Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy: A Novel Treatment for Longevity, Brain Health, and Chronic Disease with Dr. Scott Sherr

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. You can change your expression of genes to help you with healing, with optimization, with the various ways of rebuilding the scaffolding, as I like to say, of the tissue itself. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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Welcome, Scott. It's great to be here, Mark.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. All right. Well, I personally have benefited from hyperbaric oxygen medicine. When I was really sick with mold toxicity, and was just couldn't get better. And I had autoimmune issues and colitis, and I started to use it and found really profound differences with it. And I, I think it's something that really is underutilized in medicine. I've recommended for my patients for many things, everything from autism to Alzheimer's, to chronic fatigue, to Lyme disease, to just benefiting for longevity. So can you kind of tell us, you know, what is hyperbaric oxygen therapy and why is it such a powerful healing? amazing technology.

Well, thanks for having me again, Mark. I remember you coming to the facilities in New York and getting hyperbaric therapy and having your experience. So, I appreciate you mentioning that online here to tell people that we're not just people that recommend it, we actually use it ourselves. And this is personally for me as well. I have a chamber in my house, which is a different type of chamber than you used at the facility, but there's different indications for these kinds of.

Things which we can get into.

So hyperbaric therapy, the definition is relatively simple. It's the increase in atmospheric pressure combined with increased inspired oxygen. So I'll take oxygen first because most people know a little bit about oxygen at, so oxygen is something we breathe in the air at 21% at sea level. That's how much oxygen's in the air. The rest of it's mostly nitrogen at 5,000 feet above sea level where I live here outside of Boulder, Colorado, we're about 16% oxygen. So what happens is oxygen comes into the body, but that's okay. That we have motorized trouble climbing the mountains out there. Yeah, I know. That's why, right? So you get this, and this is actually comes to why it's so important. So we carry oxygen typically on red blood cells. Red blood cells carry this molecule on it called hemoglobin, and hemoglobin binds to oxygen, and then oxygen gets to our tissues, and then it goes all the way through our cells. And then at the end of our, that whole process, it helps you make ATP or your cellular energy currency. So oxygen is really important. Without it, we don't live for very long. Now we have a certain amount of oxygen carrying capacity, and that oxygen carrying capacity is relegated to how many red blood cells we have in circulation. Typically, so you have a certain amount of oxygen that could be carried. You have a certain amount of oxygen that can get into your tissues. Now, there's a couple ways to increase the amount of oxygen carrying capacity that you have. You can increase the amount of red blood cells you have in circulation. You can do that by altitude training. So when you go to altitude, for example, come to Colorado, what happens is that your body stimulates a hormone out of your kidneys called epigen or EPO for short. And EPO, what that does is it increases the number of red blood cells you have in circulation. Now, you can short circuit this by taking the drug itself. This is like psych like Lance Armstrong.

And others would do it.

Yeah, doping. The doping. Doping. Exactly. Or what you can do is actually, you can auto transfuse yourself. So one of these guys, some of these guys will do this. They'll actually take blood out maybe 90 days because it takes about 90 days to make new red blood cells, 90 days or even, even more time than that, like 180 days before a race, and then transfuse yourself a unit of blood before you do a race and you're gonna have extra red blood cells in circulation so that you have increased oxygen carrying capacity. So that's typically what's done in the doping world, right? You have EPO, you have, you have auto-transfusion, so you're just transfusing yourself your own blood. But there's another way to increase oxygen carrying capacity, and that's by increasing pressure. So we talked about hyperbaric therapy was increasing atmospheric oxygen. We can increase that up to 100%. But if you're looking at a pulse oximeter, most pulse oximeters for most people are going to read between 96 and 100%, right? Which means that, you're bound amount of oxygen on your red blood cells is about 96 to 100% once they leave the lungs. So it's not like a lot amount left for you actually to bind any more oxygen there. So if you put a face mask of oxygen on your face and you breathe 100% oxygen, there's not gonna be a whole lot more oxygen you can.

Carry because there's only about 4% more of those sites.

Maybe that could be bound. So the trucks are already loaded, right? Yes, exactly. So the pulse ox is, is something you guys can check. Everybody knows about it, a pulse ox now from COVID et cetera. So, If you add pressure though, if you increase atmospheric pressure, which means that you simulate the pressure you feel under a certain amount of seawater, that pressure changes your physiology and allows oxygen to drive into the plasma or the liquid of your bloodstream. The physics law that's around is something called Henry's law for people who like physics. The only Henry, the only physics law I'm going to talk about today is Henry's law. So the more pressure you put on a gas, the more of that gas is going to go into liquid form. and as a result of that, you get more oxygen into circulation and drive it into the plasma of the liquid of the bloodstream itself, getting up to 1200% more oxygen in as a result of that liquid O2 combined with that pressure with oxygen together. So that's how hyperbaric therapy works.

Incredible. So what are the benefits? Because sounds like a great idea. Okay, more oxygen, oxygen's good, or maybe not always right, you mentioned oxygen toxicity. too much is not always good. But what are the benefits that we're seeing both from the perspective of diseases that we can treat with hyperbaric medicine, as well as health optimization, longevity research? And then I think there's been a number of studies out there, and I think we're still learning, but I'd love you to sort of unpack how is this used in traditional medicine and how is it used outside of traditional medicine?

