Adam Torres and Sam Peterson discuss Mind Spa Denver.
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Show Notes:
Mind Spa Denver is on a mission to help the mental health of the veteran population. In this episode, Adam Torres and Sam Peterson, Founder & CEO at Mind Spa Denver, explore Mind Spa Denver and mental health.
About Sam Peterson
Sam’s career in the Army as a bomb disposal technician, which included two combat deployments to Afghanistan, and subsequent mental challenges that arose through his transition to a civilian spurned a passion for mental health treatment and the service of others. Sam has founded multiple companies in the mental health space, focused on traumatic brain injury treatment. His years of start-up experience and his background in business administration make his skills an asset to the Mind Spa team. Sam holds both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in business administration from Regis University.
About Mind Spa Denver
Mind Spa Denver specializes in interventional psychiatry, providing innovative and evidence-based treatments to support individuals struggling with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other mental health conditions. With a compassionate team dedicated to lasting and meaningful change, the clinic offers personalized treatment plans tailored to each individual’s needs.
Utilizing cutting-edge therapies such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), ketamine infusion therapy, and mild hyperbaric oxygen therapy, Mind Spa Denver delivers a comprehensive approach to mental wellness, helping patients regain balance and improve their quality of life.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today I have Sam Peterson on the line. He is a founder and CEO over at MindSpa Denver.
Sam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Adam. It’s an honor to be here. All right, Sam. So we got, a lot to talk about today. So, of course, I want to get into MindSpot Denver. I want to talk about the mental health practice. Of course, get into your background. And I think just to get us started here, I like to start with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So our aim and our goal, Sam, and our mission is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs and executives and experts. So that’s what we do. Sam, what mission matters to you? So, the mission that matters to me, Adam, is changing the way that mental health is treated in this country for our veterans and first responders. how did that mission start for you? It started as a patient man back when I was in the military I was a an explosive ordinance disposal technician So I was the guy in the big green suit that went down and cut wires on improvised explosive devices and I helped catch bomb makers in Afghanistan you know, it’s not, I love my job, but it was by far one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had in my life.
I got to meet some of the most amazing people, but what they didn’t tell me in the recruiter’s office was how high the suicide rate is. Wow. And, I don’t know if you know this, but vets are one and a half times more likely to die by suicide than non veterans. and people with a traumatic brain injury have a three times greater chance to die by suicide than the rest of the population.
And being a bomb tech checks both of those boxes. And so, you know, it didn’t take too long being into the field before, started losing guys just dropping like flies, honestly. and nobody knew why everyone wanted to chalk it up to post traumatic stress, but I have to be honest, like we were very resilient bunch.
It, there is such a significant selection process for our job that. PTSD just as an all encompassing diagnosis for the whole field just didn’t seem right to me. And then we started to realize very quickly that a ton of us were just getting constantly bombarded with blast waves. And the more I dug into that as a root cause for all these issues, the more It just showed it kind of TBI reared its ugly head and it just became it got to the point where i’ve been suffering from these things myself.
I was suicidal at one point. The only reason i’m still alive today Is because one of my friends texted me When I was about to pull the trigger when I had my 45 in my mouth, and that’s the only reason i’m alive. Whoa and he invited me over to to his place and introduced me to some of these alternative modalities that now we’ve incorporated into this one stop shop for mental health.
And it completely saved my life and got me on the right trajectory. And then, I mean, 5 months after that, you know, I was finally doing good, finally in a really good, stable place looking towards the future. And I was in the motor pool talking to one of my mentors right before field problem right before Memorial Day, and I’ll never forget that conversation with Neil because it was the last one he’d ever have with anybody at the unit because on Memorial Day, he walked into his backyard and shot himself in the head with his three year old son in the house.
And, at that point, it just it just floored me to see someone who was just a shining example of every everything that someone. In our field could be to take their own life like that. And it just, hit me square, just right between the eyes, man. And I was like, man, literally that it’s not just me, not only am I not alone, but everyone, this could literally happen to anyone.
