Anthony Gurule  00:09

All right, welcome back guys to the Live Loud Life podcast. My name’s Dr. Antonio, your host of the Live Loud Life podcast, and today we have our good friend, Mary Finck.

Mary Finck  00:19

Hello, yep, yep.

 

Anthony Gurule  00:21

Talking about brain injuries and concussion rehab. So she’s a physical therapist, I’m gonna let her obviously spew her credentials, her specialty, so on and so forth. But I think this is going to be an awesome episode. This is not anything that we we deal with here as far as a rehabilitative process. So I think it’s going to be a lot of great information. And interestingly enough, which I don’t know if you have any specific statistics on this, but how many just head injuries we get. I know for me playing sports, talking about before the podcast, how many adolescents and kids actually suffer from brain injuries, brain injuries, concussions, so on and so forth. But we’re gonna dive into it. So welcome.

 

Mary Finck  00:59

Great, thanks. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Business credit. Yeah, yeah, so. So I’m Mary Finck. I’m a Doctor of Physical Therapy. And I’m actually a certified brain injury specialist through the American Brain Injury Association, which pretty much meant you just had to do a lot of training and experience and hours to be able to like take a test and say that you provide specialty care to this population. So I originally got into treating brain injuries because my dad had a TBI, which is a traumatic brain injury from a rollover car accident when I was in high school, and it changed his personality, and he had headaches, and we unfortunately lost our business and our home. So it was quite an impact. Yeah. So that’s how I kind of got into this. And then I realized we started understanding what was going on with him and what happened and the loss that we suffered, because we call this like an invisible injury. Because you can’t see that anything’s wrong with you. It’s just our brain controls everything about our body. So if it’s injured, it can affect a lot of things. So then I kind of, you know, went to college, played basketball, blew my knee out, got to do PT myself, and then around the same time, started understanding what injuries my dad had sustained, and that like PTs helped people with brain injury. So that was kind of when I went that direction, like 2006 to 2009. So just kind of worked in all different settings and like rehab at Craig Hospital, literally like helping people walk again and get out of like a vegetative state, more severe injuries. And then the past seven or eight years, I’ve been more in like outpatient and helping with people with like kids with concussions and car accidents and stuff like that.

 

Anthony Gurule  02:51

And what’s your…? In case I forget. I will forget to ask at the end. Business Name plug.

 

Mary Finck  02:57

Oh, yeah, yeah. So my new business is Roots Physical Therapy and Wellness. And we’re in Louisville, Colorado, and the website’s rootsptandwellnessco.com. So Colorado. So I’m really excited to get this up and running and help like more of the community and a diverse population.

 

Anthony Gurule  03:18

So first question, I wanted to spin off of  and plug, or spin off and come back to some of you had said is the silent injuries, right. So these are the big things. And obviously, a rollover accident. Pretty clear to see especially if someone has an abrasion or something on their head. Right. Okay, you hit your head, you probably suffered from some sort of injury right? Outside of those. And obviously, there’s a range of, you know, severe versus to acute, but yet small. What are some of the silent symptoms and things that you see, see or hear, you know, or evaluate or assess that you look for? Yeah. And that someone who is not as versed at understanding those silent signs, what should people be looking for?

 

Mary Finck  04:03

Sure yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, just to kind of give more of a broad answer, because this could be something you could look for in your children that might have like a concussion or a spouse that was in a car accident or someone fell off the ladder or whatever. But I would say a lot of fatigue headaches, blurry vision, dizziness, balance, like difficulty speaking or like memory issues. We kind of sub categorize head injury into physical, emotional and cognitive. And then there’s like a huge energy reserve and when your brain isn’t functioning and all those areas, your energy reserve gets tapped, and then there’s like extreme fatigue. Like acutely after a concussion, why someone would vomit is more of like a labyrinthine concussion, which is what I treat as a vestibular therapist, is your inner ear organ has all these really fancy hair follicles and things that stimulate like your brain to know where your your head is in space. So that just gets like super shook up. And then people feel like they got off a roller coaster. So if you’re vomiting, like, consistently after a concussion, you have a pretty substantial labyrinthine concussion. But definitely, it can be kind of minor. My daughter unfortunately has had like four. And it, you know, affected her ability to read because it can affect like the eye movements, which is part of what I retrain. your ability to focus attention. So kids with like ADHD, many of them have had history of concussions, and there’s no correlation there. And like overstimulation, like kids with like sensory processing issues like just getting like hyperacusis or overstimulated. So I mean, everything, if it’s a very severe injury, it’s going to like cause weakness or paralysis on one side of the body, or you wouldn’t be able to, like, walk without a walker, or, you know, like more severe and more visually obvious symptoms. But that’s usually not the case. And most people in that situation got help quickly, which is part of the problem is that people do not get help, because they don’t know that there’s something wrong.

