Closed Head Injuries, Mental Illness, Dementia: Dr. Royal Lee—Sixty Years On

Modern medicine is just beginning to connect the dots between closed-head injuries and mental disorders. But as nutrition researcher and historian Mark R. Anderson explains in this stunning lecture, Dr. Royal Lee detailed the connection between them more than six decades ago.

Explaining that even a forgotten blow to the head can manifest years later as a mental disorder such as epilepsy, early-onset dementia, mental illness, or slowed cognitive function, Dr. Lee described the exact physiological mechanism by which such trauma leads to mental impairment. And while medicine remains in the dark about the nature of this mechanism, emerging research is increasingly and rapidly pointing to the correctness of Dr. Lee’s theory.

Anderson presents these rare audio recordings to allow listeners to hear for themselves Dr. Lee’s description of trauma-induced mental dysfunction as a case of autoimmunity. In one 1955 recording, forever ahead of his time, Dr. Lee explains that a blow to the head can cause “the development of brain antibodies, and that inhibits brain activity.”

Anderson proceeds to back up this assertion with findings from modern research reporting the discovery of brain autoantibodies in subjects with such neural diseases as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and myasthenia gravis.

But perhaps most remarkably, as modern medicine gropes to find a solution to the problem of trauma-induced brain dysfunction, Anderson supplies an outline of nutritional therapy, based on Dr. Lee’s work, to help counter the effects of such trauma and allow the brain to recover.

With head injuries and their long-term effects on mental health moving to the forefront of public awareness, this lecture is vitally important for anyone who has suffered a closed-head injury or knows someone who has.

This downloadable audio includes all reference materials cited in the lecture, plus a 1957 recording of Dr. Lee explaining his groundbreaking theory of protomorphology, aka autoimmune disorder.

Total runtime: 1 hour, 3 minutes