Sure. I first learned about it in a trauma center. in medical school and they were using it for really bad wounds. They were using it for carbon monoxide poisoning. They were using it for acute infections like necrotizing fasciitis, which is also known as flesh eating bacteria. That's a nasty one. That's a nasty one. Yeah. So the way I like to think about how hyperbaric therapy works is that you have all this oxygen in circulation and then something happens acutely or many things happen acutely or all of a sudden, as soon as you have all that oxygen in circulation, then you have what I call more the long term benefits of a hyperbaric protocol, and that's related more to what's called epigenetics, which I'm sure you've spoken about many times in the podcast, the idea that you can change your expression of genes to help you with healing, with optimization, with the various ways of rebuilding the scaffolding, as I like to say, of the tissue itself. So when you get into a hyperbaric chamber, you acutely infuse 1200% more oxygen. What's that going to do? That's going to reverse low oxygen states. So if you have tissue that's at risk of dying, if you can get more oxygen to that tissue faster, it may not die. And this has been studied in strokes, it's been studied in traumatic brain injury, it's been studied in acute heart attacks, acute spinal cord injuries. If these people get hyperbaric therapy very quickly, they're going to save tissue because you're getting more oxygen infused into the body. So you have more liquid O2 in, it's going to diffuse out more into the tissue.

You're going to prevent it from potentially dying as a result of getting all that oxygen in.

Yeah.

Just a quick anecdote on that. And then they keep continuing the disease thing. My, my partner fell off a golf cart and had a concussion, smashed her head and had real bad post-concussive syndrome. So I contacted a local hospital that had a hyperbaric and I convinced them to off off label. We call off label, give her hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And it was a game changer. She literally came out of there and her brain woke up. It was really quite stunning to see.

You know, in person as opposed to, you know, in a scientific article that I read. Yeah, no, it's always nice. I appreciate the anecdote. I mean, it happened to me. I gave myself an acute concussion. maybe four or five years ago, and I did my whole protocol, got into the hyperbaric chamber, and I felt like a million bucks after three days. And what's going on when you have an acute injury like that is you have acute inflammation, you could have some swelling, you have some tissue that's at risk of dying, depending on the severity of the injury, and you have hyperbaric therapy that's coming in here now, reversing low oxygen states, decreasing inflammation, immediately decreasing swelling, starting the release of stem cells, which are the baby cells in our body that can make new tissue and help mature the tissue in the various areas so that you can make new cells in the area. So you always have these sort of backup cells and all the tissues that you have in your body that are kind of waiting in case they're needed. And hyperbaric therapy can help stimulate the maturation of those so you can start getting them to start healing that area at the same time. And so you have all these things happening along with you have all the immune system cells starting to start getting involved very quickly too. So your immune system starts revving up as well and you have the immune system cells like your neutrophils and your macrophages, which are really important when you're starting to clean up tissue to help be able to do this. So from an acuity perspective, you have an acute issue. What hyperbaric therapy really does is just rev up the whole healing process to make it work better.

Yeah, it was actually, I also had another patient who had a stroke and he was, you know, it was a hemiplegic stroke, meaning like paralyzed on half and, you know, couldn't move that side of his body. And we did a lot of things, you know, A lot of nutritional things. We gave him, you know, IV and AD and other things, but I was pushing him to do really aggressive hyperbaric treatment and he did and he fully recovered. It was really quite shocking because you just don't see people recover from stroke.

Like that, you know? You don't. No, you don't. I mean, I mean, that's what I always say. I mean, obviously if you have an acute issue, like go to the hospital. Don't try to find your local hyperbaric.

Facility if you're having a heart attack. No, no, no. Stroke first and, you know, your ABCs we call them.

Yeah, exactly. But as soon as possible. Yeah, yeah. But, but truly as soon as possible, if it's possible for you to get into a hyperbaric chamber. Now the data is still, you know, controversial, let's call it that. These are off label indications, right? We have certain on label indications for hyperbaric therapy, which are covered by insurance that are, that would be covered by.

Medicare and all your private insurances. But the things that we're talking about, which are very limited, by the way.

Very limited, which are very limited indications like wound care. Yeah.

You know, diabetic foot ulcers, diabetic foot.

Ulcers, radiation injury from cancer treatment. This is delayed radiation injury. So if you have an injury from radiation six months or later after your radiation exposure, you can get hyperbaric therapy covered by your insurance companies. There is sudden hearing loss, sudden sensoral sensorial hearing loss. This is when you lose hearing, it's gonna be pretty devastating for people. Hyperbaric therapy is covered for that chronic bone infections, something called osteomyelitis. if wound care hasn't been helpful, then hyperbaric therapy may be something that you can use and then at risk flaps and grafts, this is in plastic surgery. So, if you get plastic surgery, then.

You can potentially get hyperbaric therapy covered.

For that reason as well.

Yeah, but it's very limited compared to actually what it does. It's such a powerful medicine and it's only approved for nosebleeds but nothing else.

