When Heads Come Together outlines the journey to solve many longstanding scientific mysteries, including the elusive scourge of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), potentially saving contact sports and the brains of our warfighters. Why don’t clever people solve Traumatic Brain Injury? a member of the 2008 Army Research Lab posed to author David Smith MD. Fifteen years, 40 patents, and 25 journal publications later, he has pioneered SLOSH Theory™ which explains how Nature’s highly g-tolerant creatures such as woodpeckers, giraffes and head-ramming sheep can tolerate, and even thrive, in the setting of innumerable head impacts. Smith’s tagline may say it all… Nature is my mentor™ and you can witness how this mantra plays out through the pages. Much of the early chapters of the book revolve around the creation of the First and Only medical device, The Q-Collar™, to ever be authorized by the FDA as being safe and effective against Traumatic Brain Injury. Within a year of launch and at the time of this writing, more than 40 NFL professionals have adopted this device and given the continued struggles the league has had with TBI, more are sure to come. Illustrating the world’s anticipation of this technology, within 48 hours of the above FDA’s press release, the Q-Collar received more than 350 million media hits. Act II moves into the discovery and research into the SAGE Rebreather™, a technology to revolutionize Sleep Apnea and Altitude Illness management. The book’s FORWARD was written by the esteemed Neurosurgeon Julian Bailes MD, a long-time consultant to the NFL Players Association, who was memorialized by the 2015 movie Concussion. All in all, with the help of research institutions like Harvard, the Mayo Clinic and Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center, there are now more than 20 published journal articles and more than 40 patents internationally. The backdrop of the arduous process of discovery, vetting, design and delivery of novel medical product development runs deep throughout this book and the reader is introduced to a bevy of industrial designers, artists, biomechanical engineers, marketing executives. Sit back and be introduced to the little-known world of scientific discovery and the processes used to commercialize one the world’s most awarded and awaited technologies.
