certain kinds of processes and problems in the body. So that was an integrative experience, which ⁓ later really served as the foundation for what I do. Fast forward, I was going to be a surgeon, decided to be a psychiatrist instead, because I was fascinated by

by the human mind. And what happened was I was trained at Georgetown National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, DC. And then I was in practice for about a year. And I was treating a woman who had panic attacks. And they weren’t getting better after a year. And panic attacks are pretty easy to treat. And so I was like, what’s going on here? She paged me one night after a year, Saturday night.

And I remember I had a little beeper, you know, and I went to find a phone booth and, hey, Joanne, what’s going on? It’s midnight, right? She’s talking to me, I’m having a panic attack. And I mean, I still remember the anguish in her voice. You know, it was really, really, really rough to listen to. So Monday morning, I went into the office very early and I’m like, I’m missing something. What am I missing? So I found I had one piece of blood work. had a blood count and the size of her red blood cells was large.

and I had seen that and didn’t know what it meant and ignored it. Very little. It wasn’t very large. It was just a little bit out of the norm. And I was trained in hospitals. know, in hospitals, you don’t worry about the little things. You worry about the train wrecks, right? So you never really learn what the little things mean. So here was a so-called little thing and it was ruining her life. Meanwhile, I did some research. It was a B12 deficiency. I gave her B12 injection. And with the first injection, her panic was gone.

I mean, gone, gone, gone. And I was like, whoa, what else am I missing? Because psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, it’s a revolving door. You go to this doctor, you take these meds, you do this therapy. That works for a while, then you go somewhere else. I figured I’m missing a lot of stuff. And basically, ended up learning. I didn’t know it was called functional medicine, but I ended up learning functional medicine on my own. Wrote a book, got introduced.

to Jeff Bland at IFM. contacted me and took formal training and then, you know, that was what I was doing. And I did that, ⁓ put out a second book ⁓ and that was a best seller. And ⁓ the book was called the Anti-Depressant Survival Program. But really it was functional medicine psychiatry or whole psychiatry, which I like to call it. But it’s functional medicine psychiatry, but the publisher wanted…

you know, a nice fancy title that would, know, so they decided to call it the Anti-Depressant Program, you know, survival program. Anyway, the best seller and we had thousands of phone calls, we had a lot of publicity and I couldn’t obviously see everybody. So I picked people who had treatment resistant depression and people who had the resources and the motivation or the support to be able to do what they needed to do.

And I just treated them with functional medicine. And at this time, you’ve got to realize I was a psychopharmacologist. I was also trained as a psychopharmacologist. So I was doing a lot of psychopharmacology. I mean, a lot. And now I’m doing functional medicine on everybody. And after about three years, I’m noticing that I’m not actually doing that much psychopharmacology anymore. And everybody’s getting better. And the diabetes is going away.

and osteoporosis is going away and one woman’s MS lesion in her brain went away and I’m like, what’s going on here? You know what? I might be lying to myself. So maybe I’m paying attention to the positive cases and I’m ignoring the negative. So I hired a statistician to go over all my cases over the course of this period of time, it two or three years. Ended up in 23 cases of treatment resistant depression. ⁓

I wasn’t lying to myself. Every single person went into recovery, not partial remission, not 50 % better, fully recovered by 10 months, every single one. And I was just blown away that, you know, I mean, I was blown away before, but then it was like, well, you’re not really lying to yourself. So that’s what I was doing until 2014 when I retired. I had actually an inaccurate diagnosis. I retired and…

turned out it was incorrect. So it was actually really good to be retired, although I missed it terribly, really missed medicine terribly. But it gave me some time. And this is where this kind of starts to relate more to your audience. ⁓ I’m sitting on a hammock for six hours reading a book. Well, you can’t do that when you’re in practice.

Bill Gasiamis (10:07)

Yeah.

point the laser in the brain for a patient. And then I keep reading in the book, and then they start talking about in the next chapter about quantitative EEG. And I’m like, oh, that’s how I would know. So I spent the next three years or so actually studying these methodologies. And then in 2017, I want to say, or 2018, I treated my first patient who had early dementia.

published this case actually. I was treating her for early dementia. And I had treated her for six months with functional medicine, know, hormones and treating infections, et cetera, et cetera. And she really was much better. And then I was ready to do my first quantitative EEG. And she’s doing much better. She still has some symptoms. And I do the QEG. And actually, if I could share my I don’t know if I can,

Okay, so basically what I just sent you is ⁓ how her brain looked after six months of functional medicine, right? So I was shocked because I thought her brain would look much better. And then I said, okay, let’s do the laser. So I knew where to point it because the QEG and this was the shocker. With the first laser, she had a problem.

before the laser treatment of facial blindness. I don’t know if you know what that is. It’s people who can’t remember faces. They just met someone, they can’t remember the face. It’s called prosopagnosia. She had acquired it seven years earlier.

Bill Gasiamis (12:11)

Yeah.

Dr Bob Hedaya (12:21)

What is proto-diagnosia? I don’t know what that is. She says, can’t remember faces. I have to write down everything that I do and take pictures of everything and every person. I said, my God, it’s gone, gone. that’s when I went home that night and I was like, this doesn’t make any sense. How could this be? There’s nothing about a neurological condition being turned around in one minute. It makes no sense.

But then I realized, I reasoned it out, realized, well, she had a population of neurons that were kind of alive, but they were not really functioning. And then I kind of jump started them with the laser and they went about their business and did their job.

Bill Gasiamis (13:19)

Dr Bob Hedaya (13:27)

Bill Gasiamis (13:47)

Dr Bob Hedaya (14:06)

Bill Gasiamis (14:16)

And then it leaves people feeling like they got ripped off. If they paid money, it leaves people lost for hope that there is no hope, cetera. And we kind of find ourselves in a, okay, desperate, what do we do now situation, right? And that’s kind of why I got excited when your patient’s husband reached out and said that we should chat. And I had a bit of a look into the kind of work that you do. ⁓ Functional medicine, I’ve heard about heaps.

Dr Bob Hedaya (15:00)

Bill Gasiamis (15:14)

and provide the right environment for healing. And the first thing I came across was a book by somebody that you’re gonna know, Mark Hyman. And the book was, ⁓ the book was, ⁓ Eight Fat Get Thin. I read it, not wanting to get thin, I read it ⁓ because it ticked the boxes for the diet that I was gonna use to reduce inflammation in my brain.

Dr Bob Hedaya (15:54)

Bill Gasiamis (16:12)

Dr Bob Hedaya (16:13)

Bill Gasiamis (16:41)

other amazing guys who wrote books at around about that time that were similar in nature. so you’re, and then, and then a little while later, I found there was a Tasmanian, ⁓ psychiatrist, forget her name, but I have her book on my shelf upstairs who wrote a book about, ⁓ psychiatry and food and, the link between food and a good psychiatric outcome.

Dr Bob Hedaya (17:15)

Bill Gasiamis (17:39)

Dr Bob Hedaya (17:40)

Bill Gasiamis (18:08)

Dr Bob Hedaya (18:35)

Okay, so let me back, I wanna back up, because you said something very important, then I wanna reiterate it. I just gave you before a case of a woman who in five minutes, her problem was gone, right? Not, people should not think that’s the norm, okay? Not the norm. Occasionally it happens, I have a guy who had a head injury and had light sensitivity and confusion in certain situations with light, and one treatment, boom, gone.

People, you know, I have cases like that, but most of the time this is a gradual process. So people should not think it’s a cure-all for everybody. We do have to know who it’s good for. So what we do diagnostically before we do this is I will look at their brain, you know, obviously take some history and all of that business, but we do a quantitative neuroquant MRI. So we look at the different structures inside the brain. You know, we look at…

Bill Gasiamis (19:32)

Dr Bob Hedaya (19:32)

with the neuroquant MRI, it’s like a GPS, right? A triangulation of information and then assuming there’s not a mass or an aneurysm or some reason not to do the laser like an overactive brain or something like that, then we could consider using the laser. And then we also know where we want to do it based on the symptoms, based on the QEG, based on the neuroquant. We will decide what we’re going to target. And then we combine that, sometimes, not always.

Bill Gasiamis (20:05)

Dr Bob Hedaya (20:31)

Bill Gasiamis (20:42)

Hyperbaric oxygen has been a topic that I’ve discussed as well on the podcast and the people that I spoke to about hyperbaric oxygen and guys, I can’t remember right now, but I’ll put a link in the show notes for anyone listening so that you can go and find that episode and have a listen to it. Basically, what I loved about their approach was that they did a massive amount of diagnosis beforehand to determine where the penumbras were and then target those penumbras while the person was in the chamber.

by getting them to do certain exercises that would activate those areas and therefore be targeted. So it sounds like the laser therapy is similar. Tell me about the laser. What kind of a laser is it? How does it get targeted to a specific spot? And what does it do when it goes there? I mean, I imagine it just doesn’t point there and go, I’ll illuminate that and it’ll be better. How does it actually work?

Dr Bob Hedaya (21:18)

Okay, so the laser, there are a bunch of different parameters that we have to adjust for each person. So it’s the frequency, how fast is the wavelength? What’s the wavelength? How many times per second is it pulsed? 10 times per second, 40 times per second, 50 times per second. Is it a 8, 10 nanometer wavelength or is it a 1064 wavelength? How many joules are we delivering?

you know, where are we delivering it? So there are lots and lots of parameters to adjust, right? ⁓ What does it do? So simple, the first thing that it does, it does many, many things, right? But the very, very first thing it does is it actually releases ATP, the energy molecule, from your mitochondria. So it basically, the photon goes to the fourth channel, the fourth complex in the mitochondria, bumps off

the nitric oxide, and that opens the flow of ATP. Well, if your brain, if your neurons have energy, they say, ⁓ energy, ⁓ well, we know what to do with energy. Let’s fix the puddles. Let’s build the roads. Let’s make the connections. Let’s do whatever we got to do. So now you’re getting energy flow. You also get synaptogenesis. You build new synapses. You get production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

Bill Gasiamis (23:01)

Dr Bob Hedaya (23:05)

Bill Gasiamis (23:31)

Dr Bob Hedaya (23:35)

the nutrients, the hormones, get rid of the infections, get rid of the toxins, then we’ll apply the sunlight to the brain, to the plant, right? That was my logic. I thought that made perfect sense. So this woman came to me. She was 70 years old, obese. The husband wanted me to give her the laser. She wouldn’t change her diet, not an iota. High blood pressure, obesity. She could not speak. She would not take a medicine. She would not…

Bill Gasiamis (24:04)

Mm.

Dr Bob Hedaya (24:33)

And I’m just writing, and something pops out of my mouth, God, I need a miracle. So I go into the laser room, and I start doing the laser. She starts talking. I have tears. He has tears. She starts talking. So by the end of like 20 sessions, I’m sitting with her having a 45-minute therapy session, because it turns out she was really severely abused when she was young. ⁓ She’s having a whole conversation with me.

Turns out she’s psychotic also now. She’s also a psychotic and we didn’t know. So she needs to take some medicine for the psychosis because in the middle of the night, she’s going around with a baseball bat and she wants to like do, and she wouldn’t take medicines, I had to stop the laser. But that was an amazing thing because that was one, but with aphasia, typically it’s more gradual, much more gradual. But I have had a couple of patients where,

and a woman came from Chicago and she just started talking also. So everyone’s different. You can’t necessarily come into this expecting that kind of thing is wonderful when it happens, but you

Bill Gasiamis (26:14)

I love the fact that you can intervene with a laser, but also people can intervene with all the things that you said that that patient wasn’t doing beforehand. And that you that’s the top of the hierarchy of how you approach healing the brain is you do all those things. And then you supplement with ⁓ with a therapy like laser or whatever. And you kind of combine that and you make

Dr Bob Hedaya (26:25)

Bill Gasiamis (26:42)

Dr Bob Hedaya (26:48)

It’s all important,

all important. But I will tell you this. I have come to the point now where I believe that like people come to me and they don’t want to do anything and I’m like, okay, because I can jumpstart you, assuming you’re a good candidate. I can jumpstart you with the laser. I could just jumpstart you and then once I’ve jumpstarted you, say, ⁓ yeah, okay, I’ll do this. ⁓ okay, I’ll do a little of this. I’ll do a little. Because I’m bypassing everything and I’m giving you energy.

Right? And so if you have energy, then, you know, there’s a lot that you can do that you couldn’t do before. So I kind of switched my model, really, only because of the accident of this guy who insisted I give his wife the laser, you know.

Bill Gasiamis (27:30)

That’s not a way to go. mean, ⁓ there isn’t one way to solve a problem. there’s probably many iterations of, know, like how you can put that particular, like intervention together for a person that could specify for that individual, we’re going to go down this approach for you. You were going to go down this approach to get you going. Since you have all these, ⁓ challenges and energy is difficult. Maybe we’ll go directly with the laser and then

Dr Bob Hedaya (27:46)

Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (28:09)

Dr Bob Hedaya (28:09)

Bill Gasiamis (28:12)

Dr Bob Hedaya (28:14)

Yeah, yeah

Yeah, if someone comes to me post stroke for example and the laser is appropriate I’m not gonna say well, we’ll get around to laser in six months. I’m not gonna do that They need relief they need help if it can help them Let’s do that. Let’s jump on that and you know, and then is the other stuff we need to do will do it And there’s usually stuff to do ⁓ But I want to get the healing remember the laser is healing

It’s clearing out proteins, reducing inflammation, increasing blood flow, synaptogenesis, doing all these good things over the course of time. So you really want to get that process going, I feel, as soon as you can. then, okay, now you can work on the diet that’s going to take some time, check the hormones, make sure there’s no infections, toxic element, you know, all that functional medicine stuff. Maybe you need some medication for depression, you know, it’s having a…

a phaser or a stroke or a head injury or some of things like this, they turn your life upside down better than I know. It’s ⁓ incomprehensible, really.

Bill Gasiamis (29:26)

With a laser, how much laser for how long, how often?

Dr Bob Hedaya (29:37)

Number two, the voltage is so low, if you’re only getting 2.6 % through and it’s so low to begin with, what do you think you’re actually delivering into the tissue? know, it’s hard to imagine that you’re delivering much. there, know, Henderson, I think, wrote an article where he showed there’s no penetration into the brain. But the studies do show cognitive benefit. So it could be an indirect effect or, you know, all the studies are done by the companies that make the…

the helmet, there could be some bias. I don’t know the answer there. The laser ⁓ itself is more potent, so we’re doing, say, 30 watts. So the equivalent of a 30-watt light bulb, right? They might be doing half a watt, a very, very, very dim light bulb. We’re doing 30 watts. Now, we’re targeting the area or areas that we want to hit. Now, it goes through 2.6.

