NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.

The headquarters of Oakley, a maker of recreational and military gear, looks as if it belongs in a war zone. It’s a massive bunker with exposed-steel pipes, girders and blast walls. Even the dais in the auditorium is armored.

But on a recent afternoon, the talk inside the building – set atop an arid, inland hillside in Orange County – is not about fighting wars but about caring for warriors. Doctors, scientists and veterans approach the podium at a conference to present some of the latest tools to help vets recover from wounds both mental and physical: bionics, virtual reality, magnetic waves.

A session called “Healing the Warrior Brain” features a trim, bleach-blond former Army staff sergeant named Jonathan Warren, who recounts on video his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq. His flashbacks, panic attacks and booze benders were well chronicled: For a year, the Los Angeles Times tracked Warren’s efforts to find peace, including via Veterans Administration therapy.

It didn’t work, he says. But now a different Jon Warren is here to say that he is finally free of symptoms, one year after that 2013 story ran. No longer does his worst memory of the Iraq war – failing to rescue his best friend, who nearly burned to death after their Humvee hit a roadside bomb in 2006 – grasp his psyche and inflict guilt.

That’s because of a revolutionary new treatment that retuned his brain, he says, and set “my frequencies right.” Now, he’s able to proudly embrace his military service, “to keep the memory, to be able to go there,” Warren tells the audience, “and not be controlled by it.”

The veteran, who also suffered traumatic brain injury in the blast, credits his recovery to something called magnetic resonance therapy, or MRT – a procedure that pulses energy from magnetic coils into his cortex. He and scores of other combat vets have been drawn by word of mouth to a private clinic here for what some of them call “brain zapping.”

The unproven procedure is offered at the Brain Treatment Center, located in an unremarkable office park, free of charge to former service members. The vets exit telling of a miracle cure – a transformation to tranquillity that they, their buddies and families can hardly believe.

“It saved my life,” they say, one after another.

“I got my husband back,” their wives say.

Glowing testimonials also flow from the parents of autistic children treated here, who say they’ve seen breakthroughs beyond all expectation: children who are truly communicating for the first time, learning normally, behaving like other youngsters instead of dwelling in unknowable private worlds.

Is this a product of science? A matter of faith? Or simply a mystery?

Yes, yes and yes.

Miracles sometimes require all three.

Magnetic stimulation

As doctors take on stubborn, baffling neurological disorders such as PTSD, autism and Alzheimer’s disease, they are turning to esoteric treatments that require journeys to unexplored frontiers.

“As humans, we can identify galaxies light-years away, we can study particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears,” President Barack Obama said in launching an initiative to understand and map the brain.

The goal of the brain initiative is to harness private, academic and federal research along the lines of the Human Genome Project, this time using experts in physics and medicine to focus on the brain’s nearly 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections – the circuitry that governs thought, learning and behavior.

Some doctors think the plan is too focused on mapping and not enough on exploring potential cures. One of them is Yi Jin, the Brain Treatment Center’s medical director. The affable, Taiwan-born psychiatrist has plowed ahead with MRT for PTSD, autism and other disorders despite limited evidence that it works.

“We are not claiming efficacy, but we are seeing clinical responses that are positive,” the doctor says cautiously in an interview, offsetting some bolder testimonials of swift, remarkable improvement in quality of life.

In 2008, the Food and Drug Administration approved the magnetic procedure – applied through what is called transcranial magnetic stimulation – for drug-resistant major depression. Published studies in recent years – one with 20 PTSD patients, another with 30 – reported significant reduction in symptoms in patients receiving this transcranial-magnetic-stimulation care. The procedure has been shown to be safe and is offered for depression at medical centers, including Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

Jin uses the treatment off-label, customizing it, he says, to realign and synchronize the firing of neurons in each patient’s brain, depending on the condition: People with Alzheimer’s, anxiety, sleep and eating disorders, addiction and tinnitus (ringing in the ears) have gone under the coils that emit the magnetic fields.

He calls it “noninvasive neuromodulation.” In May, the clinic became a research affiliate of the University of Southern California’s Center for Neurorestoration, whose director touts MRT’s potential as “a real game-changer for the treatment of neurological diseases.”

‘Visible change’

More than 100 vets have been through treatment since Jin started offering it in 2013. Many say they had given up on Veterans Administration PTSD approaches – which include behavior therapy, medication and virtual re-exposure to trauma – before finding their way to the clinic.

“One hundred percent responded with very visible change,” Jin says.

In June, a National Institutes of Health advisory group on the president’s brain initiative listed magnetic treatment as among those that “need to be better elucidated” as regards the potency, scale and duration of their effects. But parents of autistic children often are desperate for a cure and willing to pay Jin’s clinic $11,500 and up for a month of daily treatments, usually lasting 30 minutes each and not covered by insurance.

Since opening the Newport Beach center four years ago, Jin estimates, he has used the procedure on about 1,000 people, the large majority of them being treated for autism.

Evidence supporting the therapy’s value for autistic patients comes from trials conducted at the University of Louisville with more than 200 higher-functioning autistic children. About 90 percent of them showed improvement, says Manuel Casanova, the psychiatrist and neuroscientist who carried out the federally funded studies.

“You can actually make a difference,” he says. But how much of a difference and for how long? Casanova is forthright: “I do not have good answers.” A more expansive trial, involving more research centers, is needed.

‘A little tickle’

On a recent day at the Brain Treatment Center, a former Marine helicopter crew chief reclines in a medical suite, eyes closed, while a bearded ex-Army squad leader holds a paddle-shaped wand over the forehead of his fellow Iraq combat veteran.

Click-click-click.

For six seconds, a staccato beat ensues from the device. Then 54 seconds of silence before the clicking resumes.

“It’s almost like a magnetic massage, a little tickle,” says Ryan Wood, the man with the wand, who swears by the PTSD treatment he received here himself. Jin has hired 10 veterans, including Wood, who is the center’s operations coordinator, and Jon Warren, who does outreach to fellow veterans.

“It’s like waking up from a good nap,” says Joseph Hummel, the ex-Marine, who witnessed four comrades die in a fiery helicopter crash at the start of the Iraq war in 2003. “It’s like taking a 10-minute snoozer at 2 o’clock, and you feel like you’ve slept 16 hours.”

Hummel, an insurance agent, says his PTSD manifested in chronic insomnia, explosive anger and excessive drinking; he says he was able to sleep normally for the first time in years after his first treatment in March and awoke a far calmer man.

He decided if it worked so immediately for him, it might help his 15-year-old stepson, Andrew, who is autistic.

Andrew used to communicate mainly by reciting random lines from movies, his parents say. Andrew may have thought he was connecting with people – but, in fact, his parents say, he never really engaged in two-way conversations and never started them. He separated himself from the family.

Now the teenager’s mother, Joleen Hummel, is sitting in the center’s waiting room while Andrew undergoes treatment just a few hours after her husband did. She’s recalling what happened after her son’s first appointment last year.

“He walked out of the treatment door – he was cracking up and laughing, and he just doesn’t do that,” she says. “Right away, there was something.”

That night, she had an actual conversation with her son.

“He was like my child for the first time, talking to me about his future, asking questions about autism, asking me about heaven, what happens when you die. It was like having a conversation with a 14-year-old child I’d never met.

“We talked until we couldn’t talk anymore.”

Her face, framed by long brown hair, reflects a profound joy.

“I’ll never forget that.”