'The whole place was cheering for me'
Two weeks after beginning the regimen, Ghassemi was emerging from his coma.
"We saw hand movements on the left side," Peter Ghassemi said. "Around the fifth or sixth week, there was some movement, and then his hands started moving more, the leg was moving more."
Soon after that, Bobby began to show signs of recognizing his family and his dog and of discerning things like colors and numbers. Slowly, his brain was recovering, and his family ardently believes that the high-dose fish oil is the reason why.
"His brain was still recovering, but with (omega-3), it recovered much faster and in a shorter amount of time," Peter Ghassemi said. "His brain was damaged, and this was food for the brain."
Three months after his accident, Bobby Ghassemi was well enough to attend his high school graduation.
"The whole place was cheering for me, and they all stood up and were screaming and cheering my name," Ghassemi, now 20, recalls with a smile. "I took my graduation cap off and waved it around."
He still has significant left-side weakness and is relearning how to walk, but his progress has been tremendous, according to Lewis.
"In my opinion, and this is pure speculation, he never would have come out of a coma if it hadn't been for the use of omega-3s to allow that natural healing process to occur," said Lewis, founder of the
Brain Health Education and Research Institute. "In the end, the brain has to heal itself. There are no magic cures for brain injury."
Large-scale study needed
But what do these two dramatic stories really say about omega-3 as a potential treatment for traumatic brain injury? For now, they are merely stories with omega-3 as a common denominator.
The remaining questions are as poignant as the stories themselves: Could youth have been a factor for Ghassemi and McCloy? What about other treatments given to McCloy, like hyperbaric oxygen? Could they have played a role?
Those and other questions could and should be answered, according to experts, with a large-scale clinical study.
"These two clinical cases where we have a wildly unexpected recovery, was it just luck that they woke up?" asked Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, an omega-3 expert and chief of the Section on Nutritional Neurosciences at the National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "Or is there some reasonable scientific explanation for it?
"Given that there aren't any other treatments, this is a good bet," Hibbeln said. "It's really only reasonable to go forward with doing the full press of careful intervention studies."
The implications of a successful study are huge: 1.7 million people suffer a traumatic brain injury each year in the United States.
And research into how omega-3 might function for
stroke, Parkinson's disease and early Alzheimer's disease is ongoing.
"The message that I'm trying to get across is, there's more you can do," Lewis said. "If you add omega-3s, we can then begin to let the brain heal itself a little more efficiently."
"Up until the time the pharmaceutical industry gives us a drug that cures all brain injury, this is the best hope we have," Bailes said.
You stupid fukk. How many people have to explain to you that fish oil is not alternative medicine? lol@alternative medicine being defined by lack of tv commercials.