I know. And so, when it comes to it, it's all the baseline physiology stuff that we're talking about here, like decreasing inflammation, reversing low oxygen states, stem cell release. It's an anti-infective. If you have an infection that does not like high oxygen environments, like your Lyme infections, like your clostridial infections, like your staph infections, these do not like high oxygen environments. They don't do well, the infections don't do well in these environments too. So you have that as another piece. So I always go back to the physiology of it and how we're thinking about hyperbaric therapy in that more global.

Context as opposed to just for a specific indication usually. so you mentioned, you know, the, the approved indications, which for most, most insurance companies and Medicare, Medicaid will reimburse. What about all the non-approved indications that there's evidence science for? Kind of give us the landscape of what are the kinds of things people are treating.

Sure.

And, you know, I have many, you know, obviously anecdotes myself, but you've been in this medicine a long time, and I think it's really quite striking how powerful this medicine is. when it's applied for a certain condition. So can you kind of take us through the off-label indications and where it's most effective? Yeah, sure.

So when hyperbaric therapy is typically used is in more chronic indications, and these are things that have been going on for long periods of time. And when we're not looking at just that acute infusion of hyperbaric therapy of oxygen to really help, but also the long-term benefit of what I would call an oxygen infusion protocol where we're shifting on the epigenetic side expression of various genes, at least 8,000 different genes that are responsible for growth, for healing, for decreasing inflammation and preventing cell death. And so there's been a lot of research that's been done in multiple different conditions out there looking at it from this perspective. And we mentioned a couple of them as we've been discussing in the podcast so far, but one of the major ones is stroke, for example. So people with strokes do very, very well if they can get into hyperbaric therapy immediately or very close to it, but also there's a study that was done three months to three years post stroke, people getting significantly better even three years after a stroke, which is just unheard of. you just don't see that happening. You also have traumatic brain injury. So we talked about concussion here with your partner, Mark, but also with people that have post-concussive syndrome, which is this is people three months or longer after a concussive episode. We see people with reversal of symptoms a year later, which is not possible. If you've had a concussion, it's three months after your concussion, the chances that you're going to get completely better if you're not better at that point are very, very low. And so, and we know that this is the case. We can see, I mean, we see it in hyperbaric facilities all over the country, all over the world in the words that, excuse me, the places that I work with and, and that the clients that I work with as well. So you have stroke, you have concussion, you have the dementias. So we're talking about vascular Alzheimer's and Parkinson's associated dementia. There is some evidence that hyperbaric therapy can be effective in these patients as well. Now, especially when used in a functional context, of course, we're not, and that's a big thing with a lot of these indications. It's not just about getting into a hyperbaric chamber. It's about what are you doing before, during, and after your hyperbaric environment? Much before, right before, what are you doing during hyperbaric therapy? What are you doing right afterwards? I know that's a big thing for you too, Mark. I mean, it's not just one single therapy, but especially with all these indications, it's much more of a broad swath of integration that we're looking at. Yeah.

I mean, you can't be eating an inflammatory diet and then, you know, not taking care of yourself and then just expect it to fix you. But it's, it's really powerful. So stroke is really clear. Traumatic brain injury is really clear. And these are big problems, you know, obviously, I mean, these, these are also being used, you know, for athletes. A lot of this is for recovery. If we're not, and we'll get into the performance thing in a minute, but what other health disease sort of indications do you see? this being most effective for?

So we're using it a lot in Lyme disease and co-infections. I think it's something that can be very, very effective, but it's something that has to be done in the context of working with a Lyme expert as well, like a Lyme literate doc or a functional doc that has expertise in Lyme. Because what I found with Lyme disease especially is that for most people, I need to get them about, they need to be about 60 to 80% better already before them to significantly benefit from hyperbaric therapy and have long-term benefit after hyperbaric therapy is completed. That's been my experience there. But that's why the ground game, the foundational stuff is so important and working with a provider that has expertise. So Lyme is one of them. Another one would be complex regional pain syndrome, also known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy. It's a very difficult to control, difficult pain syndrome that's unfortunately not uncommon. and very difficult to treat. Hyperbaric therapy can be fantastically effective at recalibrating the whole tissue bed that was injured. Typically, it's an injury that causes this to happen and then there's a dysregulation or the area, the tissue itself becomes dysregulated. The nerves get all confused and the nerve and the blood vessels and everything else, they constrict when they don't constrict. And what we think hyperbaric therapy can do is actually help with what's called blood autoregulation, basically helping re regulate how the flow of blood is getting into tissue because we talked about that pressure. It's that squeeze that's happening on the microcirculation, on the very small blood vessels that the pressure itself from a hyperbaric chamber is helping exercise those blood vessels and helping recalibrate them. It happens in the brain, it happens in the heart, it happens in the genitals. We know that there's anti-aging studies for all those places, including your natural Viagra, maybe hyperbaric therapy, and if it's a vascular issue at least. So, we know that hyperbaric therapy has this anti-inflammatory capacity. It actually downregulates or decreases some of these major inflammatory markers that you see in autoimmune disease as well, like some of the interleukins, for example, or TNF alpha, which are some of these cytokines is what they're called. So, we know hyperbaric therapy downregulates or decreases those. So, that's another type of condition or group is the autoimmune conditions as well. We know hyperbaric therapy can be very helpful in those. on its own, maybe not as much as being in more of a holistic perspective.

