**1. Introduction**

Though neither of these quotes is quite true, they lead this introduction because those who are working to heal broken brains and stop the suicide epidemic are closer to winning than when they started. There are no guarantees that collective successes will overcome medical resistance to accepting the obvious: what "they" are doing does not work to heal brain wounds, and "they" ignore and denigrate a safe and effective treatment that does. Yet those trying to get urgent help to suicidal brain wounded service members see victory on the near horizon for the varieties of truths told in the research and worldwide clinical medicine. As with many advances, an anecdote helps elucidate the main point: changing minds and medicine, even with science, data and facts, is not easy work.

Two renegade Australian MDs, Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren, in **1981** knew there was a simple treatment for gastritis and peptic ulcers: an antibiotic to kill Heliobacter pylori bacteria. Now, Helicobacter pylori may be the most successful pathogen in human history. While not as deadly as the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, cholera, and the plague, it infects more people than all the others combined. Yet conventional medicine already knew that ulcers were caused by stress. An entire set of industries grew up around "healing" stress and its aftermath: antacids, stomach surgery for bleeding ulcers, gastritis, stomach cancer, depression. "To gastroenterologists, the concept of a germ causing ulcers was like saying that the Earth is flat." [1] To them, the cause of all the illness and death was psychosomatic, "all in the head." Marshall went so far to prove his point that he gave himself ulcers by drinking a broth of H.pylori and curing himself. And still not recognition. Cut to the chase: For their relentless persistence and science on H.pylori, in **2005** Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize. Treatment with an antibiotic is standard medicine for stomach cancer [2]. Twenty-four years to go from goats to Nobel laureates. Along the way, the men were ridiculed and denounced by learned councils around the world. And then the "truth."

As you read these pages, we expect that you will be whipsawed by the truths exposed as authors and readers wonder about the answer to the Obvious Question: *Since this works, why are they opposed to it?* As you will see, there are no complete answers, but the data and the peer-reviewed research do provide compelling and overwhelming evidence of the safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness of this treatment. Over 7500 successes cannot be entirely wrong.
