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

Chris Williamson pairs credentials with claims: Martin Polanco founded the Mission Within, Michael Higgs was a SEAL command master chief. The hooks are ‘how Iboga rewires the brain in 12 hours’ and why Michael ‘held a gun to his head after being out of the seals for two years’ — mechanism and outcome, both resting on testimony.

The frame widens to athletes leaving football, rugby and boxing with traumatic brain injury and CTE, and to ‘reams and reams of service men and women’. The origin is a referral: Michael, ‘four years out of my retirement’, wanted a place for a friend; Martin had treated veterans since 2015.

He dates the collapse to accumulation: ‘30 years in the SEAL teams’, two divorces, a spouse addicted to opioids, a daughter addicted during the epidemic, losses overseas, moral injury, repeated blasts to ‘my noggin’, masked with pain pills and psychotropics. ‘the train of life finally caught up with me’; at the worst, ‘fighting on two different fronts at the same time’.