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, well, I think, you know, people are going to want to buy one now that it fixes erectile dysfunction.

That's how the Israelis got everybody to sign up, actually. It's kind of funny you mentioned it. They show all the guys pictures of, it's actually one of my favorite things to show as a lecture slide when I lecture is a functional MRI of the penis before and after hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Nobody knows what it is.

Well, that's fun. Okay, I love that. Nobody knows what it is. It just looks like a tube and there's colors on it and then there's more colors on the other one. But I just like to tell everybody it's a penis that I'm putting up on my lecture slides talking about how hyperbaric therapy regenerates blood vessels. That's one thing that we haven't talked about is that what hyperbaric therapy does immediately is reverse low oxygen states by getting more oxygen in the tissue. But over the long term, it's actually rebuilding and regenerating blood vessels, something called angiogenesis. So if you have more blood vessels, you're going to get more oxygen to the tissue over the long term, and that's important. And then we can see functional MRIs of the brain, of the heart, of the genitals here, and you can see how you can rebuild this tissue. And that's where it comes into sort of the anti-aging reverse aging world. But yeah, the Israelis would have been the main people that have done a lot of this research on the reverse aging side. So they did studies on the brain, the heart, the genitals, and showing that you could see new vascularization, new blood vessels growing in the brain. in the heart. And so in the heart, it gives you more exercise tolerance. And in the groin, it gives you more sexual tolerance, I guess, or sexual possibilities. And then they've also done studies looking at senescent cells and telomere length, which are fancy words for things that get bad as we get old, basically.

Yeah. Zombie cells, we call them. They're cells that don't die, that speed up inflammation. And your telomeres are the little things at the end of your chromosomes that tend to shorten as we age. And so, actually in those studies, it seemed to lengthen telomeres more than any other treatment and actually kill zombie cells more than any other treatment, which is important as those are just part of the hallmarks of aging we talked about.

Right. Yeah, the zombie cells are a big one too. I mean, I think out of all the research that came out, the senescent cells of the zombie cell decreased population by about 30% after 30 treatments was pretty impressive. There's no other treatment out there that we're aware of that can do something like that. But you mentioned chambers at the house, Mark, and I probably should mention a little bit about the different types of Chambers out there, because I think people get confused.

Before you get in, we're gonna, we're get into the, what Chambers? We're gonna need to know how to use them, how long to be in them, what atmospheres we're gonna get into all that. Getting a headache. I just, I want to just linger a little bit more on the treatment.

Side, please, the things that actually it can help.

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Should it be thinking about this for them? Yeah. David is one of the pioneers of using hyperbaric therapy for neurologic injury. There's a couple other clinics that were in Florida doing very similar things. This guy, Dr. Neubauer, one of the oldest, one of the older guys that kind of took hyperbaric therapy from the wound care world and started using it for the brain. And it's, it's always, it's always like the happenstance kind of thing, right? You have somebody go into a hyperbaric chamber for the bends, but their stroke symptoms get better or their diabetic neuropathy improves or their traumatic brain injury that they've had for a year suddenly improves or their, their nightmares from PTSD from Vietnam suddenly disappear and don't come back. So, and these are the things that happened in the, in the early 1990s. And so the, the Pioneers of this world were a guy named Dr. Newbauer and Dr. Paul Harch, Paul still practicing in Louisiana and has been doing this for a while. And along with Dr. Perlmutter, they were all looking at how specifically the brain worked under hyperbaric pressure and how hyperbaric therapy could potentially be a modality to help in the ways that we've discussed, you know, decreasing inflammation, improving blood vascularization. And we know that this can happen. We know that brains can start lighting up again. even if they've been degenerating because of cognitive impairment. I mean, you and I both know, Mark, that after about the age of 50 or so, if you put somebody under MRI scanner and you look at their brain, even with just a regular MRI, it's going to have something called microvascular ischemic changes of the brain, which basically means that blood vessels themselves, the vasculature is starting to deteriorate. And so we know that if we can get somebody into a hyperbaric chamber and start rebuilding those blood vessels, they're going to have more tissue that's not going to die, right? Because as the brain gets older, it shrinks because the blood vasculature starts to shrink around it and degenerate. So we think that hyperbaric therapy works in these contexts for cognitive impairment, for Alzheimer's potentially, especially in the early stages, by decreasing inflammation, by increasing the vascularization of the brain, by actually helping more stem cells populate that area, and then also helping with flow. The one thing that we forget in hyperbaric therapy, actually most of my colleagues forget, is that pressure is actually the main thing that's happening. Of course, oxygen's important, but it's pressure that's driving everything. And pressure itself is driving flow and it's driving vascular and lymphatic flow. So it's the pressure itself that's helping with the brain's actually detoxification systems and helping you actually get some of that cerebral spinal fluid to flow out and help rebuild and regenerate after getting all that garbage out too. So I think it's a garbage collecting capacity as well that's happening in the chamber.