Bill Gasiamis (30:34)

Dr Bob Hedaya (31:03)

And actually it was the patient who her husband contacted you. I was treating her with a certain amount of energy and then after about five sessions I went up, I doubled the energy and boom, she had a response. But we have no way of knowing that’s what she needed. It’s all a calculation. But she, you know…

Bill Gasiamis (31:39)

Dr Bob Hedaya (32:00)

Bill Gasiamis (32:06)

Dr Bob Hedaya (32:24)

all those squiggly lines, you’ll see like 19 or 20 squiggly lines and you’re like, what is this spaghetti? I don’t know what this is. And I mean, even in medical school, we looked at it and our eyes would glaze over because who knows what it is. So the neurologists look at it and they’ll scroll through it and look for certain patterns to see is there a seizure or is there area of damage where there’s a lot of slowing like the frequency of the electricity slows down if there’s tissue damage, right? And they look

visually to see what they can find. But we know with AI, you can get the patterns that you can determine. There’s no way the human mind, the human eye, a trained eye, I don’t care how long you’ve been looking at EEGs, there’s no way you can extract this data that we now extract. So the quantitative is actually looking at the quantity of this, what’s going on here versus the quantity of electricity that’s here versus what’s here versus what’s here.

And then all of that is calculated and they say, ⁓ well, if this is high and this is here and this is low here and this is this, well, that means they’re coming from this deeper place here and that’s under functioning. And, you know, that’s done over thousands, thousands of points in a very short order, very short order. It’s amazing. I can’t imagine practicing without this. So now I can look at the thalamus. I can look at the putamen.

Bill Gasiamis (34:07)

Dr Bob Hedaya (34:17)

Bill Gasiamis (34:40)

Dr Bob Hedaya (34:45)

train them, et cetera. And then we have that data that we treat, and then we measure and see is it getting better? Do we need to change the protocol? It’s not helping, it is helping, et cetera.

Bill Gasiamis (35:29)

with stroke, so many things come from stroke that people are not equipped to handle. You know, firstly, all of the, ⁓ the parts relating to, ⁓ simply the person discovering them, they’re, they’re immortal after all, you know, you become a mere mortal immediately and you kind of work out the most terrible thing that could have happened to me happened. My brain is injured and all these things go away. Right. And then.

Unfortunately, like I think it’s 30 % the studies of people who experienced stroke will then also experience depression. Like as if recovering from stroke isn’t enough and all the deficits that you also have to recover from depression. What’s it like? How can that be supported with this particular method, this approach that we’re discussing here today?

Dr Bob Hedaya (36:28)

Bill Gasiamis (36:44)

for us in touch.

Dr Bob Hedaya (36:58)

good in order to not be depressed, right? If you have low thyroid, you’re much more likely to be depressed in the face of a stroke or other stresses. So we were kind of a little bit of a bind there because we went and treated, but it’s too sensitive. So anyway, we’re actually threading that needle nicely and we’re moving slowly and carefully and keeping, there’s no seizure activity now. But you have to treat the depression because of the depression itself.

Bill Gasiamis (37:29)

Dr Bob Hedaya (37:55)

I’m going to give up. There’s no room for that. I mean, of course you feel it and I mean, it’s all natural feelings, but you have to really be determined and that’s essential. so with depression that is ⁓ really can get in the way. So we treat it. The laser can treat it. Sometimes pharmacology, sometimes therapy, sometimes yoga, know, hyperbaric, all these things that we do with the nutrition, making sure the hormones are right. All these things work together, you know.

Bill Gasiamis (38:14)

I love all of those things that you mentioned. And then all of a sudden you just throw in yoga. mean, it just, it’s so counterintuitive, isn’t it? When you have a conversation about all these acronyms and all these tests and lasers and all that kind of stuff, and then you just throw in yoga casually like that. It’s, and we underplay it, but it’s such a massive thing in the picture of what creates the environment for a good recovery, but also

I love that you mentioned the thyroid in that conversation as well about depression and what can also be a trigger to depression and people may have depression, never check their thyroid and not know that it’s a thing. Now I’ve had thyroid surgery, have ⁓ half of my thyroid removed because I had a massive ⁓ goiter on one side and that was such a difficult thing to discover and have to go through 16 months after brain surgery.

but they only discovered it after my brain surgery when they did a chest x-ray, because I wasn’t recovering properly and they found that I had this goitre which would have been there for a long, long time impacting my health and all sorts of things. And I make that point because often people who have had a stroke and can’t speak, for example, have aphasia, ⁓ or their arm doesn’t work or the leg doesn’t work properly, will say, I just wanna fix this thing. If I could speak,

Dr Bob Hedaya (39:40)

Bill Gasiamis (40:09)

Dr Bob Hedaya (40:31)

Bill Gasiamis (40:38)

Dr Bob Hedaya (40:59)

Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (41:08)

It’s a whole, know, holistic is the word that you hear, but it is a broader conversation that people need to be having. And that sounds like what you guys do. It sounds like the conversation doesn’t encompass, it encompasses everything. It doesn’t just focus on one intervention.

Dr Bob Hedaya (41:56)

Bill Gasiamis (41:58)

Dr Bob Hedaya (42:26)

Bill Gasiamis (42:28)

Dr Bob Hedaya (42:54)

Bill Gasiamis (43:04)

Yeah. Not everybody needs to do everything to achieve significant results, but it’d be amazing to be able to find the things and target those, the ones that you’re to get the most bang for buck on. So you’re to putting time and effort into things that are not getting results. For example, an led hat from, uh, Amazon for $9 that you put on your head. And it’s basically just a red light hat. It’s not really doing the thing, right?

Dr Bob Hedaya (43:32)

Ha ha ha.

Bill Gasiamis (43:49)

Dr Bob Hedaya (44:00)

Bill Gasiamis (44:15)

Dr Bob Hedaya (44:44)

Bill Gasiamis (44:45)

go get a bottle of Methylene blue from somewhere and just start taking it and have no idea what they’re doing and, and, and, know, what they could hope for. They could be making things worse than for themselves and actually making themselves, um, like make things a lot harder for themselves. So, uh, my point is this all needs to be done under medical supervision. Typically when you, somebody reaches out to you,

how do you begin the conversation and then how does that person engage with you? And then what happens after they’re treated? Because often I know from my experience with all my neurologists, et cetera, very rarely do I see anybody a second time, six months, 12 months, 18 months, five years down the track. You usually go in, they patch you up, they send you home, you get back to your life and then maybe you do one MRI.

Dr Bob Hedaya (45:36)

Bill Gasiamis (45:44)

Dr Bob Hedaya (45:52)

and she’ll talk with them for 15 to 30 minutes and kind of tell them what’s going on and see if they, you know, the fit is good, et cetera. And then they have an opportunity if they want to meet with me on Zoom for 15 to 30 minutes and ⁓ I’ll figure out, can I help them? Can I not help them? Is it a good fit, et cetera? And then if it looks like, you know, green light and they decide they want to move forward and it makes sense, then we’ll schedule an evaluation.

The time duration of the evaluation depends on what kind of patient. It could be a couple of hours, could be four and a half hours. But usually for neurological patients, straightforward, it’s a shorter evaluation. And before the evaluation, we’ll collect the neuro-quant and the QEG and the old records, et cetera. And then I will go through all of that data plus lab data that we collect. And I will then have an idea.

Okay, what’s going on here? Now there’s all these things. There’s digestion, there’s nutrition, there’s immune function, inflammation, toxins, hormones, all the hormones, structural issues, chiropractic issues, traumatic brain injury, cardiovascular issues, et cetera. We look at all of that and then to see what are the players here and spiritual, social resources, connectivity. We look at all of this.

And then we have a whole picture of what’s going on. And then we can figure out, okay, how do we want to approach this? And sometimes we approach it very lightly. Say we just start with the laser, that’s it. Or sometimes somebody says, no, I want to really get in there and fix everything that’s wrong. Okay, well, we identified these five or six things that need correction. So let’s stage this in order. And that’s what we’ll do.

And everyone’s different. And then we have follow-up depending on what we need in two weeks, in a month, six weeks, not usually six weeks. Once things are stable, it could be every two, three months or four months. But in the meantime, I’m in the boat rowing, paddling with them. That’s the way I do it. I treat people, really, I try to treat people just like I would want to be treated myself, like I would want my family to be treated.

I do the very best. I love what I do, you know what I mean? I just love what I do and I try to do the best, highest quality. And it’s not that I’m perfect, not that I don’t make mistakes, ⁓ not that I know everything because that’s for sure that I don’t, but that’s my approach. So I try to be in the boat with the patient. As long as the patient’s paddling, I’m paddling just as hard, if not.

Bill Gasiamis (49:02)

Dr Bob Hedaya (49:22)

yeah, yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (49:30)

I’m going to learn about this particular ⁓ spiritual journey or whatever and go through it and do whatever it is that they need to do to kind of start beginning the healing journey in their own special unique way. It’s really important that spirituality gets addressed and it’s not glossed over. And I’m not saying that you did or I did or we do, but in the back of the minds, stroke survivors may not consider that being

important.

Dr Bob Hedaya (50:31)

Not everyone is oriented this way. So, you know, I just saw a businessman, very successful businessman ⁓ last week. He doesn’t want to just, you know, get me back online. OK, I don’t want to hear this mumbo jumbo and I just can’t. I don’t want to delve into it. Just get me better. know. But other people are like, I want to find the meaning, you know, and it’s very important.

to find the when I think generally for most people finding the meaning in it is critical. And I’ll say one thing, my mother, may she rest in peace, was in the emergency room, probably 25, 30 years ago, I don’t know, something was wrong, she was in the emergency room for seven, eight hours or whatever, and some guy comes by and says, ma’am, can I get you a sandwich? And she says, oh yeah, please, please get me a sandwich.

He gets her a tuna fish sandwich, whatever it is, right? He leaves. She’s so grateful. She’s so grateful that she volunteers in the hospital for 20 years. Okay? This guy has no idea what he did and all the people that he helped through her, right? So you’re, you you and you’re not just you, but we, each of us in our small minds, we have no idea.

the impact we have on other people. So if it’s important to a person to have a meaningful life, understand that you don’t have to be running a company. You can smile at a stranger, change their day. There are things that you can do and you have an impact. Now, that’s a small consolation when you’re dealing with a stroke, obviously, but that’s when you kind of want to work to a meaningful ⁓ attitude and a good attitude. So yes, the spirituality is…

many people very important.

Bill Gasiamis (52:54)

Dr Bob Hedaya (53:15)

Bill Gasiamis (53:20)

Dr Bob Hedaya (53:27)

Bill Gasiamis (53:50)

Dr Bob Hedaya (53:56)

Right.

That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. And it gives me chills because, you know, I know his wife is suffering, you know, and ⁓ but she’s making really great headway, but it’s hard, you know. But look at look that he’s reaching out and he cares enough about other people and to and make her journey and what she’s gone through and what she’s learned be useful to other people. That’s it. That’s just beautiful. I mean, that that

speaks volumes about him and her.

Bill Gasiamis (54:32)

and her and your work because your work is not unique. You’re not the only one doing this kind of work. I think there’s only kind of a small percentage of ⁓ medical professionals in the field that are practicing in this way. And hopefully that continues to grow. ⁓ If somebody wanted to, well, somebody lots of people are listening to this today. If anyone wanted to reach out ⁓ who thinks, you know, that

they might be able to ⁓ benefit from or go down this kind of approach. How should they go about that? What questions should they be asking of you, et cetera? Like how do they begin? Because this is a different conversation than I have ⁓ neurological injury, have aphasia. It needs to be positioned differently, this conversation.

Dr Bob Hedaya (55:29)

Bill Gasiamis (55:33)

Dr Bob Hedaya (55:38)

I would

say that they should go to the website for the Institute for Functional Medicine. And there’s a tab. This is find the practitioner. And make sure you look for a practitioner that is certified, fully certified. And then investigate the practitioners who are in your area and see if they experience.

in this area. there are not

I’m not aware of, there’s a guy somewhere in the Midwest here who’s using a laser, I believe. And then maybe other people that I don’t know about using lasers, but I’m not aware of anybody that I could say, go see this person for this quantitative EEG guided transcranial photobiomodulation. I’m not saying that that is readily available. It’s not. But the whole functional medicine thing, there are a lot of practitioners. And I think that’s the way to go there.

Just do your homework.

Bill Gasiamis (56:48)

Yeah. Cool. Your organization is whole psychiatry and the brain recovery center. Is that right? Okay. So the psychiatry part of it, ⁓ people might be listening and going, well, that doesn’t apply to me, the specific word specifically doesn’t need to apply to an individual to engage with you because, we’re not just dealing with the psychiatry part of somebody’s recovery.

Dr Bob Hedaya (56:56)

Thank you.

No, no, we’re dealing, we treat psychiatric,

but we treat neurological. You know, I started as a psychiatrist. was, you know, certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, but I was doing psychiatry. then, you know, just following, you know, learning and whatever, I ended up, you know, doing some neurology here. And so, but we didn’t change the name to the whole neuropsychiatry and brain recovery. Maybe we should, or maybe the whole brain recovery center or something like that.

So, you we do both, no, and if, and if, I can’t be helpful, of course, I’m going to tell people this, we really don’t want to waste people’s time, energy, money, et cetera. ⁓ But it’s, it’s been, you know, I have to say an amazing journey. And I would say when you follow for me, this is me, my life, following my passion of learning about the brain and understanding the brain and

Bill Gasiamis (57:45)

Dr Bob Hedaya (58:14)

It’s just logic, you know, don’t have to be genius. You’re just looking for truth. You’re looking for… It’s logic, common sense, right? But you’re trying to help people and get to solutions, right?

Bill Gasiamis (58:48)

Yeah, absolutely. As you, as we wrap up this final question I want to ask you specifically is, so you use the phrase good news for people who are struggling in the email that brought you here, right? In the conversation that we had. So what is that good news specifically and what should a stroke survivor who has been told they’ve plateaued or who has a fascia ⁓ that’s been called permanent.

Dr Bob Hedaya (59:08)

Thank

Bill Gasiamis (59:22)

Dr Bob Hedaya (59:30)

and you give it all it needs, nutrients, light, hormones, get rid of the toxins, great stuff can happen. There is hope, there is so much hope. But it takes that attitude, you can’t say, I’m just gonna give up because that’s exactly the wrong attitude, all right? You have to have the attitude that says I can do it. Doesn’t mean you don’t have a bad day, of course you have a bad day, of course.

But you’re going to persist, right? You’re going to set that master awareness in your head that says, I’m going to do this. Or I’m going to die trying, OK? That’s it. I’m going to do it, or I’m going to die trying. And if you do that, there’s no end to where you can go.

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:47)

Dr Bob Hedaya (1:00:51)

Yeah, think, you know, obviously I can’t treat everybody and obviously my methodology is pretty specialized. And so I’ve embarked over the last year on a couple of programs to try and train physicians. And I think people should know that let’s say you’re living, you know, the other part of this country ⁓ and you want this treatment, but you’re in Nevada or California or something like that.

But if you can find the physician there who’s interested in this, who works in the brain area, I can actually do a consultation and kind of guide the evaluation and the treatment and then make a plan and then hand that off and then I’m always available for consultation if needed. So we call these our educational consults. And then of course, if there’s any neurologists or psychiatrists who want to learn the method, we have actually a mentorship program we’ve been working on. Actually the former

⁓ head of education for the Institute for Functional Medicine and I have been working on developing this program now for a few months and we’re just actually tying it up now. So that’s available or will be shortly available if someone wants mentorship in this. And so those are ways I’m trying to get this out there because I’m just one guy.

