Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

You can live months without food and days without water, but if you are deprived of oxygen for more than a few minutes, you'll die. Yet some of our tissues exist in a state of relative oxygen deprivation. Stroke, heart disease, circulatory disorders, carbon monoxide poisoning, memory loss, burns, wounds, and trauma all have one thing in common: The affected areas aren’t getting enough oxygen. What if we could somehow get much-needed oxygen into these tissues? Well, we can—with hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

What is Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?

When you breathe concentrated oxygen in a pressurized hyperbaric oxygen chamber, virtually every cell in your body—including those with poor blood supply—is flooded with therapeutic oxygen.

But that’s just one of the ways in which this extraordinary therapy promotes healing. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy also stimulates angiogenesis, or the growth of new blood vessels to feed and nurture injured tissues. It increases collagen formation and kills anaerobic bacteria that thrive in an oxygen-poor environment.

In addition, hyperbaric oxygen mobilizes stem cells, which reside in the bone marrow and can transform into a number of cell types to facilitate healing. Studies show that one hyperbaric oxygen treatment doubles levels of circulating stem cells, and a full treatment course increases them eight-fold—making it an excellent anti-aging therapy as well. For more on this, click here.

A Typical Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment

During a hyperbaric oxygen treatment, you sit or lie in a specially designed, chamber and breathe concentrated oxygen through a mask. The pressure is slowly increased, and you simply relax, read, listen to music, or watch TV for 45 minutes to two hours. A treatment course may require, depending on the condition, anywhere from five to 40 sessions.

Although the treatment itself is simple, finding a facility that offers hyperbaric oxygen therapy and a doctor willing to prescribe isn’t so easy. For inexplicable reasons, this well-studied, highly effective treatment that could benefit millions is ignored by most conventional physicians. Click here to learn more.

Expected Results From Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Hyperbaric oxygen provides remarkable benefits that cannot be achieved by any other therapy. SPECT scans, which illuminate blood flow through the vessels in the brain, reveal that hyperbaric oxygen therapy restores cerebral blood flow in patients with conditions such as stroke, brain trauma, and cerebral palsy—it literally wakes up the brain. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy also improves circulation and improves function in other tissues throughout the body.

All told, the safety and efficacy of this treatment have been demonstrated for nearly 200 diverse conditions in more than 30,000 scientific studies published over the past 60 years, and it has been enthusiastically embraced by physicians in many countries outside the United States.

Conditions Helped by Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

For anyone who has suffered a stroke, hyperbaric oxygen therapy should be the treatment of choice, and early treatment can prevent speech and vision problems, paralysis and other common complications. But hyperbaric oxygen also helps patients regain function months, even years after a stroke. It is also effective for neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and autism and for brain and spinal cord injuries. Read about this by clicking here.

Slow-healing infections are another condition that hyperbaric oxygen helps. It speeds the healing of infected wounds, diabetic ulcers, bacterial skin infections, burns, poisonous spider bites, and post-surgical sites and has saved many a gangrenous limb from amputation. It also hastens recovery from soft-tissue and musculoskeletal injuries.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy was originally used for decompression sickness ("the bends") in divers, and it’s used in hospitals to treat carbon monoxide poisoning and just a few other conditions. But, as you can see, this exceptional therapy merits far broader use.