So if you just scuba dived at 60 feet or like for an hour a day, would that do the same thing?

It's a lot of work to go scuba dive every day because, I mean, that goes into protocols. We're not usually just talking about just going once, but there's actually a funny story about that, Mark, because they published a study on these veterans that had traumatic brain injury and PTSD. and they took them diving for five days, something like 60 feet a day. And they all said that their TBI symptoms were dramatically better. Their concussion symptoms, their PTSD, all were better. And they attributed to going diving and looking at the fish. How about the pressure guys? How about the oxygen? But they said, no, no, it wasn't that. It was just because they got to look at fish.

Okay, a couple of things on the other end of the age spectrum. I've seen people use it for autism. What are your thoughts on that?

Or cerebral palsy? Yeah. Yeah. So my father, who's a chiropractor, his name's Alan. He runs a facility in New York called the Northport Wellness Center. And, he's actually the guy that got me into hyperbaric therapy in the early 2000s because he was looking at how you could use hyperbaric therapy in the context of autistic spectrum within the functional context that you're very much in, in the sense that could you optimize blood flow to the brain and help with blood flow, what I would call regulation in the sense of oftentimes in autistic patients, the way that blood flow is regulated, the way it kind of goes to various areas of the brain is abnormal. And if hyperbaric therapy could help regulate that, would it help with actually helping the brain work better? And the answer is that it seems like it does. And there's been some small studies in Canada, in India, in other countries, and even in the US, looking at how it does seem to help autistic kids. But it's not a treatment of itself without doing all the other work that really is required.

Yeah, approach. But it's an adjunct for me. Amazing. And so, okay, in terms of, you know, the mechanisms of action to recap, you know, it increases blood flow, it stimulates angiogenesis, which is new blood cell formation, It increases stem cell production, it increases telomere length, it kills zombie cells, it helps with wound healing, it helps reduce inflammation, it's an anti-infective, kills bugs. Did I miss anything?

No, you did well. That was a good list of everything.

Wait, maybe I don't have too many microvascular changes yet. I'm gonna be 64 this year. Maybe my brain is still working.

Well, you've done some hyperbaric therapy. do a couple other things.

Not enough. I'm like desperate to get one, honestly. I'm like, I just waited till I've.

Been stationary enough long enough to go. Well, once you get stationary, I can help you. Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah. I think you did a good job with, with the overview or just the, the rundown there, Mark. I think the key for people to know, and it's something that I, I'm very emphatic about, is that I don't think that hyperbaric therapy is right for everybody right now, but I do think that at some point in your life, hyperbaric therapy will very likely be helpful for you. So it's not an if thing, it's a when thing. But the when thing is important because what happens a lot in my field is that if you own a hyperbaric facility, everything looks like you need to go in a hyperbaric chamber right now.

Yeah. Or you have a hammer, everything looks.

Like a nail, right? Exactly. So, you know, I got disinvited from a lecture because I said, please, my lecture title was, Please do not put them in the chamber. And it's a provocative, right? But the idea here is that it's not if, but when, ladies and gentlemen.

Don't take this pill. Yes.

Exactly. So, what I often find if you have a chronic issue, Mark, I need them to see you first. I need them to get optimized first. I need to start working on their vitamins, their minerals, their nutrients, their gut health. Now, but if you have an acute issue, then, you know, do not pass go. Do not collect your $200. You know, find a local hyperbaric facility and start getting treated if it's safe to do so because it's going to help the whole process. But if you have Lyme disease, if you have a chronic concussion, even if you have a chronic stroke or dementia or chronic pain. These things screw up your cellular metabolism and they need to be addressed. If I put something in the hyperbaric chamber, I flood their body with oxygen. That's awesome except if their body cannot tolerate all that oxygen. And what does that mean? Because if you have a lot of oxygen in circulation, you're also causing something called oxidative stress. This is the buildup of free radicals and reactive oxygen species. that's okay. Like that's what exercise does. That's what heat does at high level.

Temporarily.

Temporarily. Right. But if you're going into hyperbaric chamber every day, you're not going to be able to potentially neutralize that oxidative stress and that could be a problem. So it's not like it's a cure all for everybody right now.

That's, I think I just want to emphasize that too.

Yeah.

Great. Thanks, Scott. So we, we covered the, the diseases and the sort of pathology that maybe benefited from hyperbaric. Let's talk about the flip side, which is health optimization. recovery from sports, longevity. That's kind of a whole new field. So it's not just like if I'm sick, I'm going to go there. If I bang my head or if I got a big diabetic foot ulcer, but I want to live a long time, I want to feel good, I want to recover from my workouts. Tell us about the research around recovery, health optimization, longevity, and who, you know, what are the benefits and what are we seeing?