 

Anthony Gurule  06:15

Yeah, so they’re, I mean, that’s hence the the silent thing. Because you’re just going about your everyday life. What um, I’m just trying to think back too, because I started going through the rolodex of how many concussions I think I’ve probably had. a number from micro–and this is the question I wanted to bring up–is how do you see micro traumas come into play? So for instance, my my sport I played was soccer. Headers. One after the other and you get some of those–call it ring your bell, right? We kind of just hit. and I didn’t I didn’t lose, vomiting or anything substantial. But how do you see micro trauma or the micro dosing of the sub level injuries add up? Or is it not as significant?

 

Mary Finck  06:58

Well that’s what CTE is, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is like these accumulative sub concussive blows and like football, soccer, fighting, whatever, hockey. but it’s not necessarily like reported incidents of concussions. But these repetitive sub concussive like quick lead, quick stars, and then it got better. that we’re seeing, usually an athlete’s like within 10 years of stopping playing their sport, that then there’s like headaches and anger, and dysregulation of emotions and memory issues. So that is something that is like, more growing awareness of that there is like a pretty substantial problem here. And it’s causing people, you know, a lot of these guys end up, you know, physically abusive, in jail, or committing suicide, unfortunately.

 

Anthony Gurule  07:52

So on that note, because if you’re dealing with cognitive issues, which obviously could fall into the category, or should fall into the category of PT, but oftentimes people go to neuro, or PCP, and then you’re dealing with emotional things, so people go to a therapist, or something like that. What are some of the big tells outside of Yes, I played a sport or Yes, I think I’ve had trauma, that would indicate that a post, sorry, a previous concussion might be the actual leading factor. as opposed to an actual issue that can be handled with therappy. Make sense? Like, what are the things that you’re trying to diagnose? Or look at right? Say, this is the reason why I think it’s more so from the concussion?

 

Mary Finck  08:39

I mean, a lot of that kind of twofold answer would be diagnostic. So like making sure you get a brain image, there’s no tumor or MS, or something else that can affect brain function. And like cause and effect, like mechanism of injury like this is when things started changing in my life. But sometimes it can be such an accumulation of concussion and like after one concussion, you’re two times as likely to get another and after a second, you’re like eight times as likely to get a third. So like, it just becomes like this terrible snowball effect. But statistically, it just grows and grows and grows. So some people don’t know, a second sub concussive blow if the first one didn’t heal is going to result in additional or worsening or even new symptoms and like even more of a longer recovery.

 

Anthony Gurule  09:31

and that was so that was gonna be the question, which I think you answered. So because the brain tissue has not adequately healed, that makes you more susceptible to the next, just like another just like an injury we would see on the body. What is healing really look like outside of just, outside of just time? What are some things that you’re doing to help healing? What are some of the outside resources that you promote for healing ie nutrition or something like that?

