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Transitioning out of the military is tough.
Not only is it difficult on a veteran mentally and physically, but also their family and friends. In addition, the wounds veterans are faced with are not just physical, but also mental and emotional. These “invisible wounds” have been plaguing communities for years, and Transcend Foundation decided to do something to address it.
The Transcend Foundation is one of 43,000 veteran-based organizations in the country. What sets them apart, however, is that they are proactive in addition to being reactive. Co-founder of the foundation, Brendan Quisenberry, noted,
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“We're actually working with the Department of Defense. We're working with key military people, in Special Operations Command, to be able to actually document and quantify this data and what's going on with it, and be able to hopefully see what we can do to help these veterans. Not when they get off service or active duty, but as they come into service from day one, when they start, how do we really help them from a complete holistic, health standpoint, from the day that they get into service to the day that they exit service?”
At Transcend Foundation, Quisenberry and his team “aims to immediately establish a baseline on the patients by addressing and balancing their endocrine system.” This is a method not many other entities or foundations are currently addressing, and that’s where Transcend comes in — the holistic approach allows veterans and first responders to take advantage of different hormone replacement therapy avenues as well as new cutting edge medications at no cost to them. Invisible wounds often lead to perpetual stress in which veterans and first responders are expected to manage by themselves, and the time for change is now.
“You can't keep putting service members in a constant state of perpetual stress and expect them to eventually just recover in a timely manner,” Quisenberry said.
In order for veterans and first responders to operate at the tip of the spear and tackle areas of life such as work, finances, and social components, their bodies need to be in homeostasis. Furthermore, veterans and first responders who are experiencing hormonal imbalances have even experienced troubles with their reproductive systems.
“Low testosterone is leading to a lot of infertility issues and the birth rates and everything declining.1 in 4 men in the US currently suffer from this and we believe this number is much higher amongst veterans and first responders,” Quisenberry said. “And so what we're just working on is trying to identify and address that and get these people back to full optimization so they don't have those issues.”
Moving forward, Transcend Foundation hopes to continue to increase awareness regarding endocrine issues. When the foundation launched in 2022, the low awareness regarding these issues was one of the first things that was noticed. One of the more tangible goals is to collect more data in 2023, which will begin with a project called 7x. Within a seven days timeframe, seven special ops guys will conduct seven skydives, seven marathons, and seven swims on all seven continents. Money raised from this project will be given to seven highly vetted veteran or first responders charities, and Transcend Foundation is one of them.
“This project attempts to simulate these service members through a three-phase approach: first, conducting pre-training ahead of time, then simulate a highly stressful environment on this seven-day project where we break the athletes down, which simulates a deployment, and lastly, recovery — how quickly we can get all these athletes back to homeostasis,” Quisenberry said. “All this is aimed to calculate and quantify this data through numerous wearables and blood work.”
For more information about Transcend Foundation, visit the website here.
Photo credit: Courtesy of Brendan Quisenberry, Transcend Foundation's Instagram
