08/02/2026
Neurosurgeon Who Survived Iraq Combat and Lost His Son Says Faith Rewired His Brain
NEUROSURGEON Dr. W. Lee Warren knows despair from the inside. Deployed to a combat hospital in Iraq, he endured roughly 100 mortar and rocket attacks while performing some 200 brain surgeries in just over five months. Years later, tragedy struck closer to home: his son Mitch was killed in 2013, plunging Warren into a season of grief and post-traumatic stress that lasted years.
His path back, he says, ran through both Scripture and science. Warren began studying neuroplasticity — the brain's capacity to physically reshape itself through repeated thought patterns — and paired it with biblical practices of renewing the mind. Citing Philippians 4 and 2 Corinthians 10:5, he explains that the moment a person is willing to change what they dwell on, the brain is already primed to follow. Over time, deliberately replacing fear and grief with gratitude and biblical truth reshaped how he processed suffering.
Warren, now a practicing neurosurgeon and author of 'The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery', urges others not to accept destructive thinking as fixed identity — the lie of "this is just how I am." Instead, he teaches that people can identify harmful thought patterns, "take them captive," and replace them with truth grounded in faith. "You're designed to heal," he says, "and there's tremendous hope in that."