This could happen to anyone in our field. And nobody’s touching it. Nobody’s really getting to the root cause of this. So I’ve dedicated, my professional life outside of the military to figuring out, why, not only why is this happening, but what we can do to interdict, deaths, deaths related to suicide from anxiety, depression, PTSD, and brain injuries.
And that’s how I got here. And I want to stick on why just a little bit longer before we go into the modalities. I just want to clarify something. You mentioned, at least for your experience, I think you said blast waves. Like, what does that mean? I don’t want to, I don’t want to just assume everybody listening understands that or kind of like the complexity of what you’re saying.
Yeah. So, in the military, there’s, we’re around explosions a lot, whether it’s firing different kinds of weapons systems like you ever seen shoulder fired rocket launchers or shooting large artillery pieces or being inside of a tank or explosively breaching a door or in our case. dealing with improvised explosive devices that terrorists had made and we’re trying to target our forces with like dealing with those all the time, doing large demolition shots.
And I’m talking, I’m talking about, I know it’s gonna be hard for people to conceptualize this, but thousands of pounds of explosives going off at once. Like you want to talk about mushroom cloud. It was like, you know, yeah. It’s not like you have your 4th of July fireworks where you’re just like, Oh, you know what I mean?
That’s pretty loud. It’s not like a cherry bomb, right? Oh, no, no. No, this is enough to, this is enough to vaporize you. Yeah, I gotcha. So. so when there is an explosive event, it creates a blast wave. Just imagine like you dropped a rock in a completely still pond and those ripples that come out from where you dropped that rock into that pond.
are the blast wave. And that blast wave interacts with our tissues. It literally like it tears as it goes through. It shreds brain tissue. The closer you are, the worse this effect gets. And over time, those micro tears build up damage to your brain cells that causes inflammation. And it also causes your brain’s immune system to become overactive.
And that overactive immune system Kills you in about it takes about 20 years to do so. And until you use therapies that interdict that process that process or reverse it. You’re looking at a situation where people don’t get better. They only get worse. And that’s, yeah, that’s what the medical period.
Yeah, exactly. And that’s what the medical establishment has us is our fate. And, it’s not, none of that is true. And it’s really because the medical establishment, as it stands right now, is really focused on using, I’m talking about this as far as mental health goes, when we’re talking about the brain, we’re talking about behavioral health.
There are two major tools that the traditional establishment uses, and that’s medication and talk therapy, and neither of those treatments get to the underlying cause of these behavioral health issues and traumatic brain injury. They don’t, really can’t. And that’s because the two things that anxiety, PTSD, depression.
and brain injuries have in common is, first of all, they’re highly inflammatory to the brain. So they cause a lot of inflammation in the brain and they affect your neural connectivity. So they affect your brain’s ability to talk to itself and intercommunicate.
So this gets us to the, some of the, like, why and like the beginning and the root cause. Now, you went on this journey, you know, after, if I’m off on the timeline, please correct me. But after, that unfortunate story of your friend. You go on this journey , then figure out like, are there other solutions or do I just have to accept my fate?
Because you’re kind of, if I’m piecing this together, right, you’re also, not only possibly going to be a victim, except you received that text from your friend or, but it still could be lingering for you as time goes on. And if, you didn’t correct and or fix some of this stuff, then, and figure out, is there another answer other than what I’m being told?
In general so not correct. If I’m off on any of that, by the way, please correct me. But now my understanding of the timeline is that now you’re on this journey to figure out what can I do? Like, let’s pick up from there. And of course, corrective me. If I’m off on any of that timeline. No, you’re you’re totally right.
Yeah. After that happened, I went on. Just a journey to find other treatment modalities. Like, you know, like ketamine went and did a couple of ketamine infusions, noticed that everything got better for a pretty significant amount of time. But then my symptoms still started to come back then did hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
And that was one of the things that really had the longest lasting effects. And from there, started a nonprofit to pay for veterans to get more effective mental health care. So we were paying for and then proving that they were, in fact, getting better. So we started this nonprofit called the Invictus Project.
