How Does Psychedelic Treatment Work For PTSD? - Dr Martin Polanco & Michael Higgs - #494

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guests today are Martin polanco, who's the founder of The Mission Within and a veteran mental health advocate, and Michael Higgs, who is Command Master Chief of a Navy SEAL team and is Director of Operations at The Mission Within. For a long time, once soldiers have finished in war, their battles have often continued back home. Both active and retired veterans suffer with childhood traumas, life traumas, divorces, opioid addiction, family issues, traumatic brain injuries, deaths of team members, chronic pain injuries, and long-term inflammation. Martin and Michael believe that psychedelics are an important potential solution to give suffering veterans another shot at a functional life. Today, expect to learn how Iboga rewires the brain in 12 hours, why Michael held a gun to his head after being out of the SEALs for two years, the insane pressure placed on Special Forces operators by themselves, what happened when Michael ate 20 grams of mushrooms on a native Indian reservation, how to sign up for Martin's current studies, which he needs volunteers for, and much more. This is a conversation I think you're going to see a lot more of over the coming years with athletes coming out of sports like American football and rugby and boxing, needing therapy to help them with traumatic brain injuries and CTE and with the reams and reams of servicemen and women that also need help with whether it be psychological, spiritual or physical issues that they've accumulated whilst keeping their country safe. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Martin polanco and Michael Higgs. Give me the story of how you guys first met.

**Martin Polanco** (1:59)
So we met in the context of treatment with psychedelics. So I was running a program for special operations guys called The Mission Within. And we had been working with veterans since 2015 And I had treated some of Michael's or Punky's friends. So he was trying to refer another buddy. And I don't want to get too much into the details because it concerns just medical information. But I'll let Punky really dive into how far and how deep he wants to go.

**Michael Higgs** (2:35)
Yeah, pretty much what Martin said. It was two years ago. I had four years out of my retirement and I was in school. And it was finally the train of life finally caught up with me. And I had reached out to Martin to help another friend of mine to get into a program that I had heard about from a bunch of other friends but didn't really know too much about it. It was a psychedelic program and it came around at just the right time for me and at just the right time for my friend as well that I've been involved with Martin ever since.

**Chris Williamson** (3:06)
What do you mean when you say that the train of life had come around?

**Michael Higgs** (3:13)
Yeah, for me, it was the 30 years in the SEAL teams. And the normal, I say the normal life traumas that we all have that we kind of run away from, like we're always moving target until life catches up with us. So childhood traumas as a kid, and then life traumas as a young adult, two divorces, had a spouse addicted to opioids, living in that kind of tumultuous world, and a daughter addicted opioids as well at the time, during the big opioid epidemic. At the same time, the war kicked off, so I was like fighting, I felt like I was kind of fighting on two different fronts at the same time. Then a bunch of losses overseas, of friends, and then a bunch of moral injury, then a bunch of blast injuries to my noggin, and then masking all that with pain pills and psychotropics, and everything else, just trying to keep the wheels turning and keep myself moving forward, and eventually, just kind of all caught up with me.

**Chris Williamson** (4:11)
Were you trying to medicate while you were still in the teams to keep you moving forward while you were working?

**Michael Higgs** (4:19)
Yeah, a lot of it was pain management, then a lot of it was just my cognitive ability was just severely declining over time. I was a breach from the civil teams and a sniper, then just a bunch of blast injuries from training after combat. I was starting to suffer memory loss, massive migraines, and then just the frustrations that come with that, trying to mask it and covered up and move through life. Then on top of all the other daily things that I was struggling with on the home front and then show up to work with a smile on my face, going, hey, I'm ready to go like we all do. And yeah, then I had gotten out and retired at the end of 2016