Bill Gasiamis (1:02:15)

Dr Bob Hedaya (1:02:19)

Bill Gasiamis (1:02:22)

I have that similar kind of sensation and feeling with the podcast. I’ve done 400 episodes and it’s really challenging to get an episode out every week. But ⁓ because of all the booking system and most of the things is automated, what happens is I look at my calendar and there’s another appointment for a podcast episode. And I find myself sitting in front of the chair and pressing record and then just there goes another Saturday afternoon or a Sunday afternoon.

Dr Bob Hedaya (1:02:47)

Bill Gasiamis (1:03:03)

Dr Bob Hedaya (1:03:14)

yeah, it’s, I can’t, it’s, you know, it’s a tough one. I love it, it’s a good problem to have.

Bill Gasiamis (1:03:21)

Bill Gasiamis (1:03:26)

If you want to explore Dr. Hedaya’s work, head to wholepsychiatry.com. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner closer to home, the Institute for Functional Medicine at ifm.org and use their practitioner finder. Look for someone who is fully certified. I also mentioned a previous episode on hyperbaric oxygen therapy with Dr. Amir Hadani.

I’ll link that in the show notes because the two conversations sit alongside each other in a way I think you’ll find very useful. If this episode opened up something for you, please share it. Send it to someone in your life who is still searching for answers, be it a stroke survivor, a caregiver, a family member who needs to hear that the story doesn’t have to end at the plateau. Also, my book, The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened is available at recoveryafterstroke.com.

And if this show has helped you, you can support it at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. I’m Bill Gasiarmus. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post The Laser That Restarts Brains – Dr. Robert Hedaya on Photobiomodulation, QEEG, and Whole Psychiatry After Stroke appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

If you caught my recent video about UCLA’s discovery of the first stroke rehabilitation drug that rebuilds brain connections in mice, you know the incredible excitement it generated.

If you missed it, the link is in the description below. It’s definitely worth a watch.

Because of the huge response and the many messages from stroke survivors asking for more real recovery options, I wanted to take a deeper look at another breakthrough:

The Griffith University study on using a drug called etanercept to help stroke survivors, not just weeks after a stroke, but even years later.

And trust me, the results are eye-opening.

Today, I’ll walk you through what the study found, how it was set up, what it means for all of us, and where things are heading next.

Researchers at Griffith University in Australia asked a bold and important question:

Can etanercept help stroke survivors still living with chronic pain and movement problems, even many years after their stroke?

They weren’t looking for tiny improvements – they wanted to see fast, meaningful, life-changing results.

This study wasn’t designed for people who have just left the hospital. It was for survivors who had had their strokes at least six months ago, with some having had strokes over 15 years earlier.

Chronic post-stroke pain, or CPSP, is one of the most devastating outcomes of a stroke.

It’s not just muscle pain. It’s deep nerve pain, constant, burning pain that regular medications like oxycodone or pregabalin often can’t touch.

Researchers now understand that this ongoing pain is often caused by inflammation in the brain, specifically driven by a chemical called TNF-alpha.

Etanercept is a drug that’s been used safely for over 20 years to treat arthritis and autoimmune conditions because it blocks TNF-alpha.

The Griffith team wanted to test whether using etanercept to block brain inflammation could unlock recovery, even years after a stroke.

This wasn’t a casual or loose experiment – it was a carefully designed, professional clinical trial.

Here’s how it worked:

Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups:

Each person received two treatments:

The injections were given near the neck in the perispinal space, allowing the drug to travel quickly to the brain.

The researchers focused on solid, measurable outcomes:

Participants were monitored closely for 30 days after their first injection.

Here’s what the trial revealed:

Meanwhile, the placebo group showed almost no change.

If these results hold up in larger, longer studies:

However, it’s important to remember:

But it’s a huge, hopeful step forward.

It’s important to acknowledge someone who helped make all this possible: Dr. Edward Tobinick.

Dr. Tobinick was the first to use perispinal etanercept for stroke survivors back in the early 2000s.

He was featured on 60 Minutes Australia in 2011, showing stunning recoveries that few thought were possible.

Despite facing skepticism, lack of pharmaceutical company support, and high treatment costs,

You can find the link to that original 60 Minutes interview in the description.

Because of all the interest from our community,

They’re currently working on new therapies for stroke recovery, and I’ll update you on:

Stay tuned, as soon as I hear back, I’ll share everything with you.

If you’d like to read the full Griffith University study,

The brilliant researchers behind this study include:

They deserve real recognition for pushing this research forward.

If you found this article helpful,

And if you’re listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts,

The post Etanercept and Stroke Recovery: Breakthrough Griffith Trial Results You Need to Hear appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

On 29 April 2021, Cecy Galvan was doing what she had always done, working a client event, surrounded by people, moving at full speed. A celebrity publicist with a client list that included the Wayans Brothers, Cecy had built a career on being present, persuasive, and always on. Then she collapsed in a bathroom in Boston.

She was 47.

A bartender called 911. Doctors found a tear in her aorta. She woke up three days later with a scar and what appeared, initially, to be a second chance. But four months later, she was back in the hospital for aortic repair and heart valve replacement surgery. On 15 September 2021, as she came out of anaesthetic, she had two strokes, one affecting her speech and motor function, one involving her cerebellum. In the hours it takes to close a chest, Cecy’s life changed completely.

Five years later, sitting down to tell her story, she said something that stopped the conversation:

“I just told my friends the other day that my brain is finally back.”

The week before her collapse, Cecy had been dizzy. Vertigo for two days, the kind that made her afraid to drive. It was during the COVID period, and going to a doctor felt like an unnecessary risk. So she pushed through, got on a plane, and made it to the event in Boston.

This is not a story about a woman who was careless. It is a story about how stroke symptoms, particularly in the lead-up to a cardiac event, can present as something mundane and easy to dismiss. Vertigo. Fatigue. A feeling of being slightly off. For Cecy, those were the only signals before everything changed.

Recognising early warning signs of stroke remains one of the most critical conversations in stroke prevention. If symptoms persist, even mildly, seeking medical review is always the right call.

Cecy’s recovery has been shaped by two distinct strokes, both occurring simultaneously during surgery. The effects are layered and ongoing.

Her right vocal cord is paralysed. She walks with a forearm walker indoors but has not yet been able to take it outside. Her core is still rebuilding, and her cerebellum, responsible for balance and coordination, remains affected. Her vision changed: she now needs glasses for reading, something she never needed before. For the first three years after her strokes, she barely remembers anything. She kept a journal and relied on her sister’s videos to piece together what had happened.

Her sister and brother-in-law became her primary carers. They modified their home, building a ramp, converting a shower for wheelchair access and showed up every day with a consistency that Cecy describes as the quiet foundation of her survival. Her parents, both in their late eighties, also cared for her until they passed her father at 90, her mother at 89, in the years following her strokes. The grief of losing them, layered on top of the grief of losing her former life, has been one of the heaviest parts of the journey.

“My whole life changed overnight.” – Cecy Galvan

And yet she keeps going. She does speech therapy exercises daily, recording herself and playing them back. She uses both hands, intentionally brushing teeth with her non-affected hand, rinsing with her affected one. She gets massages weekly. She reads and re-reads books her memory hasn’t yet retained. She is, in her own words, constantly doing the work.

Two of Cecy’s doctors told her she would not walk again. One sent her an email last year to confirm it. A third told her she would improve within six months.

None of them has been entirely right. None of them has been entirely wrong. But the idea that recovery has a fixed deadline, that the brain stops responding to rehabilitation after a set number of days, is a narrative that does genuine harm to stroke survivors.

Cecy’s experience over five years is evidence against it. Her lung capacity has measurably improved. Her speech, which was largely absent for years because she was afraid no one would understand her, has progressed to the point where she is now giving interviews. Her memory, the one she describes as the most disorienting loss, has started to return not all at once, but in a way she can feel and name.

Neuroplasticity does not operate on a clinical deadline. The brain continues to find new pathways when given the right conditions: repetition, intention, rest, and time. Bill’s book 

Bill’s book The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened explores this in depth, drawing on both the research and the lived experience of survivors who were told they had reached their ceiling and then kept going anyway.

Cecy’s advice to someone at the beginning of their recovery is grounded in her own experience of those first disorienting months: the early period matters enormously. The first three to six months are when the brain is most responsive to rehabilitation, and the work done in that window has an outsized impact on long-term outcomes. But that is not where recovery ends.

What carries a survivor through the years that follow is not speed, it is consistency. It is doing the small things every day. Using the affected hand even when it spills water. Recording your voice even when you hate how it sounds. Crying a little, then trying again.

Cecy’s five-year goal is simple and unambiguous: she is going to walk again. She does not know exactly how. She does not need to. The direction is clear.

Recovery after a stroke is rarely a straight line, and no survivor should navigate it alone. If this episode resonated with you, 

If this episode helped you, consider supporting the show at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. Every contribution keeps this content free and accessible for survivors who need it.

Because if Cecy Galvan’s story tells us anything, it is this: five years is not the end of recovery. It might be where it finally begins.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

The post The Brain Came Back – Cecy Galvan on Five Years After Stroke appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

If you caught my recent video about UCLA’s discovery of the first stroke rehabilitation drug that rebuilds brain connections in mice, you know the incredible excitement it generated.

If you missed it, the link is in the description below. It’s definitely worth a watch.

Because of the huge response and the many messages from stroke survivors asking for more real recovery options, I wanted to take a deeper look at another breakthrough:

The Griffith University study on using a drug called etanercept to help stroke survivors, not just weeks after a stroke, but even years later.

And trust me, the results are eye-opening.

Today, I’ll walk you through what the study found, how it was set up, what it means for all of us, and where things are heading next.

Researchers at Griffith University in Australia asked a bold and important question:

Can etanercept help stroke survivors still living with chronic pain and movement problems, even many years after their stroke?

They weren’t looking for tiny improvements – they wanted to see fast, meaningful, life-changing results.

This study wasn’t designed for people who just left the hospital. It was for survivors who had had their strokes at least six months ago, with some having had strokes over 15 years earlier.

Chronic post-stroke pain, or CPSP, is one of the most devastating outcomes of a stroke.

It’s not just muscle pain. It’s deep nerve pain, constant burning pain that regular medications like oxycodone or pregabalin often can’t touch.

Researchers now understand that this ongoing pain is often caused by inflammation in the brain, specifically driven by a chemical called TNF-alpha.

Etanercept is a drug that’s been used safely for over 20 years to treat arthritis and autoimmune conditions because it blocks TNF-alpha.

The Griffith team wanted to test whether using etanercept to block brain inflammation could unlock recovery, even years after a stroke.

This wasn’t a casual or loose experiment – it was a carefully designed, professional clinical trial.

Here’s how it worked:

Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups:

Each person received two treatments:

The injections were given near the neck in the perispinal space, allowing the drug to travel quickly to the brain.

The researchers focused on solid, measurable outcomes:

Participants were monitored closely for 30 days after their first injection.

Here’s what the trial revealed:

Meanwhile, the placebo group showed almost no change.

If these results hold up in larger, longer studies:

However, it’s important to remember:

But it’s a huge, hopeful step forward.

It’s important to acknowledge someone who helped make all this possible: Dr. Edward Tobinick.

Dr. Tobinick was the first to use perispinal etanercept for stroke survivors back in the early 2000s.

He was featured on 60 Minutes Australia in 2011, showing stunning recoveries that few thought were possible.

Despite facing skepticism, a lack of pharmaceutical company support, and high treatment costs,

You can find the link to that original 60 Minutes interview in the description.

Because of all the interest from our community,

They’re currently working on new therapies for stroke recovery, and I’ll update you on:

Stay tuned, as soon as I hear back, I’ll share everything with you.

If you’d like to read the full Griffith University study,

The brilliant researchers behind this study include:

They deserve real recognition for pushing this research forward.

If you found this article helpful,

And if you’re listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts,

The post Etanercept and Stroke Recovery: Breakthrough Griffith Trial Results You Need to Hear appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

On 29 April 2021, Cecy Galvan was doing what she had always done, working a client event, surrounded by people, moving at full speed. A celebrity publicist with a client list that included the Wayans Brothers, Cecy had built a career on being present, persuasive, and always on. Then she collapsed in a bathroom in Boston.

She was 47.

A bartender called 911. Doctors found a tear in her aorta. She woke up three days later with a scar and what appeared, initially, to be a second chance. But four months later, she was back in the hospital for aortic repair and heart valve replacement surgery. On 15 September 2021, as she came out of anaesthetic, she had two strokes, one affecting her speech and motor function, one involving her cerebellum. In the hours it takes to close a chest, Cecy’s life changed completely.

Five years later, sitting down to tell her story, she said something that stopped the conversation:

“I just told my friends the other day that my brain is finally back.”

The week before her collapse, Cecy had been dizzy. Vertigo for two days, the kind that made her afraid to drive. It was during the COVID period, and going to a doctor felt like an unnecessary risk. So she pushed through, got on a plane, and made it to the event in Boston.

This is not a story about a woman who was careless. It is a story about how stroke symptoms, particularly in the lead-up to a cardiac event, can present as something mundane and easy to dismiss. Vertigo. Fatigue. A feeling of being slightly off. For Cecy, those were the only signals before everything changed.

Recognising early warning signs of stroke remains one of the most critical conversations in stroke prevention. If symptoms persist, even mildly, seeking medical review is always the right call.

Cecy’s recovery has been shaped by two distinct strokes, both occurring simultaneously during surgery. The effects are layered and ongoing.

Her right vocal cord is paralysed. She walks with a forearm walker indoors but has not yet been able to take it outside. Her core is still rebuilding, and her cerebellum, responsible for balance and coordination, remains affected. Her vision changed: she now needs glasses for reading, something she never needed before. For the first three years after her strokes, she barely remembers anything. She kept a journal and relied on her sister’s videos to piece together what had happened.

Her sister and brother-in-law became her primary carers. They modified their home, building a ramp, converting a shower for wheelchair access and showed up every day with a consistency that Cecy describes as the quiet foundation of her survival. Her parents, both in their late eighties, also cared for her until they passed her father at 90, her mother at 89, in the years following her strokes. The grief of losing them, layered on top of the grief of losing her former life, has been one of the heaviest parts of the journey.

“My whole life changed overnight.” — Cecy Galvan

And yet she keeps going. She does speech therapy exercises daily, recording herself and playing them back. She uses both hands, intentionally brushing teeth with her non-affected hand, rinsing with her affected one. She gets massages weekly. She reads and re-reads books her memory hasn’t yet retained. She is, in her own words, constantly doing the work.

Two of Cecy’s doctors told her she would not walk again. One sent her an email last year to confirm it. A third told her she would improve within six months.

None of them has been entirely right. None of them has been entirely wrong. But the idea that recovery has a fixed deadline, that the brain stops responding to rehabilitation after a set number of days, is a narrative that does genuine harm to stroke survivors.

Cecy’s experience over five years is evidence against it. Her lung capacity has measurably improved. Her speech, which was largely absent for years because she was afraid no one would understand her, has progressed to the point where she is now giving interviews. Her memory, the one she describes as the most disorienting loss, has started to return not all at once, but in a way she can feel and name.

Neuroplasticity does not operate on a clinical deadline. The brain continues to find new pathways when given the right conditions: repetition, intention, rest, and time. Bill’s book 

Bill’s book The Unexpected Way That A Stroke Became The Best Thing That Happened explores this in depth, drawing on both the research and the lived experience of survivors who were told they had reached their ceiling, and then kept going anyway.