 

Mary Finck  09:58

Right. Absolutely. Nutrition and like any anti-inflammatory diet, and there’s certain supplements that are good. trying to just get like a healthy. like you, I always tell patients you got to put good gasoline in the car to drive the car, right? So and then just identifying the areas of deficit because we call this like a snowflake injury not one is the same and each person is a different person. So then add an injured brain. So trying to if there are like severe emotional issues, was there, is this a result of like abuse or a car accident? Do we need to do like trauma therapy? so making sure people get like the right emotional therapy. cognitive therapy is usually done by like either a speech therapist or occupational therapist. And that’s more helping with like getting back to school and getting back to work and memory issues at tension like why usually say more of the marbles, what I do is more the physical dimension of retraining, vision, dizziness, balance, coordination, and then trying to get all of the systems working together. Because even though that brain lesion might be like a disconnected nerve, we know neuroplasticity has the ability to heal. So we just kind of find out. I always tell my patients like find a way around the traffic jam. So we’re just trying to find a new way. And sometimes after enough time, you’re just like, Okay, this is how it is, how can you modify or change your life around that?

 

Anthony Gurule  11:28

that’s a good point, I use a very similar concept where it’s just like multiple roads to Rome, or sometimes you run into a roadblock. You have to just switch how you’re doing something temporarily. Hopefully we can get back on the main highway. Not always. So one thing I have heard, and I don’t know any sorts of amounts or numbers, but using obviously goes within the anti inflammatory conversation, like omegas and high fat diets, not diets per se, sorry, adding higher fat content, good, healthy fat, right? How does that come into play?

 

Mary Finck  11:59

Yeah, so there’s a lot of research with like ketogenic diet and stuff like that with like brain recovery. The hardest thing for someone that is like truly injured is like, there’s so many elements about their life, like sometimes I can’t go to school, I can’t go to work. And so adding like some, like more complex diet is hard. So I usually just try to tell people like, you know, limit soda, limit sugar, or try to eat foods that come from the earth, and like trying to make it more basic, because it’s just too hard to then also add a huge dietary change on top of like, manage the rest of their life. Just like a general way in this population, specifically, because you could get into like, a lot of nitty gritty with that, and the research and everything, but just trying to keep people like generally eating healthier. And drinking enough water too.

 

Anthony Gurule  12:47

for sure, which is so funny to say don’t drink soda, don’t eat excessive amounts of sugar.

 

Mary Finck  12:51

Right? Just so easy to just do that. But some people don’t even know that’s a problem. And then you talk about inflammation. And you talk about like, limiting to less than 20 grams of sugar. And a lot of people don’t even know that the soda they’re drinking at 76 grams of sugar. So it’s just education.

 

Anthony Gurule  13:08

So as a side note, which, Nichelle always (my wife) always kind of points out for people that are consuming or having trouble with sugar just to put it in content, context, how much a gram of sugar is, so four grams of sugar is essentially like one sugar cube. So when you’re looking at the sugar content of anything you’re eating, divide that by four and that’s how many sugar cubes you’re consuming, right? So when you look at literally whether a bottle of soda, and it’s like 76 grams, right? Just literally how many sugarcubesyou’re just drinking down. And that’s the and that’s the that’s the big killer for so many things. It’s just liquid calories, but like liquid sugar. just so much easier to consume and just guzzle down. Imaging. so I came across, I don’t know if it’s wavy or walk– Is it WAVi?  Yeah. So boulder-based group. I did a scan. Obviously, it didn’t have a post scan before. They said I passed with flying colors. I don’t know what that meant, per se. What are some of the scans people should be looking at getting? Obviously, you mentioned the MRI, you know, looking at lesions, tumors, different major space occupying thing, but what are some of the other scans that provide you the good information of how cognitive brain function is actually performing.

 

