Last year, Bernie Kosar, the former Cleveland Browns star quarterback, seemed anything but fine. Throughout October and November, he sent a series of incoherent tweets; during a radio-show appearance in December, he slurred, shouted, and rambled until the hosts mercifully cut the segment short. Separately, Kosar confessed to suffering from depression, ringing in the ears, and insomnia. He was displaying the hallmarks of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head. The 49-year-old Kosar had seen a platoon of doctors, but none of them could help.

Within a few weeks, though, everything had changed. On January 10, Kosar called a press conference and, standing before a room of Cleveland reporters, declared himself cured. The Browns winning the Super Bowl would have seemed more likely. But here Kosar was, smiling and confident. And the credit, he said, went to the square-faced man in a black t-shirt and tan blazer standing beside him: Dr. Rick Sponaugle.

CTE can only be diagnosed via autopsy, but Sponaugle explained how Kosar had visited his clinic in Palm Harbor, Florida, where the doctor used something called a “positron emission tomography scan” to figure out what was wrong with Kosar’s head. Details about the ensuing treatment were sketchy—Sponaugle delivers supplements through an intravenous drip, the formula for which is proprietary—but Kosar testified that, whatever was in the stuff, it worked its wonders in no time. “It was a gift from God to find this and feel like this,” Kosar told the journalists. “I see all the symptoms going away.”

It’s hard to overstate what a fix for CTE would mean for football. More than ten years after the disease was first found in the brain cells of a prematurely dead former lineman, awareness of its risks is now widespread; earlier this year, 4,500 former NFL players sued the league for allegedly hiding the dangers of head trauma. The ex-athletes who suspect they’re suffering from the condition face a cruel paradox. During their careers, they learned to will their bodies to amazing feats—and to equate giving up with moral failure. They get banged up, then get their shot of Toradol and are good to go. But with CTE, there is no fighting their way back to health. “Once the brain tissue is lost, it’s gone,” says Robert Stern, a neuropsychologist at Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy and a leading CTE researcher. “These are neurodegenerative diseases, with no known ways of slowing or stopping them.”

“The neurologists that I saw, the only thing they had to offer was, ‘Get your affairs in order.’”