So some of the stuff we've been talking about so far, I'm almost all of it to some degree. What is aging, but wounds that kind of build up over time that we need to address, right? But I mean, what it comes down to is that the Israeli group, it's run by a guy named Dr. Shay Fradi, they published a number of studies on a healthy population greater than 65 years of age and looking at all these markers that we've been discussing, senescent cells, telomere length, they looked at blood vascularization in the brain and the heart in the genitals. So this is in a normal population. So this is making a normal population, a normal for a 65 year old, healthier. So, i.e. reversing their age by giving them these markers that give them signs of having a lower age, better cardiac output or heart capacity, better brain function, better genital function, et cetera. So we know that from like a reverse aging perspective, an anti-aging perspective, that's how hyperbaric therapy is working. There's no doubt about it. And we're getting more and more people that are interested in these kinds of protocols doing diagnostics before, doing cellular testing before, then doing diagnostics afterwards. Maybe it's brain imaging, maybe it's neuropsychological testing, maybe it's additional types of blood work and things like that. Looking at before and after inflammatory markers, there's lots of different ways to go about it and I do various things in my practice depending on the patient and the clinic and things like that. When it comes to the athlete, there are some really interesting studies that have been done in the regenerative world. So looking at like PRP plus hyperbaric oxygen therapy for recovery, which has been pretty effective. There's also some studies looking at stem cells and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And we make stem cells mobilize more in a hyperbaric chamber, but using them exogenously or getting injections or putting them in various locations, there may be a benefit from doing that as well. And there's interest in exosomes and V cells and all these other fancy different types of regenerative technologies, although we don't have a lot of data for those quite yet.

So, through the same mechanisms of reducing inflammation, of increasing stem cells and repair, of helping new blood vessel formation, it seems to really be sort of something that is promising for not only just health optimization and actually recovery from injury or exercise, but actually for longevity itself.

Right. Yeah. And then when it comes down to the recovery piece of it, it's everything that we've discussed before. And so for my athletes that use hyperbaric chambers, we talk about it using pre-treatment, like so pre-workout as a way to kind of boost your hyperbaric therapy. You can actually, so interesting thing about after you get out of a chamber, you have about 30 minutes to an hour where you have more oxygen in circulation. So you're gonna have more oxygen carrying capacity for that 30 minutes to 60 minutes after you get out of the chamber. And so that you can actually leverage that to do some additional work or increase your oxygen carrying capacity in the sense of what kind of work are you going to do when you get out of the chamber? Are you going to try to do some more exercise that you wouldn't typically do? And, I've had lots of patients that tell me that they can run for 30 minutes longer after their hyperbaric treatment that day as opposed to when they didn't do it that day, for example. So, amazing. Yeah, you can use it on the recovery side. So, after you do your hard workout, after you do your exercising, you can use hyperbaric therapy on the other end of it for helping with the recovery. So, it's going to help with decreasing inflammation and increasing blood flow and helping with lymphatic and detoxification. But, I mean, you want the hormetic stress, you want the stress of the exercise, so you don't want to typically do it right after exercise. You want to wait maybe three to four hours afterwards. But, the same things apply. And, I work with athletes, I work with people with stage four cancer, I mean everyone in between because we know hyperbaric therapy from its base mechanisms, what it's doing. And, then it really just depends on how much you need, what kind of pressure you need, what kind of chamber you need, how often, you know, those kinds of of metrics and variables that we play with. And then also not only those, but what are your integrations? What are you doing before hyperbaric therapy? What are you doing during? If it's the type of chamber you can bring something in there, what are you doing afterwards? So these are all the things that are very much involved in sort of the ecosystem that I've developed with my company OneBasE and everything. But it's something that I've been using.

In clinical practice for a decade now. Yeah, amazing. So now let's get into the sort of the nitty-gritty. because I'm sure by this point, people are like, I want one. I want to get in one. I need it. You know, it's not like, oh, here's a. I can get a cold plunge and just, you know, bum bum or get a little sauna. It's. It's a. It's a substantial piece of equipment. And for those listening, there are different kinds of Chambers. There's ones that are medical grade Chambers that are used in hospitals where you require a technician. There's soft Chambers, which. are things that have been sold for a while at home, which have much lower pressure. So, and we'll get to talk about what is an atmosphere, what are the atmosphere ratings and what is the difference of them and how do they apply to our health. But the, you know, there's soft chambers and then there's hard chambers and then there's now home hard chambers. So, there's a whole new era of people actually learning about this, wanting to do this at home. It's not cheap, but, you know, the benefits are pretty substantial. So I would encourage you to sort of help us walk through the difference between hardened soft chambers, take us through the science of the protocols around different things. For example, like, you know, how many atmospheres should we be using? How long do you stay in the chamber? You know, what is the, you know, what do you use for different problems? And sort of take us through a little bit and we'll sort of go deep in this because I think it's an important conversation about how how is this applied?