Mary Finck  14:23

There aren’t really a lot to be honest, like there’s your answer. I mean, a lot of the times people get in an accident or they have more severe head injury, they went to the emergency room, they’ll do a CT to make sure there’s no bleed. Then usually neurology or primary care if there’s more substantial red flags, which would be like severe loss of control, double vision, severe memory loss, like more significant symptoms would order an MRI to get more detail of the brain tissue. But these are like cellular level changes. So it’s not showing up on a lot of imaging. So the WAVi I believe is showing like EEG signaling. But a lot of what I do is visual and vestibular. So there’s something called a V and G–video and a stagger gram. So we order that a lot to check like ocular tracking, because your eyes are controlled and controlled by your cranial nerves, and only that comes from your brain. So if there’s dysfunction in the eye, or there’s a dysfunctional like eighth, the eighth cranial nerve to the vestibular system is not working, then we can use those objectives to test for that. But a lot of the times, we don’t need the testing to like treat the patient, we just like treat the patient, not the image, but we’re trying to rule out anything more severe going on, you know, because I have had patients like, well, they had this brain tumor they didn’t know of, because they got in a car accident, they got a brain MRI, never would have known that was there before because they were functioning pretty well, right? Or, you know, MS come up like a time or two. So it’s just trying to rule out something else. But even like with my dad, his imaging was all normal. And then three years later, that like diffuse axonal injury showed up on a scan. So that the biggest thing is just as is not showing up.

 

Anthony Gurule  16:13

So are there any? Are there any blood marker indicators?

 

Mary Finck  16:18

I know they’re doing research for don’t using that as an indicator in the emergency room. But I don’t think that’s mainstream yet to my knowledge, but

 

Anthony Gurule  16:27

I didn’t know if there’s a sort of like specific thing that would be leaching out that would indicate…

 

Mary Finck  16:31

they’re trying to test for emergency room like protein levels, I think or something but I’m not sure. Because I don’t work in that acute setting. Like what is standard. Usually, most of the time these patients don’t even have imaging done in the emergency room unless there’s like significant symptoms.

 

Anthony Gurule  16:48

So that makes sense. So I’m curious, and I know you had mentioned kind of piggybacking and going a little bit deeper into the therapies you provide, right? So obviously, you’d mentioned, it’s a multifactorial approach, right? You got to look at this, you got to look at this, because there’s so many elements, and there’s only so much you can do from one end, but you focus on the physical. What does that retraining really look like? Yeah, especially when you’re dealing with eye movements, and so forth. I know, you had mentioned previously like balance, so on and so forth.

 

Mary Finck  17:20

Depends on the patient.

 

Anthony Gurule  17:22

Let’s use a.. Um

 

Mary Finck  17:24

I give you like a pediatric, like a kid example. And like an adult example or something.

 

Anthony Gurule  17:29

If you’re okay with sharing, like, how you’ve been treating your daughter.  Kind of like what have you been doing for her? Because obviously reading if you’re having trouble tracking with your eyes, that can make it more challenging.

 

Mary Finck  17:39

So my daughter is a perfect example of like childhood concussions going on notice, especially because I was like, Okay, I’m not going to blow this out of proportion because of what I do. And I kind of just pushed her to go back. The research shows like this group of kids goes back to school, this group of kids sits in a quiet room in the dark. And the group of kids that goes back to school gets better faster. Like you use the brain to heal the brain. Still, these days, people are getting advice, like sit in a dark room. And like, yes, for the first day or two of mental rest. Yes, appropriate. But that is not like how you treat a brain injury these days.

 

Anthony Gurule  18:17

Because that still is a common suggestions, When, and it’s no different than like someone saying like rest like the right protocol for an ankle injury. It ould be beneficial for the very acute, right? When would somebody know that they are okay to get out of the dark room and start being reintegrated?

 

Mary Finck  18:36

Just trying to do that and see how the body responds, like trying to add…

 

Anthony Gurule  18:41

Like the body’s response would be like dizziness…

 

Mary Finck  18:43

…headaches, stuff like that. Yeah. So just trying to slowly add back life in. Knowing that it’s not going to just be like it was, you know, most concussions clear in like seven to 10 days and then more pos concussion is like two to four weeks. So if we’re going longer then to a month, then you have more like substantial, lingering symptoms. But that’s only 10% of the population like most concussions heal. But that’s like the 10% of the population I treat, for sure. Yeah. Which I really think that that data might be different. It’s just because it’s not recognized. It’s not a recognizable injury.

 

Anthony Gurule  19:17

The one thing we always say to is like when you’re looking at statistics, right? And we’re slightly biased because we work in specialty fields. But for the patient, when you’re looking at a statistic, you are that statistic, right? So it feels like it’s 100% because that is you.