We started paying for vets to go through hyperbaric and ketamine. And we’re like, you know, this is we’re almost there. Like they’re getting so much better, but it’s like we’re not seeing these sustained results that we really want to see from there. I met a doctor in Aspen who was doing intranasal stem cells.
And help develop his protocol. We actually did it on both myself and my dad. And my dad had a 30 year old traumatic brain injury. It’s kind of you know, serendipitous that I got into this because he called me while while this is all going on. He’s like, Hey, son, can you help me? I think I’m starting to get dementia.
Granted, this guy’s 55 at the time. And you know, 30 years ago, fell off a three story roof, hit a slab of concrete. The only reason he’s alive is because the wooden step that his head hit shattered the thing into a million pieces. So, he’s starting to get dementia at the age of 55 calls me up.
I mean, my dad’s on Medicaid, so I’m developing like these new, these new stem cell protocols like that. I don’t know what to do. Like I can’t afford to pay for this for you. so I turned to Dr. Hughes, the doctor who, originally developed the stem cell protocol. And I was like, Hey, man, like, is there anything we can do?
And Dr. Hughes looked at me and is like, Oh, yeah, absolutely. We’ll just upregulate your stem cells and put them into his brain. And I was like, what? So, yeah, I know, right? You know, for anybody who’s listening who, you know, has kids, guess what? They actually do have medical utility for you. So, they’re not just there to drain your wallets and age you.
You can actually Ah, little farms, little farms. Well, they’re little stem cell farms for you. I can tell you this. I’m saying little stem cell farms. Dude, well, I call them little, little stem cell factories. Oh, that’s, that’s great news. Yeah, so, dude, what we did is we upregulated my body’s stem cell production using hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
We took the stem cells out of my body. We stuck them into his brain and his spine. And this man was the emotional equivalent of a 15 year old for my entire life. And since that treatment, that was back in 2018, a new dude. New guy. Wow. It was like the emotional intelligence fairy decided to hit him on the head the right way this time.
And all the symptoms have been gone since then. Wow. And then, you know, this is the tip of the iceberg for this kind of, technology. And that’s why, these new innovative treatments are so important because this just line of crap that we’ve been fed regarding mental health that like, Hey, you’re going to have this for the rest of your life is just wrong.
It’s absolutely wrong. These things can be treated. And we can, recover, move on and gain strength from these traumas instead of being bound by them. Let’s spend some of the time we have left and, just tell us a little bit more specifically about, MindSpot, Spa Denver and how people can get involved.
Yeah, so. Here at MindSpot Denver, we use a combination, and I’m going to throw a couple medical terms at you here, so I’m going to catch them, go for it. I’m going to catch them, go. Alright, so we use a combination of culturally competent talk therapy, medication management, ketamine infusion therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Now, I know that sounds like a lot of medical terms, and it is. But like the basic principle here is that we are downregulating inflammation in the brain. We are upregulating what’s called neuroplasticity, so we’re making it so your neurons can branch out and create new connections. And then we’re giving your brain all of the energy it needs to do that healing and rewiring.
And when we do that simultaneously, we see some pretty amazing effects. We treat a lot of veterans at our clinic, a lot of first responders. And what we see is if someone engages with all of these therapies simultaneously, the average time for them to reach full symptom remission from depression, anxiety, PTSD, and TBI symptoms is around 14 to 17 days. Nate, how do people follow up? How do they learn more? How do they connect with your team? Yeah. So, you know, the easiest way is to check us out at MindSpotDenver. com. You know, we’ve got all of All the services. There are a lot more in depth dive on what we do. They can reach out to us at our clinics, email info at MindSpotDenver dot com or just give us a call at 303 327 0350.
Perfect. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely. Put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over and speaking to the audience. If you haven’t done it yet, especially if this is your first time, hit the subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day.
We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So definitely hit that subscribe or follow button and Nate man. I appreciate all you’re doing out there. And thanks again for coming on the show. Well, thanks man. Appreciate you have me.