Yeah, thanks Mark. That was a great overview. So the best way to think about it is that, let's forget about the type of chamber for a minute. Let's just talk about pressure. So for the most part, what we're talking about is neuro, we have two different types of pressures that we typically use in the chamber. We have what we kind of call neurologic pressures and we have systemic pressures. Now there's, of course there's going to be crossover, but in general, neurologic pressures are an atmosphere of between 1.3, and 2.0. So that means about 15 feet of seawater to about 33 feet of seawater. So that, if you can imagine, if you're 33 feet below the sea, you're looking up, all that water is extremely heavy. You pick up a bucket of water, it's extremely heavy. So we're actually simulating that pressure you feel in the chamber. So neurologic pressures tend to be about 1.3 atmospheres to about 2.0, and the systemic pressures tend to be about 1.8, 1.7, to about 2.4. Now, we can go deeper than that, especially if there's an acute injury, like if there is an acute lack of blood flow to a limb or if there's carbon monoxide poisoning or if there's the bends. But in general, our therapeutic pressure range is between 1.3 and 2.4. Okay. And so home chambers are soft. So let's talk about soft chambers now. So soft chambers in general typically go between 1.3 and 1.5 atmospheres. these are chambers that can be used at home very easily and very safely. It's a bit of a wild west when it comes to finding chambers out there, which we can talk about, but when it comes down to it, the mild units, the soft sided units typically go between 1.3 and 1.5. And then you'll have different varieties of soft chambers that can do that, but that's more for neurologic pressures in general. So for neurocognitive optimization, for what I would, I call them sort of your overall day-to-day optimization chambers. They're safe to use at the house. They're easy to use at the house. You can stack them or have protocols where you can find different integrations. This is what my team has been really emphatic about is how you can make these mild chambers more therapeutic by enhancing blood flow before you go in, for example, doing various types of therapeutics while you're in the chamber itself and even afterwards. But in general, the mild units are for neurocognitive optimization day-to-day wellness and recovery. Okay, now the hard chamber units, as you were alluding to Mark, there are medical grade units that you can go to a facility for that these are single occupancy chambers, sometimes multiple occupancy chambers as well, called monoplace or multiplace. And all the medical indications for hyperbaric therapy at this point right now are either a 2.0 or greater. So if you're going to go to a medical facility, typically that's the pressure they're going to treat you at. Although there are some hyperbaric facilities that do both on label and off label hyperbaric therapy that will allow you to have more of a range of pressures that you can do. There are facilities that do both insurance work and non-insurance work. So you can get hard chambers for your house as well, although that's a newer area and it's not as easy logistically. The chambers are much heavier and they take more They just take more work to operate in general and there's a more of a safety component to it. I mean, they're very safe, but at the same time, you have to make sure you're getting it from a good manufacturer, from a company that's going to give you good safety, just kind of overall is kind of work with you in a very specific way. I mean, the challenge that you have with hyperbaric chamber companies in general in the US is that it's kind of just buy, sell you a chamber and then you're then no longer talk to you on your own deal. Right. Yes. And actually, that's why I got involved in the And the business side of this was I was just tired of talking to people after they got a chamber, had a bad experience, or didn't know what they were doing, didn't know how to use it, didn't know what kind of protocol. But in general, the way I see the soft chambers at least going, Mark is kind of like the way of the Peloton over time. Is that you're gonna have your Peloton, you're gonna have your sauna. For people that can afford it, I know these are not inexpensive things, but you're also gonna have a hyperbaric chamber because it's gonna be your recovery tool. as it is with your cold plunge. I mean, one of my favorite protocols is 30 minutes in a hyperbaric chamber and then get into your cold plunge afterwards. And it's called our optimal performance, our cognitive performance protocol on our app, for example, that we use.

So, I mean, there's lots of fun ways you can go.

Yeah.

That's amazing. So the, the higher pressure chambers, the hard chambers seem to be more effective maybe for longevity for some things you're talking about, the stem cells. the recruitment, the inflammation issues, the telomere length, the zombie cell killing effectiveness of them. Is that fair to say?

So right now that's the data. Yeah, if anybody tells you that the soft chamber they're trying to sell you does the same thing as what they've shown in these studies, the answer is that they have no clue and they're not being truthful because we just don't know. There is some indication though that we do know actually that stem cells do get released in these mild units. even without oxygen, interestingly. So typically what we're doing is that you have a hyperbaric chamber and you're getting oxygen that's usually being piped in it via either an oxygen concentrator or if it's a deeper chamber, it may be through oxygen tanks or liquid oxygen, even at deeper pressures. But we do know that even at 1.3 atmospheres, which is a mild unit hyperbaric protocol or hyperbaric chamber, you're getting about two times or 200% more stem cells than circulation. So this is not a small amount, even without any oxygen added, this is just hyperbaric air. So all that means is that you're pressurizing the air and the environment around you. And when you do that, you're getting more stem cells released. And another argument that I get a lot from the hard chamber people in hyperbaric therapy. And again, I'm not a purist. I use hard chambers, I use soft chambers, I use them both. That one of the arguments that you get from the soft chamber, the people that do not like soft chambers, is that they don't think you can get a huge amount more oxygen in circulation at that level. And if it's from a pure oxygen perspective, it's not a huge amount more, but it's the pressure as well that people forget about because the pressure itself increases energy production directly, even without oxygen being around. So we do know that absolutely the data shows that stem cells, the deeper you go, the more stem cells you're gonna release. The 2.0 pressure is what's been studied for senescent cells, for telomere length, for, for angiogenesis, for, for the brain, for the heart and the genitals we were talking about before. Okay.

But 2.0 is the way to go.