Cecy’s advice to someone at the beginning of their recovery is grounded in her own experience of those first disorienting months: the early period matters enormously. The first three to six months are when the brain is most responsive to rehabilitation, and the work done in that window has an outsized impact on long-term outcomes. But that is not where recovery ends.

What carries a survivor through the years that follow is not speed, it is consistency. It is doing the small things every day. Using the affected hand even when it spills water. Recording your voice even when you hate how it sounds. Crying a little, then trying again.

Cecy’s five-year goal is simple and unambiguous: she is going to walk again. She does not know exactly how. She does not need to. The direction is clear.

Recovery after a stroke is rarely a straight line, and no survivor should navigate it alone. If this episode resonated with you, 

If this episode helped you, consider supporting the show at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. Every contribution keeps this content free and accessible for survivors who need it.

Because if Cecy Galvan’s story tells us anything, it is this: five years is not the end of recovery. It might be where it finally begins.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

The post The Brain Came Back – Cecy Galvan on Five Years After Strok appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

Your brain is the most energy-hungry organ in your body. It accounts for roughly 2% of your body weight but consumes about 20% of all the energy you produce. One of the key molecules driving that energy, CoQ10, quietly declines from your 30s onwards.

For stroke survivors navigating fatigue, cognitive changes, and the long arc of recovery, that raises an obvious question: could supplementing with CoQ10 actually help?

This mini-episode examines the peer-reviewed evidence — not marketing copy, not supplement industry claims, but what clinical research actually shows.

Coenzyme Q10, also known as CoQ10, or ubiquinol in its active form, is a molecule your body produces naturally. It lives primarily in the mitochondria, the energy-producing structures inside your cells, where it plays two roles: generating ATP (the cellular energy currency everything in your biology runs on) and acting as a powerful antioxidant that neutralises free radicals.

When a stroke occurs, whether ischemic or hemorrhagic, the brain undergoes what is called ischemia-reperfusion injury. Blood flow is cut off, then restored. That restoration triggers inflammation and a surge of oxidative stress. Mitochondria in neurons start failing. Cells die not just from the original event but from the metabolic fallout that follows.

CoQ10 goes directly to the site of that problem. If levels can be sustained or supplemented adequately, the theory is that it could reduce the secondary damage unfolding in the hours, days, and weeks after stroke.

A landmark 2025 review published in the journal Nutrients analysed 12 animal studies and 8 human randomised controlled trials examining CoQ10’s effects on the brain. The findings are genuinely mixed, which is exactly what honest science looks like.

In animal models, the evidence is consistent and compelling. Across Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and epilepsy models, CoQ10 supplementation produced meaningful improvements in cognitive function via reduced oxidative stress, decreased neuroinflammation, increased ATP production in the hippocampus, and reductions in amyloid plaque burden.

In humans, the picture is more complex. Of the 8 human RCTs reviewed, 4 showed evidence of benefit in specific conditions. In Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, frontal lobe cognitive function improved significantly. In Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, 150mg daily for 8 to 12 weeks improved working memory and reduced oxidative stress markers. In one Parkinson’s trial combining CoQ10 with creatine, cognitive improvements were measured at 12 and 18 months.

However, trials in Alzheimer’s disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment showed no significant cognitive benefit, even at high doses. There is also an unresolved question: whether supplemental CoQ10 can cross the blood-brain barrier in meaningful quantities. Indirect pathways improved cerebral blood flow, reduced systemic inflammation, and may account for observed effects rather than direct brain-level action.

The honest assessment: the research supports a biologically plausible mechanism. CoQ10 is depleted by the conditions that cause and follow stroke. Supplementation shows real benefit in some neurological conditions. Animal evidence is consistently positive. But large-scale human RCTs specifically in stroke populations are still limited.

Two practical points worth raising with your treating team before starting CoQ10:

Form matters. Ubiquinol (the reduced form) has significantly higher bioavailability than standard ubiquinone, particularly important for older adults whose absorption is lower.

Drug interactions. CoQ10 can reduce the anticoagulant effect of warfarin, a medication many stroke survivors take. It may also amplify blood-pressure-lowering effects of antihypertensive medications.

Take the research, not the marketing, to your neurologist or GP. Ask whether it is appropriate, given your specific stroke type and current medications, what dose the evidence supports, and how long a reasonable trial period looks like.

For more evidence-based tools and conversations with people who have walked this road, Bill’s book is a good place to start: https://recoveryafterstroke.com/book

Support the community on Patreon: https://patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

The post CoQ10 and Stroke Recovery: What the Science Actually Shows appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

I had my first brain haemorrhage at 37. I had no idea that was even possible. Like most people, I associated stroke with age, something that happened to grandparents, not to someone in the middle of building a career and raising a family. That assumption very nearly cost me everything.

It turns out I’m not alone. The data on stroke in young adults is shifting in ways that should concern all of us — and the medical community is paying close attention.

In this episode of the Recovery After Stroke podcast, I spoke with Dr. Guilherme Dabus, President of the Society of Neuro-Interventional Surgery (SNIS) and one of the world’s leading neuro-interventional surgeons. Dr. Dabus performs thrombectomies, a procedure that physically removes blood clots from the brain and has dedicated his career to improving outcomes for stroke patients of all ages. He joined me as part of Survive Stroke Week 2026, a campaign by SNIS to raise awareness about stroke signs, symptoms, and the urgency of acting fast.

What he shared in our conversation is something every family needs to hear.

The assumption that stroke is an old person’s disease is not just wrong, it’s dangerous. Recent data shows that the number of patients under 65 experiencing stroke is increasing. Dr. Dabus is unambiguous about why.

“A lot of it has to do with our lifestyle,” he told me. “Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sedentarism, these are risk factors for stroke, and they’re affecting younger people more than ever.”

But lifestyle isn’t the only factor. Dr. Dabus also highlighted migraines and autoimmune diseases as stroke risk factors that are often diagnosed late, if at all. These conditions are harder to identify, harder to control, and disproportionately affect younger patients who may not yet be seeing a doctor regularly.

The takeaway is uncomfortable but important: you cannot assume you are too young, too healthy, or too active to be at risk. Stroke does not make those calculations.

The single most important thing you can do for someone having a stroke is recognise it quickly and call emergency services immediately. In the United States, that means 911. In Australia, triple zero.

Dr. Dabus uses the acronym BEFAST as a tool for rapid recognition:

“If you feel someone may be having a stroke, just call 911. We’re going to get you checked. If in the end you’re not having a stroke, good for you. But if you are, you need to be in the hospital.” — Dr. Guilherme Dabus

One of the most honest things Dr. Dabus said in our conversation was this: a person having a stroke is often unable to call for help themselves. They may not be able to move, speak, or comprehend what is happening. That means it falls to the people around them, partners, colleagues, friends, to act. Community awareness is not optional. It is the first link in the chain of survival.

During a stroke, a blood vessel in the brain becomes blocked or bursts. The brain, or a significant portion of it, is suddenly deprived of oxygen. Two million brain cells die every minute if this continues.

That number deserves to sit for a moment. Two million per minute.

Some of those cells are in the part of the brain that controls movement. Others control speech, comprehension, memory, or personality. The longer the blockage continues, the more of those cells are lost permanently. And while some surrounding cells remain viable, they are not yet dead, just starved. Every minute of delay narrows the window for recovery.

“The sooner you get to medical attention, the sooner your vessel gets unblocked, and the blood flow is restored, the greater the chance that you’re going to do well,” Dr. Dabus told me. Research supports this: for every ten minutes saved getting to appropriate treatment, a patient gains roughly one additional month of disability-free life.

For the most severe type of ischemic stroke, where a major vessel in the brain is blocked, the treatment is a thrombectomy. Dr. Dabus performs these procedures regularly, and his description of what happens is both technical and quietly extraordinary.

Access is gained through the groin or wrist. A catheter navigates through the body’s vascular system to the neck, and a smaller device reaches the site of the clot. The clot is removed. Blood flow is restored. In some cases, a patient who arrived at the hospital paralysed and unable to speak walks out of the procedure room close to normal.

“You see the patient improvement really in front of your eyes,” he said. “That’s probably one of the most impactful things one can do in medicine nowadays.”

The outcome is not guaranteed Dr. Dabus was honest about that, too. Even with a technically successful procedure, if the brain damage was already too extensive, deficits can remain. But with early intervention, the success rate climbs significantly. Time, again, is everything.

For those who do experience lasting deficits, Dr. Dabus offered something that will resonate with every stroke survivor reading this. His own mother had a stroke at 49. He has seen recovery from both sides.

“Stroke rehabilitation is truly a mindset,” he said. “You really need to work very hard, and the improvements will come.”

The research consistently shows that rehabilitation, physical, occupational, and speech therapy, continues to yield results years and even decades after a stroke. The brain retains more plasticity than medicine once believed. Progress is possible. But it requires showing up, consistently, over time.

If you are navigating recovery right now and wondering whether the effort is worth it, the answer from the science, from the surgeons, and from the 400-plus survivors I have interviewed on this podcast is yes. The work you put in today compounds over time in ways that are genuinely hard to predict.

For a deeper exploration of the tools that support recovery, you can find my book at recoveryafterstroke.com/book.

And if this kind of conversation matters to you, if you believe that stroke survivors deserve better information, better support, and better community, consider supporting the podcast on Patreon. Every contribution keeps these conversations going.

recoveryafterstroke.com/book

patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke

Stroke does not discriminate by age. But awareness, fast action, and the right treatment can change everything.

This blog is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your doctor before making any changes to your health or recovery plan.

The transcript will be available soon…

The post Time Is Brain – Dr Guilherme Dabus on Strokes, Thrombectomy, and Why Acting Fast Saves Lives appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

When I first heard about EECP therapy in the context of stroke recovery, I was skeptical. It’s a cardiac device approved in Australia for stable angina and congestive heart failure. Stroke is not on the label. So why are we talking about it on a stroke recovery podcast?

Because the mechanism is fascinating. And the research, while still emerging, is pointing somewhere worth paying attention to.

In this episode, I sat down with Jack Clifford, a heart disease patient who discovered EECP therapy and began exploring its potential beyond its approved indications. What started as a cardiac conversation quickly became one of the most scientifically interesting discussions I’ve had on the show.

EECP stands for Enhanced External Counterpulsation. The treatment involves a set of pneumatic cuffs fitted around the calves, thighs, and buttocks. These cuffs inflate and deflate in precise synchrony with the heartbeat, inflating during the heart’s resting phase (diastole) to push blood back toward the heart, and deflating just before the heart contracts.

The result is an increase in blood flow and a specific type of fluid shear stress on blood vessel walls. It’s that shear stress that makes things interesting.

To understand why EECP therapy might be relevant to stroke survivors, you need to understand two terms: angiogenesis and arteriogenesis.

Angiogenesis is the sprouting of entirely new capillary vessels — the body builds small blood channels where none existed before. Arteriogenesis is different: it’s the remodelling of pre-existing, dormant collateral vessels into functional bypass channels. Think of it like upgrading a dirt track into a highway. The track was always there; the body just wasn’t using it.

When blood flow is obstructed, whether by a blocked coronary artery or a stroke, the body can, under the right conditions, activate these collateral pathways. The shear stress produced by EECP therapy appears to be one of the triggers that stimulate arteriogenesis. By generating repeated waves of increased blood flow, the treatment creates the mechanical signal that tells blood vessel walls to grow and remodel.

This is why cardiac researchers originally developed EECP for heart patients. But it raises a legitimate scientific question: could the same mechanism support blood flow recovery in the brain after stroke?

A 2026 meta-analysis published in the QJM: An International Journal of Medicine examined 15 randomized controlled trials involving 506 participants, looking specifically at EECP’s effects on functional outcomes in stroke patients. The results showed statistically significant improvements, with EECP outperforming control conditions on standard functional recovery measures.

This is preliminary evidence, not a settled clinical consensus. The studies are relatively small, the methodology varies across trials, and EECP remains off-label for stroke in Australia. But for a therapy with a well-understood safety profile and an existing approval framework, 15 studies and 506 participants is not nothing. It’s enough to warrant serious discussion.

Jack came to EECP as a patient, not a researcher. His experience with heart disease led him to explore the therapy, and he’s spent considerable time understanding the evidence base and connecting with practitioners. He’s not a clinician, and neither am I, but what we can do together is examine what the research actually says, what the mechanism actually is, and what questions remain unanswered.

In our conversation, we discussed:

This episode is not medical advice. It is a conversation about an area of emerging research that I find scientifically credible and worth understanding. The goal is to help you ask better questions, not to tell you what treatment to pursue.

Research cited: Zhao et al. (2026). Enhanced external counterpulsation for ischaemic stroke: a systematic review and meta-analysis. QJM: An International Journal of Medicine. DOI: 10.1093/qjmed/hcag010.

Bill Gasiamis sits down with Jack Clifford to explore EECP therapy, a TGA-approved cardiac treatment that may stimulate the growth of new blood vessels. Together, they examine the emerging research on angiogenesis, arteriogenesis, and whether this off-label approach holds promise for stroke survivors seeking to improve blood flow to the brain.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction – EECP Therapy
06:06 Recognizing Health Issues and Seeking Help
09:50 Hospital Experience and Heart Health
12:12 Decisions Against Medical Advice
16:28 Exploring Alternative Treatments
18:06 Understanding Enhanced External Counter Pulsation (EECP)
21:58 The Mechanism of EECP
27:03 Personal Transformation Through EECP
30:29 Lifestyle Changes and Holistic Health
34:35 The Impact of Stress on Health
38:30 The Journey of Writing a Book
43:29 The Role of EECP in Heart Health
48:21 Raising Awareness for EECP Therapy
56:05 Exploring the Future of EECP Therapy

Transcript:

Jack Clifford (00:00)
Mine was really severe. 100 % blocked in my widow maker, the left anterior descending. I’m 95 in my left coronary artery and in my right main, I am 80%. And I’m still that way today, but I can run a sub seven mile.

Bill Gasiamis (00:16)
Welcome to the Recovery After Stroke podcast. I am your host, Bill Gassiamus. Before we get into today’s interview, I need to share something important.

The topic we’re exploring today involves a medical device called an EACP, Enhanced External Counterpulsation Machine. In Australia, EACP is registered with the Therapeutic Goods Administration for the treatment of stable angina and congestive heart failure. It is not approved for stroke. What we are discussing today is emerging off-label research, not a treatment recommendation.