 

Mary Finck  19:31

That’s right, that’s right.

 

Anthony Gurule  19:32

And that in it sometimes feels a little bit more skewed because they’re just like, oh my gosh, I’m one out of 10 people, this must be really bad.

 

Mary Finck  19:40

Right? Right. Right.

 

Anthony Gurule  19:40

Yeah. On this spectrum, higher. But it doesn’t also mean it’s horrible.

 

Mary Finck  19:47

Right, right. And yes, and like trying to get people to identify with like, who they are as a human being and not identify with like their injury or their brain injury or their back injury but like, trying to make sure people don’t know I’ll identify with this new diagnosis. And that they put themselves in their human first is like super important, I think in general. But going back to like the testing and stuff, yeah.

 

Mary Finck  20:13

But so she initially was climbing and she hit her head on a bar and like got really dizzy and that that lasted about a week of like a lot of dizzy and like I couldn’t take her in the grocery store because all the visual stimulation, she was getting like super dizzy and seemed to clear pretty well. And then only a few weeks later, my son who was, I don’t know, 15, 16 months like threw a glass vase that shattered on her head. It was about like a centimeter thick base. Luckily, she wasn’t like cut. But that was like sunglasses on for days. Like she slowly seemed to get better. And then she just tanked in school. And it was like her reading levels went down and she couldn’t focus because she said the kids it sounded like the kids were hammering her head because she couldn’t focus on all the noises coming in. And her attention was worse. So she actually wrote a book. It’s called my invisible injury, a story of kid concussions. it is not published, So if anybody is a publisher, I got a good book. There’s not another kid concussion book out there. So mommy published it on Shutterfly and sells like cash copies. Yeah, but we’ve sold probably, like 80 copies of this book, but I just I just, it’s not like mainstream yet. Yeah. But her story was to tell other kids like that this is what happened. And this is what a concussion is about. And this her last concussion, she then maybe a year later flipped out of the hammock and fell right on her head. And she couldn’t walk for two hours. So like that was substantial, like there was motor loss, right? But then she kind of cleared, so trying to retrain like the eye tracking and the convergence and the balance and trying to like, recreate the pathways that are injured is just more part of like how what I test and then that kind of helped guide my treatment. But when people get more advanced, you’re integrating balance with vision exercises and having them do cognitive things at the same time, like make a list of fruits and vegetables. That’s like high level vestibular concussive therapy, like you’re getting back to normal at that point. Because the multitasking can pretty much tank like in the research, the multitasking gets really hard. And when you start doing more than two things with a head injury, so

 

Anthony Gurule  22:30

Do you start to see changes? Also just thinking because your background with CrossFit and everything else. Or people start to see changes based on their metabolic, I guess, output changing? If they get back to exercising, breathing harder, How does that come into play?

 

Mary Finck  22:50

So that’s like a huge piece, because there’s something called like the buffalo concussion protocol, which is trying to like get hyperperfusion of oxygen to the brain through exercise for healing. And that’s kind of the concept of like hyperbaric oxygen treatments. And like why people go to sea level and feel like a normal person. Again, there’s just like, more oxygen, because we’re at Mile High here. But yeah, like, as soon as we can get exercise back in like that is ideal, because it will help the brain like in an athlete is going to naturally just heal better, because they already have such a high function of vestibular system and cardiac output and all of that. But yes, and so in this protocol, we measure like heart rate and symptom response and oxygen levels, and like, take them through, like progressing, getting every minute, a little bit harder. And then there’s just like a threshold, we call that like, your, your sub Max threshold is when you got symptoms. So then we have people exercise it like 80 to 90% of that heart rate. So trying to get people back to exercise.

 

Anthony Gurule  23:54

And on top of that, outside of maybe that, do you see, do you do you give any specific breathing exercises to help facilitate that?

 

Mary Finck  24:04

Absolutely. Antonio.

