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You know, every year about 1.7 million people in the United States suffer a traumatic brain injury. I see it every day in my line of work. 

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And in severe cases, there is no drug, there is no pill, there's really no intervention that can truly help once the damage sets in.

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But I'm about to tell you a story about two dramatic cases of crippling brain damage that may have, 

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in fact, been reversed by a change in nutrition, something so simple again and it's hard to believe -- fish oil.

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Bobby Ghassemi's story begins almost three years ago, with a phone call.

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Toughest call that any parents can get.

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''It's about your son. There has been an accident. Come quick."

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Bobby's car had careened off a dark and winding road. Paramedics assess the wreckage and Bobby.

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When I'm looking at the reports, they report a Glasgow Coma score of three. A brick or a piece of wood has a Glasgow Coma score of three. 

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It's dead. And somehow, the paramedics miraculously managed to revive this kid.

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There had been so much bleeding within the brain, his skull could not contain the swelling. Every part of his brain was affected. 

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But Peter and Marjan Ghassemi shrugged off the horror of their situation to fight.

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Little did they know that that fight would link them to the sole survivor of an infamous mining disaster.

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A few years before Bobby's car barreled off that road, 13 miners huddled together after an explosion as deadly carbon monoxide crept into the airspace around them. 

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Forty-one hours later...

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The only confirmed survivor is Randal L. McCloy, Jr.

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Dr. Julian Bailes was Randy McCloy's neurosurgeon. McCloy's body somehow recovered. 

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The question was, could his brain do the same?

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Bailes was concocting an unorthodox plan to try and save Randy McCloy's brain -- high doses of omega-3 fatty acids, fish oil.

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So the concept was then trying to rebuild his brain with what he was made from when he was an embryo in his mother's womb.

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If you have a brick wall and it gets damaged, would you want to use bricks to repair the wall? And omega-3 fatty acids are literally the bricks of the cell wall in the brain.

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During a traumatic brain injury, the brain swells and nerve cells stop communicating and die. 

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Omega-3 fatty acids, the theory goes, can rebuild damaged nerve cells, reduce inflammation, keep those brain cells from dying.

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The problem? Few human studies had proven this theory.

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Dr. Michael Lewis, a former Army colonel and omega-3 researcher, believes fish oil could be the missing link.

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After Bobby's accident, he got a desperate call from Peter Ghassemi, and after some explaining, asked him...

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What do you think about the idea of using high dose fish oil like Julian Bailes used with Randy McCloy?

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The carbon monoxide level was really high I had no explanation of how I escaped it.

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But McCloy, whose remarkable recovery is well-known, was just one case, and it remains unclear whether omega-3 was truly the key.

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The next hurdle for Ghassemi? Convincing Bobby's doctors.

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It was a fight. They didn't believe. 

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And they said, fine, the West Virginia miner was one case. I need a thousand case[s] to be proven for me before I can give this to your son.

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He literally had to lay down in the middle of the floor and throw a tantrum until they started to put it down his child's feeding tube.

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The tantrum worked. 

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And two weeks after starting his fish oil regimen, Bobby Ghassemi, case study number two, began to emerge from his coma.

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About two months after that, he attended his high school graduation.

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They all stood up and were screaming and cheering my name. I took my graduation cap off, and waved it around.

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The common denominators for Ghassemi and McCloy, devastating brain injuries and then omega-3 fish oil.

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But did the omega-3 hasten their recovery? For now, we do not know.

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I absolutely believe that it made a huge difference in Bobby's recovery. And this is pure speculation. 

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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.