Everything in this episode is for informational purposes only. This is not medical advice. Please speak with your treating physician before pursuing any treatment, therapy or intervention discussed here. With that said, let’s talk about something that genuinely fascinated me when I started reading the research. Your body has the capacity to grow new blood vessels, not just small capillaries, but to remodel dormant pre-existing channels into

functional bypass routes. Scientists call this arteriogenesis. There’s also angiogenesis, the sprouting of entirely new Both processes matter deeply for stroke because stroke is fundamentally a blood flow problem.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. A cardiac therapy developed for heart patients, not stroke patients, trigger exactly this kind of vascular remodeling. And in 2026, a meta-analysis published in the QJM across 15 randomized controlled trials and 506 participants found that EECP

produced statistically significant improvements in functional outcomes for ischemic stroke patients. Now, that’s not proof. That’s not a green light to go and get an EECP, but it is worth a serious conversation. My guest today is Jack Clifford. Jack is a heart disease patient who discovered EECP therapy while managing his own cardiac condition and who has since spent considerable time investigating its potential.

beyond cardiac care. I should tell you, I was skeptical going into this conversation, but I’ve learned that skepticism without curiosity isn’t really skepticism. It’s just closed mindedness. So I read the research and then I sat down with Jack. So if you find this episode valuable, I’d love for you to grab a copy of my book,

The unexpected way that a stroke became the best thing that happened at recoveryafterstroke.com/book. And if you want to support the show, you can join Patreon at patreon.com/recoveryafterstroke. And I want to thank everyone who is supporting me on Patreon, especially the people that have been around for a long time and the people who have just recently signed up. I very much appreciate it. And now here’s my conversation with Jack Clifford.

Bill Gasiamis (03:19)
Welcome to the podcast.

Jack Clifford (03:22)
Thanks, Bill. Great to be here.

Bill Gasiamis (03:24)
Let’s give the listeners a bit of a background understanding of why you’re on the podcast. You’re not a stroke survivor, but we have something in common as ⁓ somebody who has been unwell before myself and you in the past. Tell me a little bit about your journey to the podcast So we just kind of give people an understanding as to how it is that somebody who’s not a stroke survivor.

Jack Clifford (03:34)
We do.

Bill Gasiamis (03:51)
how we ended up chatting together?

Jack Clifford (03:54)
Yeah, absolutely. So the quick version here is ⁓ I was on the brink five years ago of having ⁓ unsentable emergency triple bypass surgery. And ⁓ I chose a different path, which we’ll get to. ⁓ But you you have some level of placking if you have a stroke, typically, depends on the stroke, but that’s typically the case. And in my case, I had placking in my coronary arteries.

So it resulted in heart disease.

Mine was really severe. 100 % blocked in my widow maker, the left anterior descending. ⁓ I’m 95 in my ⁓ left coronary artery and in my right main, I am 80%. And I’m still that way today, but I can run a sub seven mile.

I can do some things that a guy that’s as blocked up as that should not theoretically be able to do. ⁓

Bill Gasiamis (04:49)
All right.

Tell me about life before the injury. What kind of work did you do? How did you go about life? What was generally a day like for you?

Jack Clifford (04:59)
Yeah. So I’m retired military guy. Um, so, you know, been in the military most of my life, um, retired about 10 years ago, a little over that. And, um, so I’ve always been a pretty fit guy. It wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t a fitness issue per se. Um, and, uh, I, I, I had kind of lost some of my self care because my wife had been going through some real significant medical issues that really required my full attention for quite a while.

And because of that, really stopped taking care of myself in the ways I had in the past for about 10 years. And when we had just moved to Florida, I started trying to take care of myself again. And that’s when I discovered all these problems.

Bill Gasiamis (05:44)
So

what does not taking care of yourself look like though?

Jack Clifford (05:47)
Gotta be in a couch potato and being on my computer way too much research and for ⁓ trying to help my wife get better and hold down a job at the same time and raise a family and all these other things that took the priority off of me in that sense that one should be taking care of themselves, meaning exercising, meaning eating the right foods, so on and

Bill Gasiamis (06:09)
You know, caregivers tend to die before the person they’re caring for much more often. And it’s cause of that reason, right? Because time is really taken up by especially full-time caregiving with somebody’s in the house and they need caregiving. need care. The caregiver tends to neglect themselves in every way, shape and form and tends to ⁓ make it about the other person. And then the other person.

Jack Clifford (06:14)
I’ve seen that and heard about it.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (06:39)
seems to be doing okay, but the caregiver is struggling and doesn’t ask for help and doesn’t go and doesn’t go and get looked after. And then things tend to catch up with them and they become the ⁓ sickest person in that relationship.

Jack Clifford (06:55)
It’s

like that whole put your oxygen mask on first on the airplane type thing, right? Like, you know, we can’t we can’t give what we don’t have to give

Bill Gasiamis (07:01)
Uh-huh.

Yeah.

So you, did you notice, did you notice the steady decline in your health? Did you kind of go, I’m not feeling right. I’m a feel a bit sluggish like 10 years down the track, or did it just creep up on you? then you got to this point.

Jack Clifford (07:15)
It

really crept, it really crept. I, you know, like I had initially exercise induced angina, but it wasn’t much exercise that induced the angina. And then it very quickly progressed to trying to walk and getting out of breath and, know, at very basic walking speeds, just moderately paced, you know, anything anybody would do out in your neighborhood. ⁓

Bill Gasiamis (07:39)
Did you know that you

had an angina?

Jack Clifford (07:41)
I did, yeah. I didn’t have a big heart attack episode like some people have. I’m 100 % blocked. There’s no heart attack to happen, right? Because the stuff is, I’m so blocked that it’s just a pure blood flow issue. A lot of people don’t understand that that 50 % blockage is a huge risk for a heart attack because you’re gonna burst a plaque and then go from 50 % to 100 % like that. But you know about collaterals.

And if you have collaterals in place, the blood’s not getting flowing this way, you’re gonna recruit some lead oval collaterals to be able to just get by with your activities of day living. But if you don’t push yourself, you don’t know that you don’t have enough blood flow to do these other things.

Bill Gasiamis (08:22)
Okay, so you got to the point where you were so unwell as far as the blood vessels around your heart were so unwell, they were so blocked that angina led to another escalation or something happened that got you to the point where you realized, okay, things are not good. Now, tell me what angina is exactly and what it’s like to have it. How do you experience it?

Jack Clifford (08:39)
Yeah.

yeah, yeah.

I’d love to talk about that. Bill. at its most basic, it’s a supply demand mismatch. So, you know, the blood flow that’s supplying your heart ⁓ is adequate for X, Y, or Z activities of daily living. You know, walking around the house, doing the dishes, you might have enough blood flow for that, but you don’t have enough blood flow to go run a mile or even walk potentially, you know, or

but it’s all about supply demand mismatch. And that’s about just the size of the pipes, you know, if they’re clogged up, how clogged up are they? And, know, ⁓ that’s, really it. So, and what it feels like is it’s scary because it feels like a heart attack. all like, what does a heart attack feel like? Well, there’s a thousand different sort of, ⁓ descriptions of it. ⁓ you know, radiating down your arm or nausea or something in your back, but.

you know, if it’s right over your heart, it’s unmistakable. And that’s at least my presentation of angina. And I think it was a pretty typical one is, you know, I have this weird kind of deep pain. initially, when I, when I started, you know, run, trying to run and got it, I thought, ⁓ you know, I just pulled a chest muscle weirdly over my heart. You know, I’ll stop and let’s see if it goes away. I come back, you know, no, same thing. Okay. Still not better. Let’s do it again. Another couple of days later, so on and so forth. I was just kidding myself, but

I didn’t know anything about the horror at that point. hadn’t had to research all this stuff and do all the deep dive.

Bill Gasiamis (10:16)
That’s the same crazy logic

that stroke survivors put to, I’m feeling weird. I’m dizzy. I’m going to go and lie down. I’m going to rest. It’ll be better later. ⁓ I’m too busy. I’ve got to go to work. ⁓ I’ve even had stroke survivors where somebody’s telling them you maybe you’re having a stroke, you know, just tongue in cheek and they’re like, yeah, no, probably not. ⁓ it’s the same crazy logic that we say about things that are unfamiliar to us that we cannot potentially.

Jack Clifford (10:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (10:46)
link to something so serious because we have no knowledge, we’re ignorant, right?

Jack Clifford (10:47)
Yeah.

Well, yeah, I think that’s really part of the key there is like most times with something as sudden as what you’re talking about or what I’m talking about in my instance, because it was pretty, pretty sudden, you know, weeks and months. ⁓ We went from being these, you know, healthy people that felt like we were on top of the world to all of a sudden not. you you didn’t have a frame for what not looked like. ⁓

Bill Gasiamis (11:14)
Exactly.

Yeah. That’s such an important comment. We don’t have the frame for what not healthy looks like and therefore you don’t know what you don’t know. So you don’t take any action. You just brush it off. Okay. I hear you. All right. We got to the bottom of the stupidity behind a lot of my decisions as well to avoid going to hospital for a week, et cetera, the first time. ⁓ So you end up

Jack Clifford (11:24)
Exactly.

That’s it.

Bill Gasiamis (11:43)
being really unwell on this particular date. Kind of what is that day like? Explain us.

Jack Clifford (11:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

So I got tight. I, I, I’ve been a biohacker for a while. So that’s probably the only reason I’m here talking to you because I went off the beaten path really far off the beaten path to get to the place where I know what I know and I have to share what I have to share. ⁓ because I’ve been trying to help my wife get better for some significant issues, including a really bad traumatic brain injury.

And some other things and doctors didn’t have the answers for those so we had to we had to kind of biohack our way out of some things I was comfortable back. I’m saying that to say my wife got me a Chili pad for my bed because you know been trying to biohack sleep for a while and the colder environments to sleep are you know better to some degree at least in theory ⁓ and so Yeah, correct

Bill Gasiamis (12:32)
Chili meaning cold, not spicy.

Jack Clifford (12:37)
Yeah, correct. A chili pad as in the cold. So it’s a device that just, you know, cools your bed off. And so I crank that down to 55. She got it for me for Christmas. So Christmas day Eve, I’m like hopping into bed, like I’m going to sleep really well tonight, you know, and I woke up at four AM like, Oh, you know, I thought that was the big one because it felt that way. I a dead sleep woke me up with, with intense chest pain.

And I knew something was going on, you but I was kidding myself. I hadn’t talked to family about it. You know, I hadn’t shared anything about what was going on with anybody. So at this point I’m like, oh my goodness, you know, and I could be dying and have not had, you know, just been an idiot the whole time. So I rushed to the hospital and I didn’t have a heart attack. I just made it so cold that I made my heart work and that supply demand mismatch was happening all night long in my sleep.

Bill Gasiamis (13:15)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Clifford (13:31)
And so it got to this, you know, a giant, creeps up, you know, it’s like, can feel it. And then if you push it, you’re like, can really feel it. Well, you know, I woke up out of a dead sleep going from not feeling it when I went to sleep to, to feeling it to the extreme when I woke up. Um, but that’s when they gave me the, uh, the, uh, nuclear stress test with a treadmill test, right in the hospital. And it was, it was really bad. They can’t quantify your blockages with that, but they can tell you that, you know, you’re

You’re kind of screwed. And I was like really screwed. Like it was 47, but they said I was one of the worst I’d ever seen. ⁓ yeah. So I had all weekend to think about it, you know, cause I was a Friday, fortunately, and they could, they weren’t going to do the heart catheterization until Monday and the doc, you know, I was signing consent forms for them to do bypass surgery and it was pretty clear that the odds of it getting stented was not really good, but that’s what you hope for. Right. And most people are like, we’ll just get a step.

once then in you’re fine. And ⁓ in my case, it wasn’t looking likely. And my mother had had bypass surgery five years before that. And I watched her cognition after the bypass surgery just declined to the point where she’s in memory care now. And she had gone from being this vibrant book author of multiple books and you know, she was a hypnotherapist and she’s helped a lot of people in her life, done a lot of amazing things, but ⁓ she never.

she never really came out of the bypass surgery as her whole self and pretty quickly was just completely not herself at all. ⁓ So I wasn’t ready to come back. Now she’s 76.

Bill Gasiamis (15:03)
How old? How old’s your mom?

Yeah. I know with people that are older, ⁓ heart surgery can lead to cognitive decline and there is a link there. There is a number of it’s well researched. It’s a risk. ⁓ not one that you’re probably aware of and that they talk about much, but it definitely is a thing. so, okay. You’re, you’re you go to the hospital. They realize, ⁓ the

Jack Clifford (15:15)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (15:37)
charts are not looking good. ⁓ They do the tests. They suggest that what they can offer you is bypass surgery.

your, and you’ve got a weekend, think about it and you, and you go home, do they go, do you go home with medication and joining the medications to keep the blood flowing with anything? What do they do?

Jack Clifford (15:51)
Mm-hmm. Where’d you go? Yeah, such a blessing.

No, no, because I

was leaving against medical advice so they weren’t going to help me, right? And I actually said to the doc, said, you hey, I’m new here because I just moved a couple of months ago to Florida. And I said, can I come see you? And I didn’t have a cardiologist. I didn’t need one before this. And he says, if you live that long, just walks out. So I was on my own at that point. There was no resources of institutional medicine. I had to go find resources myself.

Bill Gasiamis (16:28)
Wow. Things are pretty wild in Florida. If you live that long and he walked out.

Jack Clifford (16:30)
Yeah.

Yep. That’s exactly what we said. It’s a very sobering moment for me. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (16:35)
And you walked out. Yeah, and you walked out.

Far out, man. So what’s the thinking behind walking out of that? Because I understand ⁓ that there are very few things that, like my situation was different, right? But I’ll give you kind of my thinking behind the, I’m gonna walk out routine. It’s like, there is a part of me that sort of says, I don’t need to subscribe to all that medical stuff, all the nonsense. I wanna try and avoid the medications. I wanna do all of that.

Jack Clifford (16:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (17:07)
That means I’ve got to do some work to get to that point, right? I’ve got to make sure that I’m eating well. I’m sleeping well. ⁓ I’m exercising. ⁓ I’m not overweight. I’m not smoking. I’m not drinking. Like there’s a responsibility that goes with, don’t want to take that medication. Right. And one of the other things is that, ⁓ if it wasn’t for the medical industry, I would not be here recording this, ⁓ podcast. Yeah. So there’s this big thing, which is.

Jack Clifford (17:31)
Yeah. Double-head sword, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (17:37)
They’re not fixed. My brain is not getting fixed unless they go in and take out the faulty blood vessel and potentially risk all the complications that, that I got the ones I got, but also the ones I didn’t get, which many people get, which is far worse deficits than what I visible on me. So, ⁓ I’m, you know, I’ve never met anyone in my time who hasn’t

who has been through the medical ⁓ system, who hasn’t benefited from it in a way that’s sort of sustained their life, supported their life, lengthened their life. Like everyone that I’ve interviewed has always gone through the medical system and has saved them, supported them, helped them, right? And you’re going to, the first place to get help you’re going to is a hospital, right? You ring up and you go, I’ve got to go.

Jack Clifford (18:22)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (18:31)
to the hospital because I’m feeling like I’m having heart attack. You get there, they confirm it, and then the place that you go to for help is the place you walk out of. What’s the thinking? Yeah, yeah. You have the angina, the blockages. Yeah, you got all of that.

Jack Clifford (18:41)
Well, I didn’t have a heart attack. That’s a really important nuance point. you know, I’m sitting in the hospital all weekend.

there was nothing at risk in an emergent moment for me. My heart wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t going to lose heart muscle if they didn’t do something. Like my mother’s instance was different. She had a heart attack. She probably needed the bypass surgery. It was really hard on her, obviously, like we talked about, but in my case, I had time, but they didn’t treat it like I had time, right?

Bill Gasiamis (18:54)
Okay.

Okay.