 

Anthony Gurule  24:09

That was not a question we asked before. But do you then help coach that through the metabolic efficiency as well? Like, does that help if they start that sub, or that that threshold? Right, right, oftentimes, that threshold, at least when someone’s clean, clear, it’s it’s almost your aerobic capacity threshold when you switch to more hyperventilation right? So if someone’s starting to get symptoms, assuming that that heart rate is at a sub threshold from their arobic capacity, cueing breathing, so that they’re more efficient, allowing them to maximize that heart rate?

 

Mary Finck  24:41

Absolutely. I mean, part of how that pulls in so much is like because when you have a trauma to the head, you’re gonna go into sympathetic, you have your sympathetic and your parasympathetic. So you’re going to be sympathetically over driven and a lot of head trauma is a result of direct trauma like an accident or something hit my head or, so the body’s like going to get stuck in that state. Yes. So trying to teach people, I actually give breathing stickers out. So I have people put stickers like on their wall, on their phone, in their car. So they’re like visually reminded to like, do the “in your nose for four, hold for a second, out of your mouth for six,” or whatever, however you teach your breathing, like, just just breathe. but mindful breathing will calm and activate the parasympathetics to be able to because a lot of, this is kind of a whole nother topic, But like Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome–POTS, or dysautonomiam, is very common with concussion, because like the brain-heart regulation is off. So people get like, heart palpitations, they get like, they can’t regulate temperature. So there’s this huge, like weird body response, and people don’t know what’s happening or that that has anything to do with a concussion. So trying to like retrain the parasympathetics. And exercise will help reset the parasympathetic.  It’s pretty, pretty complicated topic of concussion. But yes, essentially, like if you’re breathing more mindfully throughout the day, you’re going to have a better response, like when you’re trying to exercise for sure.

 

Anthony Gurule  26:17

but I think it’s so important too, because most people want to get back to some sort of physical activity. And I could see that being a very strong rate limiting factor, because you know, and the fact that you integrate that in so very, very soon or suddenly, is very good, because we often see, right, it’s just like, and it’s the same we talked about, like don’t do anything for your low back until you feel like you’re healed. But then that gap from when you feel better to what you want to be able to do is too great. Yeah. And then you start just yo-yoing.

 

Mary Finck  26:47

Yeah, so I have a I have a good example of that one. So I had a girl that she was a veterinary surgeon was like traveling and a wild dog ran in front of her on her bike, and she crashed and got a head injury. Well she came for her hamstring injury. but she had her sunglasses on and she couldn’t be in the waiting room, she couldn’t fill out her paperwork. And so I was like, I think I can help you with your concussion too. And so this was like a very high level elite biker. But she was scared because of her PTSD, or getting on a bike to get back on a bicycle. So she decided to take up running, but she wanted to run Hundreds. So so what we did was like just slow integration, like and so she slowly added her miles, like she slowly, she couldn’t run in the dark, because she got so dizzy and disoriented. So I had her like, put a headlight on and just start walking around her neighborhood a few laps at night. So it’s just like, slowly, like that’s an extreme example of getting to like a sport. I think she’s done like seven or so Hundreds at this point. And she can like practice again, I don’t think she does surgery, but she practices as a vet again. But it was just like, sometimes it’s such a slow process, trying to give people hope that like not to give up because it can it can be really rough.

 

Anthony Gurule  28:07

But no, I think that’s actually, it’s funny. You mentioned like slow process. And obviously, when you’re talking about brain injuries, the processes, I’m assuming, much slower than like other outside tissue healing, just because they’re toleration for certain things a lot different. But the way you describe it, realistically, I think is important for everybody is that that’s that’s the rehab process for anyone. It’s the stepping stone mentality, we’re building a pyramid, the pyramid, the foundation of the pyramid, is all the boring shit that nobody likes to do. But it sets the foundation for everything else. Everyone assumes. And whether it’s 100 mile race or elite type of thing is the tip of the pyramid. For some people, for some of our patients, honestly, it’s gardening like yeah, like the thing that they want to be able to spend their time and do. But yet and what comes to mind is this patient who I have, who is 77, suffered from back injury. And everyone told her well don’t do anything that hurts your back. So for six months, she hasn’t done anything. Now she can’t even get out of chair, she can’t even kneel down and garden. Like we have to go back to our foundation. So the example you gave is beautiful because it’s the same for anything else. And it’s all about managing what’s tolerable. understanding the threshold of symptoms. And you laying out the symptoms that people should be mindful to think about is important for realizing what your threshold is.