Jack Clifford (19:10)
They treated

it like, we’re gonna go in and take care of this thing for you rather than you have time to explore other options when I knew in fact I did. So it might be that getting bypass surgery is the right move for some folks, but it also might be the right move for you and me. We’ve already discussed that you take care of yourself so you never get in that situation. And yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (19:32)
Yeah.

And this is not a interview about do as I say, this is not that interview, right? What this interview is like one person’s experience and what they did. That’s it. We’re not giving medical advice here. We’re not telling you what decisions to make. We’re not telling you any of that stuff. This has got nothing to do with advising anyone to do anything, but what it has got to do with is what either you discovered

Jack Clifford (19:45)
Yeah. Right.

Bill Gasiamis (19:58)
or you knew before and put into action or what you discovered after you left the hospital that weekend. So take us through the next sort of phase of I’m taking responsibility for this and I’m going to take advantage of something that is documented scientifically and proven.

Jack Clifford (20:03)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah. And you know, like, so I’ll go into that phase, but, but I just want to share this thing because, know, you, you pretty much already told me when you first heard EECP, you like EECP what? Right. And most doctors are EECP what? Basically every patient is EECP what? And it’s, it’s just, it’s really not going to lie. really bothers me because this, this, this therapy is, is so well-documented. It’s, it’s, it’s FDA approved. It’s not controversial.

Bill Gasiamis (20:25)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Clifford (20:43)
⁓ it just anyways, okay. So, so, so yeah, so I leave the hospital and the only reason I knew about a EECP was because when my mom had her heart attack, I listened to a podcast by Ben Greenfield. He’s a pretty, you know, pretty high-level guy, right? And that had been, that was like 2015. And I just heard mention of it. was like, it was maybe like two minutes of the, of a 60-minute podcast at most, but I was like noted. So I looked into it from my mom. The closest provider was two hours away and you got to go 35 times and my mom isn’t going to drive.

35 times, you four hours round trip. It wasn’t gonna happen, so we moved on, but I just sort of knew about it. And when I say knew about it, I didn’t know, Bill, like what it actually did or how it worked. I didn’t look into it at that level. just, you know, like assessed the situation. I was like, okay, there’s something out there. That’s it. Okay, yeah. It stands for enhanced external counter pulsation. And you want me to go into a little bit about how it works? Yeah, okay, so.

Bill Gasiamis (21:27)
Hmm. And what is a ⁓ CP stamp? What does it stand for?

Yeah, yeah, let’s do that, yeah.

Jack Clifford (21:42)
So EECP involves lying on a bed. From the patient experience, you’re lying on a bed. You have ⁓ cuffs wrapped around your calves, your thighs, and your hips. And inside those cuffs, there are little air bladders.

Bill Gasiamis (21:55)
those cuffs,

are they like blood pressure cuffs?

Jack Clifford (21:58)
Yeah, like big giant Velcro blood pressure cuffs. Yes.

Bill Gasiamis (22:02)
Okay, so like they’re much bigger than a regular cuff, which is just over the bicep. Okay. All right.

Jack Clifford (22:04)
Yes.

Yes. Correct. yeah,

just that’s the right way to think about it. you you cinch them up, you’re getting really snug in this thing, but it looks like a giant pantsuit, you know? ⁓ And you lie on the bed and then you get a three lead EKG on you. It’s here, here, in here. And then in between heartbeats, the machine…

inflates compressed air into those bladders at 1.3 psi to start with, which feels like kind of a gentle massage. And then the pressure can be increased in increments of 0.1 psi all the way up to six, which feels like the exact opposite of a gentle massage. However, if you go slowly, your body accommodates to that pressure and that pressure feels different, both over one session and over multiple sessions, meaning

you might not get to six your first session, that’s unlikely, but as you do repeated sessions, you’ll increasingly get closer to six earlier in the treatment and be cumulatively more hours at those higher pressures. And what’s happening is all the blood, not all the blood, a significant amount of blood from your lower body is being pushed up in between heartbeats and it’s causing this phenomenon called sheer stress in your vascular systemically.

And wherever there’s pressure differentials in the body, it’s giving a stimulus to grow. It’s saying the pipes are not big enough, you gotta grow. We’re trying to put through more than is gonna fit. The body’s like, wait a second, it’s not big enough. But growing things in the body takes time. And so you need those repeated sessions. Like I mentioned, T.R., before we started recording, it works just like cardiovascular exercise, but at levels humans can’t do on their own. ⁓ And so, yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (23:52)
That’s important to talk about. so

just for a moment, we’ll talk about that. Like it works like cardiovascular exercise. So the idea with cardiovascular exercise is that what, does cardiovascular exercise do that’s similar to EECP?

Jack Clifford (24:04)
Sure.

If you’re out running, when you hit that stride on your feet, you’re doing that same thing, right? You’re ⁓ sending blood up, right? And then your circulation, your heart’s beating twice as fast maybe than it normally is, or substantially more than you’re just sitting here heartbeat is. And that’s because the heart is responding to the environment around it and saying, I gotta get…

a lot more blood, a lot more places. So I gotta work a lot harder. you know, is maintenance. So collateral blood flow. have alternate routes that we can use that lie dormant throughout our body. And those collaterals, if they never get used, they honestly, they get weaker and they close off, but they also can be reopened, you know? And then you can grow more of them. And…

Bill Gasiamis (24:38)
And what’s the result of that?

Uh-huh.

Okay, so there’s blood vessels that get

less ⁓ blood flow because people are sedentary or people aren’t doing the type of exercise that would activate those blood vessels, for example. And then what in theory, not in theory, and then what happens in cardiovascular exercise, the body goes, we need more blood flow, let’s open up.

Jack Clifford (25:12)
Exactly.

Bill Gasiamis (25:26)
other areas where normally blood flow wouldn’t be required or doesn’t go. And EECP kind of mimics that mechanism.

Jack Clifford (25:27)
Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah, but not kind

of, it’s really important just to note, cause I don’t want, I don’t want any of your listeners thinking, well I’m just going to go run more. Right? I mean, by all means do that safely. You know, the dose always makes the poison with everything, but, but don’t think that you can, you can just go do this. You can do it to a limited degree with exercise, but you’re not going to grow, you know.

that I didn’t have that before. And I like it because it shows you like the world of the possibly or it might be a little unsightly, but it’s feeding my brain. EECP has changed my cognition in addition to my heart, you know, my pelvis and my kidneys and my liver. you know, like it’s, it’s optimized blood flow systemically. Um, yeah. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (26:19)
Okay, so let’s go back to the cuff, the cuff

that we put on and then what happens.

Jack Clifford (26:24)
Yeah.

Yeah. So, so you just lie on the machine. Typically you do 35 hours on a machine for a course of treatment and one hour a day is a typical, you know, five days a week. That’s just typically you’re going to the doctor. There’s lots of other variations of that, but that’s the typical course. And that’s the most well-researched course. And, ⁓ you know, over time, usually about halfway through those 35 sessions, if you had angina, you’re going to notice a difference, but

you know, they use this to treat dementia. It’s a well studied in dementia. There’s a recent study in the US that was profound, a year-long study, a hundred demented patients, roughly a hundred non-demented or a hundred treated patients. Everybody had dementia and a hundred CHAM patients, placebo. The demented patients that got an EECP, they all got better when we know dementia, people get worse in a year, right? They all got better, all of them. And yeah, so that’s like, you know,

similar phenomenon erectile dysfunction, similar phenomenon kidney disease, similar phenomenon stroke recovery. So, you know, these are studies. I’m not making it up. It’s just literally like really well documented. It’s not.

Bill Gasiamis (27:33)
studies

that we can get a hold of and put in the show notes, link to the show notes.

Jack Clifford (27:36)
Yeah, go

to to EECPLocator.com and all these studies are there. ⁓ Yeah. So what I did is in the U.S., I, you know, it’s really hard to find. so I couldn’t find it. I had to, I had to call around and like, I could find a few doctors, none of them near me, but a few of them that would had machines, but they would only use them after everyone had failed stints and failed bypass and they had nothing else to offer them, which makes no sense. But that’s how the insurance reimbursements work.

Bill Gasiamis (27:41)
Okay.

Jack Clifford (28:04)
That’s the only time they’ll actually pay for it. So that’s what they say it’s good for, but that’s not what it’s good for. That’s just what they can get money for, I guess. but, so I had to drive three hours and take a chance on a doctor and stay in a hotel to get my treatments. And it was really difficult. I mean, I ended up buying one of these machines and got it at my house and I’ve just been using it for the last five years. So, you know, 35 hours was great, but I was pretty bad off. Now I got about 700 hours and, uh, you know,

more hours is just greater stimulus to the body to grow vasculature, right? And I mean, I…

Bill Gasiamis (28:38)
how do you know that you’ve grown? I know there’s this ⁓ feeling or this change that happens in the person. ⁓ Like you said, dementia, ⁓ people who experienced dementia have a better outcome later or a change in the way that they’re brain working, et cetera. can you see the, is there a way to see the difference between the blood vessels and

Jack Clifford (29:02)
You can’t, you can’t image, could image

on a, on a cardiac pet would be like the only imaging or I guess, you know, if I went back and did a stress test again, you would, you would be able to see, cause it’s not quantifying specific arteries. It’s, quantifying the total volume, but I tried that they were, actually wouldn’t let me, they said it’s not safe because you have it at a stent or a bypass. So I went back to the same place that I got it, you know, and I was like, literally they put me through the imaging machine. gave me the dye and then they got

I went to go on the stress test and the same doctor was there and he refused to tell me to go. So I like, wanted to say, hey doc, let’s go for a run. Cause like, you’re not going to keep up with me, but you know, so I, I didn’t bother with that, but I’ve got my own, you know, I did my own little stress, stress test with a treadmill, right? I started, I was getting chest pain. I found out where I can induce angina and I try and say just below it, you know, so I know where it is, right? I was 2.2 miles an hour. That’s not a fast walk.

And then after the first 19 sessions where I was staying in the hotel, I got up to 2.7. That’s a really big difference even if it doesn’t sound like a lot. And then I got my machine and I kept going. And then within a couple of months, I was starting to do a running stride. And I could keep that up, no angina. I know where angina would come in. I had time calculations and everything. And then eventually, now I can run.

comfortably 6.5 mile an hour pace for quite a while, know, push it up to 14 miles an hour for 30 second sprints and you know, like all kinds of stuff. So, ⁓

Bill Gasiamis (30:38)
How long before

you break the two hour barrier for the marathon? Like was recently done. Maybe, maybe the more blood vessels, the more blood flow. Maybe you can get there.

Jack Clifford (30:42)
⁓ I got zero interest in that. Yeah.

I think so

though, I think those Kenyans should be ⁓ hopping on these EECP machines and they’re I mean, they’re already amazing but.

Bill Gasiamis (30:58)
Well, you want the Kenyans to just completely own marathon running for the rest of eternity. It’s unbelievable what they did. Right. Like I imagine that there is something else going on there, but I imagine blood flow, oxygenation, more blood vessels. Like it’s got to potentially be a thing. reckon if you do a check between the last guy, me, who’s going to like 50 hours before you get to the other side and those dudes, there would

Jack Clifford (31:03)
Yeah, yeah, it’ll just be a Kenyan

Yeah. ⁓

Bill Gasiamis (31:27)
definitely be a difference because they’re exercising all the time, right?

Jack Clifford (31:31)
Sure, yeah, they’re pushing the collaterals as wide open as, know, whatever, whatever a human can do on their own, they’re doing it to the max to, know, the same phenomenon that EECP is doing for folks lying down. You know, they’re doing it to whatever the max you can without the machine, I would say.

Bill Gasiamis (31:48)
So this is a bog standard human body task. Like it just does that all the time. I have heard the blood vessels can reroute in the brain when somebody experiences a blockage and then, and it’s not useful at the time of the blockage, obviously, and it causes potential cell death when somebody has a stroke. But then later on.

Jack Clifford (32:11)
If there’s too much blood,

the revascularization, yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (32:14)
Yeah, so

EECP can kind of occur naturally and then it can support as much of the surrounding tissue as possible so that it doesn’t all die off. ⁓ So what you’re talking about is just encouraging EECP ⁓ to happen more than it would normally happen by ⁓ inducing it through this device where people ⁓ get sort of strapped in and then

Jack Clifford (32:23)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (32:43)
the machine runs, what does it run like a program? Explain how that works.

Jack Clifford (32:47)
Literally,

it’s just air pressure. got different pumps to pump the calves, the thighs and the hips up. And then it’s really just about the timing, right? It’s got to hit it at the right interval of your heartbeat. So it’s at the right place in diastole where your heart is at rest. that timing is very, crucial. And that’s really…

Yeah, it’s not, it’s very old technology. The machine I have was built in 2009. You know, they have new machines that are portable now that I’m working with some of the manufacturers to actually, you know, make these available in the U S because there aren’t any in the U S but they do have portable machines that don’t require a bed. You could get treated on your couch. You could get treated, you know, on your own bed, uh, lying on the floor, I suppose. Um, so, you know, we’ve, we’ve really like technology hasn’t

Bill Gasiamis (33:19)
Wow.

Jack Clifford (33:42)
slowed down. just China’s like taking this thing and you know, have a basically every Chinese hospital has several of these machines and they treat patients in the, in the room with us. It’s, part of their standard of care for all kinds of different, different diseases that they’re treating. You know, and it’s adjunctive to just about everything. There’s nothing that you couldn’t do EECP with, right? ⁓ yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (34:03)
Okay, okay, so.

How do you experience your body differently now? And actually, let’s go back actually, how long has it been since you came across this, decided to get the first treatment, implemented yourself ⁓ at home and then how do you feel different now?

Jack Clifford (34:08)
Oof.

Yeah, it’s been five years

and four months now. And every since like, this is this is a little hard part to quantify, because there’s been a lot of brain changes to from this, right? So so I don’t even like feel like my 47 year old self who was in the hospital, that feels really like somebody else to me. You know, it’s a version of me, I suppose, but I can’t really relate to that person. Because I like a small example.

I used to sleep eight to nine hours a night. That was my normal, my whole life. I was generally like the guy that would come in the latest. You could come to work. was the guy that came in the latest. You And now I get up at two 30 most mornings and I’m like, like rare to go with energy. I’m, you know, I’m working out doing resistance training. I’m reading, you know, I wrote a book, I’m writing another book. I’m writing a book on rectal dysfunction as it relates to this phenomenon, because that’s a whole other, you know, case study.

and I work a full-time job and I just have an incredible amount of energy basically all the time. My mood is way better. My sense of touch is really different now. I give a lot more hugs because it feels really good. ⁓ My sense of smell and taste and…

You know, hearing, you know, I used to like have to go to the bathroom at night sometimes, you know, wake me up to go to the bathroom. Long gone.

Bill Gasiamis (35:47)
So at the same time though, it sounds like also you might have changed other things as well though, right? So what else have you changed in the meantime?