 

Mary Finck  29:32

Yeah, I would say another really important note is like the emotional effects because just imagine like your brain not feeling right and your body not working and like the suicide rate and young kids with like multiple concussions like there’s absolutely correlation, so like just encouraging parents to like be very mindful what’s happening with their kids and sports and like getting people the right help because it just comes to a point where people just feel like they don’t I don’t know how to be in control anymore, right? They just can’t like, be, you know, have another day of headaches or be able to like, “I can’t focus” or whatever it is.

 

Anthony Gurule  30:09

And layering on top of that, right. The stress have already being, depending on the age, a student athlete, right, you know, playing college. This has been phenomenal. I learned a lot of great stuff to look out for. Any last little tips that you try to spread, as far as like brain health and awareness that we can leave people with?

 

Mary Finck  30:31

Yeah. How to check if your helmet fits right. You know this?

 

Anthony Gurule  30:36

I don’t.

 

Mary Finck  30:37

So if you’re putting on your kid’s helmet, and you put it on, and you tighten the back, then you have to strap it enough to pass the Shake, shake test. So if you shake your head and the helmets moving around, it’s not going to be very proficient, but helmet’s just gonna prevent a skull fracture, you can still get concussed within a helmet. But if the helmet’s just floating around all over the place, it’s probably going to be a little less effective. And then like finding a concussion, concussion provider, just looking for people that have the experience, because there’s a lot of people getting into concussion care, which is great. But if you don’t know exactly how to treat this population, you actually can make people feel a lot worse. So making sure people have like, extensive training in this area.

 

Anthony Gurule  31:23

So obviously, if people are local, you have that provider here in the Boulder County, Broomfield County, Weld County area. But if someone’s not local, Do you do telehealth?

 

Mary Finck  31:36

Yeah, telehealth within my licensed states. So I think I’m licensed in like five different states. But you can always just reach out and I can help someone fins. There’s Concussion Compass–is a good foundation. And then you can look for providers in that area.

 

Anthony Gurule  31:54

Now, I did have a question about the helmets real quick. Yeah. MIPS. You know, helmets have so MIPS technology, the part that attaches to your head, and the actual shell can actually slide and move a little bit. And it’s supposed to help disperse energy. Is that even…?

 

Mary Finck  32:11

I mean, it’s it’s propably how you fall, angle, force, the brain, whose brain? I would say it’s probably better than, like, not having that. But yeah, it’s just like jello floating around in there. And as soon as it shakes it, just yeah, it just can get injured. So just do the best you can do and gotta live life.

 

Anthony Gurule  32:34

Don’t be scared.

 

Mary Finck  32:35

Yeah. Don’t be scared. Just yeah. Because anything can happen at any time.

 

Anthony Gurule  32:39

Well, thank you again.

 

Mary Finck  32:40

Thank you. Yeah.

 

Anthony Gurule  32:43

And we’ll put again, we’ll put all the contact information. So if you guys are local, where you can find Mary here, Boulder County, Weld County, Broomfield County, so and so forth. But I mean, I just encourage you guys, I have healed from my injuries, took time off, did the things. And I’ve been, you know, trying to be mindful is if certain things come up, could it be a result of that? Fortunately from my injuries, I have not suffered from a lot of major things. But there are so many people that are dealing with the silent injuries. So hopefully this provides you guys with a little bit more context, a little bit more research, provides you also with some encouragement that something actually could be and is going on, because oftentimes, as you said, the silent things get swept under the rug. You didn’t see anything on this. We didn’t see any of this like, it must be in your head. Well it is! What are we gonna do about it?

 

Mary Finck  33:37

Thank you. Thank you. Yep, that was great.