Jack Clifford (35:55)
sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It hasn’t just been EECP. Absolutely. you know, really good supplement routine. ⁓ Pretty extensive, but, you know, managing my lipids, for example, I take a thousand milligrams of niacin twice a day. I’ve been able to bring my triglyceride to HDL ratio to kind of an optimal one-to-one, using fish oil and some other things. ⁓ And, you know, I…

I really stay away from carbs for the most part. I like to eat keto, but I like it to be what I call clean keto. So I’m not like pounding keto ice cream or all these things that are, you know, they taste good and yeah, they’re keto, but they got all kinds of oils in them that aren’t really good for your body. ⁓ And, ⁓ you know, I’m big into moving and being active and, you know,

having an engaged social life as much as possible as well. I mean, I think that’s a very underrated thing. That’s actually an area I struggle in because I’m working so much, but you even this helps just, you know, getting to know people even online. But, ⁓

Bill Gasiamis (37:04)
It sounds like you haven’t re it doesn’t sound like you’ve reinvented the wheel. Like everything that you say is things that people take for granted that if they implemented would improve their life before EECP. We’re talking about EECP today, right? But just those things alone would make a massive difference to somebody’s experience. And that’s kind of the message that I’m trying to kind of get into the

Jack Clifford (37:17)
Totally agree.

I thought it a good

Sure.

Bill Gasiamis (37:30)
⁓ minds and hearts of the stroke survivors who I interview and who listened to the podcast. My book, I’m going to, we’re going to talk about your book in a sec, but I’m going to talk about my book. My book, when I wrote it, I thought I discovered all these things that people, should know about that no one knows about, but it’s not true in here is mindset. ⁓ there’s a chapter about emotional intelligence. There’s a chapter about nutrition. There’s a chapter about sleep. There’s a chapter about community.

Jack Clifford (37:32)
Yeah.

Yeah. No, please.

Bill Gasiamis (38:00)
⁓ that’s just the five that I can just rattle off the top of my head right now. And you’ve already mentioned that in the last few minutes, that’s exactly the things that you mentioned. And people take it for granted how much that improves your overall health. Right.

Jack Clifford (38:13)
That’s so true. And also

what’s wrapped up in the wrapper of all of those things that are threaded together is stress, right? ⁓ If you do all of those things, right, you’re lowering stress. How did I get heart disease at 47 when it happened to my grandfather in his late 60s and my mom in her mid 60s and it happened to me at 47? And we know it didn’t happen at 47. It was years earlier and I realized it at 47. Stress, you know? Like I was the guy that took on a lot.

Bill Gasiamis (38:38)
Hiding earlier.

Jack Clifford (38:44)
and had some traumatic things happen in my life and whatever, and I don’t need to go into that. But I always felt like it was all rolling off my back. Like, you know, I’m fine. know, like I didn’t, and there are reasons why I felt that way. ⁓ However, at the end of the day, I know that I wasn’t processing. There was so much I did not process. And I didn’t learn how to like have really good boundaries and that, you know, begot more stress because of those lack of boundaries and, but stress, right? You know, like, but if you have good

good social life and healthy people in your lives, that takes stress off. Eating the right food takes oxidative stress off your body. You could go on and on, but I think stress is gonna kill you before anything else.

Bill Gasiamis (39:17)
you

Yeah. I love

that you said that. I love what I love that. That was the answer that you gave when I said, what else did you do? Because it’s not just, you know, it’s like, I’m going to eat well, but smoke, you know, I’m going to eat well, but drink excessive amounts of alcohol. Like, no, it doesn’t work. You know, you can’t do that. Yeah. can’t do. Yeah. Small.

Jack Clifford (39:42)
No, you gotta do it all in concert. It’s the layers, right? Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (39:49)
numbers, know, the percentages they add up, you know, 1 % here, 1 % there all adds up and you get a result at the end of it. Okay. So, so you’re you’ve gone, I’m going to see if I can grow new blood vessels to support my heart. And what you’re found between the time that you went to hospital around five years ago to now is that the angina has

Jack Clifford (39:55)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (40:17)
⁓ improved, they’ve gone away. The heart has improved, I beg your pardon, the blood flow. And have you had a medical examination since then to do other comparison?

Jack Clifford (40:28)
Yeah, I have.

Yeah, I’ve got a cardiologist. I haven’t seen him and I’ve talked to him the other day because I talked about the book, but I haven’t gone to see him because he’s a plane flight away. But I’ve been worked up for the crowded intermediate thickness. You might be familiar with that as it relates to stroke. okay, well, they just measure your crowded arteries and look at the placking in your crowded arteries as a proxy for your systemic plaque burden. And flow mediated deletation, is they totally occlude the…

the arm with a blood pressure cuff and then see how quickly you can refill it after, you know, like, it’s like five minutes of this, your hand is completely numb. And those all, you know, workups were good and that was after a couple of years of treatment. You know, I tried to have that stress test, like I mentioned, but you know, now I just see my primary care, you know, he’s a good guy and he runs on my lipid panels and, ⁓ you know, so I’m definitely monitored, but.

What I haven’t done is gotten re-imaged because I don’t want to put extra dye in my system. Sure, somebody wants the images because they don’t believe me, but I’m not trying to sell anybody anything here. I’m just trying to spread the word on something. If somebody doubts my honesty, they can, it’s fine.

Bill Gasiamis (41:38)
I know what you mean, Jack. I know what you mean. I and I asked you because yeah, I would love to see that before and after. would love to see the blood flow. What’s happening, watch change. would be amazing. story to tell, but I also went out of my way if I could to avoid having more dyes and all that kind of stuff injected into my body. I totally get it. It’s okay. Yeah. ⁓

Jack Clifford (41:49)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (42:01)
Okay. So you wrote a book about it. Like, what was the idea behind the book? What were you thinking? Show us the one that you got there with the old book cover. And then I’ll include the new book cover in this image as we chat.

Jack Clifford (42:06)
yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Thanks. Yeah. So I started writing this book, in, know, ⁓ November timeframe, ⁓ after I mentioned to you, so my, my friend came down, ⁓ and stayed with me for 13 days and he had had some stroke damage five years before that was, you know, his whole right side, he just had like numbness and then pain. And then, you know, it this weird cascade of symptoms so bad, you know, sometimes he couldn’t sleep from it. And so

All the time he took off work he could he came and he used the machine three times a day and then he left pain free and like nothing else had worked and then this worked and I didn’t per se expect that I but I was like, you I know it does stuff. It’s helpful. But anyways, when I saw that, you know, I really started digging even more because before that I was like, well, Jesus is amazing. But maybe it’s just me, you know, and and anyways, so, ⁓ so then I, you know, I just started writing the book one day and

You know, my mom was a book author and I always wanted to write a book. didn’t really have anything particular to write about and all of sudden I do. So I’m like, you know, let’s see what happens. And, uh, and you dig into the research more and more, and you’re just like, increasingly frustrated by how everyone has known about this. And yet, you know, they don’t promote it. They don’t talk about it because it’s inconvenient. You know, and I’m going to get a little, try not to get like soapboxy here, but

Bill Gasiamis (43:36)
Do

it, do it, go for it man.

Jack Clifford (43:37)
Okay,

okay, because, you know, cardiologists will say it, some of them, the ones that are honest, they’ll be like, like mine. He says, I was making obscene amounts of money, giving people bypass surgeries instance. And then I was given the same people bypass surgeries instance, a couple years later. And, you know, and then he stumbled upon some answers and EECP is one of them that helps his patients stay well. And, you know, he makes a lot less money.

because of it, because he doesn’t go in and do these interventional approaches. And, you know, EECP, the most you could pay somebody is like $100 an hour, and you’re going to tie up a patient room for 35 hours with a tech, it doesn’t make any sense. I go pop a stint and you make 10 grand in two hours and never see you again. You know, like it just, I get it from, you know, I want to own a portion of Ferrari and have a lake house and a winter house, but

You know, like, I don’t know how you live with yourself. You said go for it, man. I’m going to go for it. you know, and my son’s about to graduate. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. I’m good with it. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (44:38)
But come on, come on, Jack. Yeah, you go for it. I’m going to push back. I’m going to push back as well. You go for it. I’ll push back. There’s yeah. Which is cool. Right? That’s what I want. I want to have a conversation and

I don’t want to control the narrative, but the guy that goes in needs a stint today has a blockage. Like that’s life saving. That does work. What I am afraid of that happens sometimes when people go in and they’ve got a blockage and then they get ⁓ even even a stroke blockage. Right.

in carotid or a vertebral artery. What happens is sometimes people go in and they get told you need a stent. Fair enough. You’re about to have a heart attack. You’re about to have a major stroke. If we don’t put one in, you’ll have a, that’s necessary. The challenge is, that that person sometimes doesn’t learn the lesson of what got them into the situation where they need a stent.

Jack Clifford (45:22)
Good.

Exactly. sure.

Yeah, by all means. Like emergency medicine is great. And we’ll put that in the emergency medicine category of cardiology, right? Why aren’t they offering you, why aren’t they saying, Hey, you’re at risk for a whole lot of other things just by this happening. Why don’t you come 35 times to this EECP machine and you know, like, or why don’t we have centers

Bill Gasiamis (45:36)
Yeah.

Yes, and then later…

Jack Clifford (45:55)
all over. I found exactly one place in Australia so far that I’m not focusing on Australia right now. I do plan to take EECP Locator International, but right now the access points in the US are abysmal. 70, 80 % of the people in the United States could not get to a center. There’s no access point that’s at all realistic for them to get to. And yet these machines are not that expensive. They’re the price of a

Decent not that great car. ⁓

Bill Gasiamis (46:24)
we’re starting to

see them in, I don’t know, health spas or something like that, where people will go, they’ll get yoga, they’ll get this, they’ll get that, they’ll get infusions perhaps and all sorts of other things. And there’ll be a machine or there’ll be a suit that people can put on and they can go through one hour.

Jack Clifford (46:29)
Yeah, that’s good.

That’s great.

Yeah, although

I do want to say that the Normatech, like the compression boots that they have and some of those things, when they don’t use the pressures that EECP uses up to 6 PSI and they’re not sinking it in between heartbeats, it’s helpful, but we’re not talking about things that can do the same thing in the body. It’s on the right path and I’m not digging it as being worthless because it’s not, but it’s just not the right thing.

Bill Gasiamis (46:47)
Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s kind of what we’re seeing. And to go back to your point is because the medical profession does medical profession stuff. this is not, it’s not that it’s not medically kind of aligned. It definitely is. But when you’re told that the way you solve a problem is through putting a stent in and then never talking to that patient again, to tell them how to avoid to get a stent in that’s

Jack Clifford (47:31)
Yeah, that’s your job.

Bill Gasiamis (47:34)
what they do, like they’ve been trained to do that forever. And that’s what they do. And that works and it saves the life. But what it doesn’t do, which I also have a challenge with this, it doesn’t teach the lesson. What it reinforces is that if I have something wrong with me and I go to a doctor, they’ll fix it. So next time it goes wrong, I’ll just go to the doctor and they’ll fix it again. And I didn’t have to change my life. Like this even bloody advertisements that do that. They

Jack Clifford (47:51)
just I’ll go and he’ll fix it.

Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Bill Gasiamis (48:03)
They hijack that part of the person’s brain and they say, you know, have you got reflux, heartburn, that kind of stuff? Don’t let reflux and heartburn get in the way of eating the foods that you love. Just take a tablet. You know, that’s the same kind of thing, right? And that’s why the medical profession doesn’t do that because they’re not trained to do anything other than sell their thing. And their thing is what they went to work, to school for.

Jack Clifford (48:17)
Yes.

Bill Gasiamis (48:30)
20 years to be able to administer. But every so often you come across an amazing doctor, surgeon, et cetera, who says, I can’t do anything more for you, but maybe somebody else can. Those guys are better than the doctor who says, we can’t do anything else for you and then send you off their way. That next sentence, but maybe somebody else can, I don’t know who they are. That is.

Jack Clifford (48:43)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (48:57)
I think a great thing to say this is where I think EACP kind of fits in that now that I’m here and things are not good.

Jack Clifford (49:05)
I totally agree. I totally agree. And

yeah. And you, so you, you mentioned like the wellness spas and whatnot. And here’s the thing in 2015. So, you know, somewhat recently the FDA approved EECP for a brand new indication, general circulation, right? In healthy people. Like it’s right on the FDA indication. And also in one case in increase in VO2 max, but rough, that’s roughly saying the same thing. ⁓ yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (49:32)
for healthy people, was that part

of it?

Jack Clifford (49:35)
Yeah, it said unhealthy patients and healthy people didn’t call patients. So, so, ⁓ but, but, know, the litmus test for that is, is your doctor say you’re healthy enough to undergo circulation enhancement? If the answer is yes, you know, it doesn’t matter if you got all that other stuff or not, you know, we’re just not treating you for it. We’re not saying ECPs is fix for this, your erectile dysfunction. It might help it. You know, what’s not saying it’s, it’s the fix for your stroke, but it might really help your stroke, recovery, but.

Bill Gasiamis (49:47)
which

Jack Clifford (50:03)
Anyhow, so like you can, you know, I don’t know about in Australia, but in the United States, you could get an EECP machine and create a viable business model off of helping people as soon as people actually know about it and what it does, right? I’m trying to solve the access issue in the United States by aggregating demand, right, as one of the solutions. So I have a website, eecplocator.com. And if people… ⁓

tell me that they like EECP to be available in their area, when I get like five to 10 patients in one area, we’re gonna find a way to get it to them. ⁓ The how is, you there’s a bunch of different possible ways we can get EECP to them, but at the end of the day, you know, like people need this treatment. They really, really do.

Bill Gasiamis (50:50)
Yeah. We’re

not talking about anything ⁓ out there. Like this is not an out there thing. This is definitely common. Now I, I don’t know how I haven’t come across it. I’ve all these years after all these years now I’ve just because of our conversation right now, I just did a Google search and I typed in EECP machine Australia. And the first thing that came up was an Australian government department of health, disability and aging.

Jack Clifford (50:57)
No, it’s that.

Bill Gasiamis (51:20)
document from the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which

talks about a mid-trade Australia EECP system model, external counter pulsation system stationary. So it seems like they have a…

Jack Clifford (51:36)
Like they’ve approved it, sounds like they have some approved devices. Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (51:38)
Something like they’re at least looking at it. Let me see what that

says. The inclusion of the kind of device in the AI community is subject to compliance with conditions placed in post. Yeah, it sounds like it’s been through some regulated body in 2021.

Jack Clifford (51:52)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yep. There you go.

Bill Gasiamis (51:57)
This device is intended to provide external counter pulsation therapy and is indicated for use in the treatment of stable angina.

Jack Clifford (52:06)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Gasiamis (52:08)
pectoris and congestive heart failure. There you go, my friend.

Jack Clifford (52:10)
Yeah, it works great for

people with art failure. It really does.

Bill Gasiamis (52:14)
Dude, father-in-law had heart failure. He passed away from heart failure just a few, about a year and a half ago. ⁓ Now, I don’t know, I’m not saying anything, but we’ve never heard of this before. Today’s my first time where I’m really going to deep dive about this thing with you. ⁓ So what are the challenges that you face? what are the, what is it? ⁓ The barriers that you face?

Jack Clifford (52:20)
Yeah.

Bill Gasiamis (52:44)
when you’re speaking to people about this or how people finding out about it, how do you help people like

Jack Clifford (52:50)
It’s just an awareness piece. It’s an EECP what? And then, you you get in with some physicians and then you got to duke it out a little bit. Not with all of them. There’s plenty of physicians, you know, I’ve talked to the physicians that have machines and are doing the right thing for society and still making plenty of money. ⁓ They’ll just tell you, you know, I’ve talked to some cardiologists and just they know that all their colleagues are, you know, kind of crooked in certain ways. But

Bill Gasiamis (53:03)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Clifford (53:17)
⁓ Or at least they just haven’t taken the time, you know, like it’s a matter of what catches your shiny attention, right? Like you’re gonna, I know that’s fair. I want to retract that. I do.

Bill Gasiamis (53:20)
Yeah, let’s not call them crooked. I want to feel

like they are just not aware or they are

Jack Clifford (53:32)
Yeah, no,

and think that’s accurate, but I think maybe a more accurate thing would be to say not curious. It’s the lack of curiosity that bothers me. ⁓ I don’t need to go into it any further than to say like, hey, ⁓ some people know about it. Plenty of people haven’t bothered to find out that probably should have. ⁓ But in either case, we are where we are. ⁓

We’ve got a giant access crisis, but China has 5,000 access points. We have 150. I don’t know how many you have in Australia, but it’s not enough. let’s fix this because this could change the health status of your entire country, of the world. Like if people were proactively getting 35 hours of VECP, it’s some kind of an interval when they’re in an at risk.

category, which we can quantify with various tests and measures, you could easily stop people from ever getting to your father’s situation. My dad who died of dementia situation, sorry, father in law, yeah. ⁓

Bill Gasiamis (54:36)
Yeah, other in-laws. Yeah.

I hear you. hear you. Maybe what we need to do is maybe we need to, ⁓ get some data out and say how bad this is. Like it’s, we’ll call it something as bad as smoking and then we’ll get an advertising company to create a marketing campaign about how something bad is good for you. And then we’ll just teach people to be addicted to doing something good for themselves that they don’t know is good for themselves. Maybe that’s the way in. I know, I know where you’re coming from. get it.

Jack Clifford (54:58)
Yeah, right. There you go. We’ll reverse psychology.

Exactly. Yeah, although I want

to comment on one little side piece of benefit of the machine, which is I didn’t discover this right away and in 35 hours, probably not enough to do it, but you can appreciate the value of breath work, I believe, right Bill? And on the machine, it’s going to dunk, to dunk, to dunk at the rate of your heartbeat. If you learn to…

Bill Gasiamis (55:22)
Yeah, yeah, that’s huge.

Jack Clifford (55:31)
You slow the machine down like 30 beats a minute. You know, it’s real dramatic. goes from the dunk, the dunk, the dunk, to the dunk, to dunk, to dunk. And it’s just really crazy biofeedback in addition, because the pressure in your hips, right? It’s doing this to you. It’s strengthening your core and you really get to learn how to do breath work on the machine. And what I’ve found is over these 700 hours now, I have reflexive breathing. When I’m stressed out, don’t hyperventilate. I do the opposite.

it’s reflexive. And that’s because of those hours on the machine and just using that time, that time you’re stuck there for an hour. You guys will do some stuff.

Bill Gasiamis (56:14)
Yeah. I imagine it makes you feel really well. Also afterwards, I imagine like you’re meditating or you’re focusing on your breathing. Plus it’s doing that. Like the whole experience one hour or giving yourself one hour of time to do that is an amazing experience anyway.

Jack Clifford (56:18)
It does.

Mm-hmm.

I agree, totally agree.

Bill Gasiamis (56:33)
Yeah. ⁓ so let’s just get back to the book a little bit. Like, how does it go through? What does it go through? it scientifically based? What’s the idea with it?

Jack Clifford (56:41)
Yeah, yeah,

my story and you know a little bit about my wife’s journey along with me because it’s really benefited her as well too, but ⁓ She doesn’t have as many hours as I do and then we talk about ⁓ The you know the differences between other countries like China and India and why and what you know They’re different for both countries and some other countries where it’s more advanced And then we talk about the different, know how it works and what it works for and then we talk about

⁓ how a patient could actually go about, you know, accessing this therapy in the United States. And then we talked about kind of the future of the world of the possible if the EECP access was a thing and you how much money it could save our government and know, healthcare dollars or at least healthcare dollars could be spent better. ⁓ And

That’s about it. But it really helps you understand if you’re in the why haven’t heard of this camp before, you’ll really understand why. It’s very, very particular about picking apart what happened and why it kind of… So it had it like it’s high watermark was probably around 2006. And then drug eluding stents came out and people kind of lost interest in the EZP in the US. And so it just went a different direction.

And then here China with medicine, know, incentives that are different than ours, you know, it expanded from there and we were trying.

Bill Gasiamis (58:10)
Yeah, I love it. ⁓ so I, while you were chatting and I did it, I did another search for a CPM machine image photo. And there’s a Australian organization that has, ⁓ a machine that you lie on that they wrap you up in and it takes you through that process as well. Okay. So I’m just, I can’t believe I’m just becoming aware of this. They call it. They, they, one of their, ⁓ offerings is mitochondrial cell training.

Jack Clifford (58:37)
Yeah, I don’t disagree. I mean, when you deliver it, when you get so much blood flow in these small little capillaries that are the size of a human hair, right? You know, there’s a profound change at the cellular.

Bill Gasiamis (58:40)
Yeah, yep.

What I like about it is ⁓ if there is a therapeutic goods administration kind of approval and these machines are appearing in, we’ll call them ⁓ medical centers or health wellness centers or wherever, ⁓ clearly there’s.

a lot of benefit, very little risk. And then therefore people are feeling comfortable promoting this. This particular organization, I won’t name them, they have medical in ⁓ in their title, which sort of suggests that they are kind of maybe general practitioners or doctors of some sort. There’s a link, I’m in Melbourne, there’s a link that says new to Melbourne and it’s got an organization that’s there as well that talks about it.

Jack Clifford (59:11)
Yes.

Nice.

Bill Gasiamis (59:37)
So there you go. It’s more well known than I could ever have thought. And then there’s a video battling AONOCA angina and dyspnea after the COVID vaccine is one of the videos. yeah, look, doctors names listed all over here. Interviews. Okay.

Jack Clifford (59:41)
Yeah. That’s a start anyway.

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:04)
This is brilliant. I didn’t come in here skeptical, but I had never heard of it. So I didn’t even know how to start this conversation, but I love the idea of being able to offer solutions to stroke survivors who would benefit from additional blood flow, blood vessels, reroute around the damaged areas in their brain. ⁓ It’s kind of what hyperbaric oxygen therapy ⁓ aims to do as well.

Jack Clifford (1:00:23)
So.

Yeah, yeah, they go

hand in hand. The two are probably really powerful together. just, EECP works, but I’ve owned a hyperbaric chamber. I’m actually really familiar with it. ⁓ And I think a lot of it, but it’s really, it’s uncomfortable. And, you know, EECP can be uncomfortable in its own way, but it’s not, it’s not, you know, if you’re claustrophobic or if you have, you know, ear pressure sensitivity, ⁓ you know, hyperbaric has its challenges. ⁓

Bill Gasiamis (1:00:36)
Yeah.

Jack Clifford (1:00:55)
But it’s not going to grow blood vessels. It’s not in the same way. It’s going to oxygenate what you have. The EECP is going to give you a lot more. ⁓ They would work really well together. ⁓ Anyhow, ⁓ the one thing I want your listeners to just keep in mind is, it works just like exercise. So it’s gradual. So you’re going to get into it what you put out of it in terms of hours on the machine. ⁓ There are ways to get machines.

Bill Gasiamis (1:01:02)
I

Jack Clifford (1:01:22)
So if anybody, feel free to reach out to me. If you go to eecpbook.com, I’ve got all my contact information. I’d be happy to have a discussion with anyone. I’ve got a contact to my Facebook group and I’m talking to people from all over the world there. ⁓ I don’t charge anything to consult with people. I just passionate about EECP and spreading the word. yeah, it ⁓ sounds like it’s already approved in Australia. So that’s great. That means they could ship you a device if you wanted to. ⁓

One of the things that’s been really neat, we’ve been working with lot of couples lately and they’ll treat each other on our machine. They’ll stay with us for a couple of weeks and do that or stay near home. In the US, I’m open and I’ve got a space, like a six unit Airbnb. People will come and just stay there and get the treatment done. They’ll get the 35 hours done in 18 days, so it’s a lot faster instead of seven weeks.

Bill Gasiamis (1:02:15)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Clifford (1:02:17)
But the couples thing is actually a really big deal. I will say this, like, I don’t have the picture. I just posted it on my Facebook group, but it shows the different parts of the body and the blood flow increase. And let me just say the pelvis stands out about four act. So I like to say, like couples should really be doing this together. It’s almost a little dangerous for them not to.

Bill Gasiamis (1:02:31)
Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Yeah, I hear you.

hear you. It could actually probably help some men in, you know, ⁓ erectile dysfunction issues. Like I get that as well. Like it makes complete sense. we’ll diet, so we’ll not smoking, so we’ll not drinking, so we’ll exercising, so we’ll not eating carbs, ⁓ and increasing your testosterone through, you know, physical activity and all that kind of stuff. Like all those things go hand in hand, right? And

Jack Clifford (1:02:55)
Yes, all these can be done.

Bill Gasiamis (1:03:09)
If you can give it a boost as well with this thing, that’ll be, you know, that’s amazing. Again, non-invasive, ⁓ everything about it sounds like it’s good. I’m glad we had this conversation and I’m going to look into it a lot further. Thanks so much for reaching out. We will have all the links in the show notes so that anyone who wants to reach out and ⁓ catch up with Jack. ⁓ I love your story, man. Thank you so much.

Jack Clifford (1:03:33)
Yeah, thanks Bill. This has been fun. Really appreciate it.

Bill Gasiamis (1:03:36)
That was Jack Clifford, and I want to thank Jack for taking the time to walk us through the science and his personal experience with EECP therapy. So what stays with me from this conversation is the biology. The idea that the body already has dormant bypass channels and that under the right mechanical stimulus, it can be told to activate them and that it’s not science fiction, that it’s arteriogenesis.

and it changes how I think about what’s possible in stroke recovery. But I do wanna be clear one more time, EECP therapy is approved in Australia for stable angina and heart failure. I’m not sure what the status is in the United States, but I think it’s similar. It is not approved for stroke. This is emerging off-label research and everything we discussed today is for informational purposes only. So please speak.

to your treating doctor before pursuing any treatment. If you want to explore EACP further, find the provider at eecplocator.com and learn more about the therapy at eecpbook.com. The research we referenced today was a 2026 meta-analysis from the QJM across 15 studies and 506 participants. The link is in the show notes.

If today’s episode sparked something in you, I’d love for you to grab a copy of my book, The Unexpected Way That Stroke Became the Best Thing That It’s the resource I wished I had had in own recovery in the early days. And you can get it at And if you want to support this podcast and the work of getting evidence informed, honest conversations about stroke recovery out into the world.

join us at can sign up there and you can support the podcast for as little as $6 a month. Until next time, keep recovering. I’m Bill Gasiamas. This has been Recovery After Stroke.

The post EECP Therapy and Stroke Recovery: Can a Cardiac Treatment Help Grow New Blood Vessels? appeared first on Recovery After Stroke.

A viewer reached out recently with a question I have been getting more frequently: Does near infrared light therapy actually help the brain recover after stroke? It is a fair question — the claims circulating online range from cautiously promising to outright extraordinary. In this post, I am going to cut through the noise and look at what the peer-reviewed research actually shows.

This is not a tanning lamp or a heat lamp. The mechanism is specific: NIR light at the right wavelengths is absorbed by cytochrome c oxidase, a key enzyme in mitochondrial energy production. When stimulated, cytochrome c oxidase increases ATP synthesis — essentially giving cells more energy to carry out repair and function.

For neurons recovering from ischaemic or haemorrhagic stroke, the theory is compelling: damaged brain cells that are energy-starved might benefit from an additional energy stimulus.

Skull and scalp tissue absorb and scatter light substantially. Transcranial delivery requires sufficient power density (irradiance) at the source and long enough exposure to accumulate meaningful fluence (energy dose) at depth. Studies using ex vivo human skull specimens suggest that only 1-3% of surface irradiance reaches cortical tissue at clinically relevant depths — and deeper subcortical structures receive even less.

This does not make tPBM ineffective — it means dosing is everything. And most consumer devices do not disclose their irradiance or fluence specifications, which makes comparing them to clinical trials nearly impossible.

Several well-designed rodent studies have demonstrated that tPBM applied within hours to days of stroke onset reduces infarct volume, improves functional recovery, and modulates neuroinflammation. A 2019 study by Thunshelle et al. found tPBM reduced lesion size in ischaemic stroke models and improved neurobehavioural scores.

Animal models are useful for mechanistic insights. However, rodent skulls are thinner and brain structures are more superficial than in humans — so translational accuracy is limited.

The NeuroThera Effectiveness and Safety Trial (NEST-1 and NEST-2) were the most prominent early RCTs. NEST-1 (2007) reported positive outcomes for acute ischaemic stroke patients treated within 24 hours. However, NEST-2 (2009), a larger double-blind RCT with 660 patients, failed to replicate those results on its primary outcome measure.

NEST-3 was halted early in 2013 after an interim analysis showed it was unlikely to meet its primary endpoint.

What went wrong? Researchers identified several issues: heterogeneous stroke populations, inconsistent dosing protocols, and the fundamental challenge of transcranial light delivery in adults with varying skull thickness and tissue composition.

More recent work has shifted focus. A 2023 review by Zomorrodi et al. examined pulsed tPBM and found preliminary evidence for cognitive and neurological benefits in traumatic brain injury and neurodegeneration — but noted the absence of large, well-powered RCTs in stroke specifically.

Here is where I have to be direct with anyone considering purchasing a NIR device for home use.

Clinical studies use medical-grade devices with precisely calibrated irradiance, typically 10-700 mW/cm2 at the source, with controlled exposure times to achieve specific fluence targets (often 0.9-36 J/cm2). Consumer devices vary enormously — and most do not publish their specifications at all.

Buying a NIR cap or helmet marketed for brain wellness is not equivalent to receiving the protocol used in clinical research. This does not mean it is harmful. It means we do not know whether you are getting a therapeutic dose, a sub-therapeutic dose, or anything in between.

If you are in recovery from a stroke or brain injury and you are exploring every option — which I completely understand — the risk here is not primarily financial. The risk is investing hope, time, and energy into something that may or may not be delivering what clinical trials suggest is therapeutic.

The opportunity, on the other hand, is real: the underlying biology is sound, and the research pipeline is active. This is an area worth watching closely.

When the brain is given the right conditions — adequate sleep, nutrition, rehabilitation, reduced inflammation, and potentially adjunct therapies that the evidence supports — healing happens in ways that can surprise both patients and clinicians.

I have spoken with hundreds of stroke survivors on this channel who found approaches that contributed meaningfully to their recovery. Not a single one found a shortcut. But many found tools — used thoughtfully, in partnership with their medical team — that made a genuine difference.

That is what this channel is about: doing the work so you can make informed decisions.

Bill Gasiamis is a stroke survivor and the host of the Recovery After Stroke podcast. He is not a medical professional. Nothing in this post constitutes medical advice. Always consult your treating physician before starting any new therapy.

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