But I can say, Mark, clinically, clinically using the soft chambers for a long period of time, if you have the ability to optimize before you go in. So you're doing functional medicine, you're doing, you know, some sort of foundational testing and then optimizing vascular flow using various types of technologies, maybe lights, maybe, maybe cold therapy. maybe even things like supplements to help with vascular flow, which I'll use. This is something that I've developed for many years, and you're looking at this cadence of how you do things to enhance vascular flow. You can potentially, I think, simulate for some indications, not all, in the mild unit by doing this integrative kind of approach. But simply going into a hyperbaric chamber at mild pressure is not going to do the same thing ever as going into 2.0. it's just not possible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I think, you know, obviously imagine the costs will come down for these units over time. I think, you know, used to be, you know, 150 000 to get a hard chamber. Now you get one for 25 000, for 50 000 for less. It's still a lot of money, but, you know, it's, it's kind of a, a long-term piece of equipment that I think can have, you know, profound benefits for health if we can get it.

One of the things I think about is sort of like my hub and spoke model for this, which is like I have a soft chamber in my house that I use regularly. And I have a clinic close by that has a hard chamber that I can use in case I need it. So I think from a day-to-day wellness perspective, overall, if you don't have a severe condition, some of the things that we talked about before, then I think having a mild unit can be very, very helpful. But having an access to a hard chamber so that you can use it periodically, I think is very, very helpful for the reasons that we mentioned as well. So, I think from an affordability perspective, you know, it's significantly less cost to get a mild unit for the house than it is to get a hard chamber for the house, that's for sure. And logistically, but then if you have somebody close by, you have a facility close by that you can trust. And I work with many facilities and that a lot of them are great. Some of them, you know, you have to be careful, but most of them are great. And then you have a great place close by to get hard chamber hyperbaric therapy when you need it. And, you know, I think about these longevity protocols, like what do you, how do you use a hyperbaric chamber over the long term. And I think having the ability to go to 2.0 for a protocol once every year or two is likely awesome if you can do it.

Or you can buy one with 10 friends.

You're going to crowd fund your chamber. I like it. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about the protocols. I mean, these longevity protocols were like 60 sessions over three months. So it's basically Monday to Friday and skip the weekends. Can you talk about, you know, what do we know about the frequency, the sort of dose duration? In other words, should it be 60 minutes, 90 minutes? How many days a week? How many times a year? Like, is it something you can do every day? For example, if you have your chamber, would you go in a hard chamber every day for 365 days? Or is there danger to doing that?

Please don't do that.

Yeah, yeah. Talk us through what is, because the thing is, you buy a chamber, if you use it for 60 days, and what happens the other 305 days of the year? Right. So let's talk about, unless you have a big family, yes.

Or you've got like a hyperbaric share, like it's like your timeshare or something.

Yeah, like a timeshare.

Exactly. I think that's a- that's a new business idea. I like that. Yeah. Like you have your condo, you have your hyperbaric chamber. I dig it. So, yeah, protocols are important. So oftentimes the way to delineate this is a couple different ways. So if you have an acute indication, meaning you just got an injury, you just had a trauma, you have an infection, typically you don't need that many hyperbaric sessions to see a massive benefit. Maybe one, maybe three, maybe five, maybe up to 10. But in general for an acute indication, this actually includes surgical indications. So if you just had a surgery, you're going to heal faster if you get into a hyperbaric environment. And in the studies we're talking about anywhere between 30 to 70% faster. So, I mean, on average about 50% faster overall. So that's a big deal. If you're an athlete, that's a huge deal. If you're somebody that just had plastic surgery and you don't want to have raccoon eyes for two weeks and you want to have them for 10 days, that's also nice too, right? So then there's also these, so these are shorter protocols typically, as you were mentioning, Mark, Monday through Friday. And the reason for that is not so much for the shorter term protocols, although it's important, but for the long term protocols where we're talking about 20, 40, 60 hyperbaric sessions. It's the cumulative exposure of the oxygen in your cells that creates this shift in your epigenetics, which we were discussing about before. It's that change in expression of helping you heal, helping mature those stem cells, helping decrease inflammation. All that stuff takes time. It doesn't happen. It starts happening pretty quickly, but it doesn't really start solidifying itself up until about treatment 20 or so. So if you have more of a long-term goal or a chronic indication, like, for example, Lyme or dementia or, or a chronic pain syndrome. You don't necessarily want to stop before at least 20 hyperbaric sessions, but that's your minimum typically. So the hyperbaric protocol you were discussing before with the Israelis, the reverse aging protocol, that was 60 6 0 hyperbaric sessions over three months. But in general, I find, and if you look at their study itself, their max benefit was around treatment 30 to 40. That was when senescent cells dropped the most. That's when telomere length increased the most. That's when angiogenesis, the, the building of blood vessels was happening. So in general, what I say is for an anti-aging protocol and for most of the long-term benefit for chronic indications, we're talking about at least type 30 hyperbaric sessions, sometimes 40 and sometimes more than that. It just depends on how people are doing. And you have to also think about the pressure. So we were talking about the various types of pressures. So for neurologic conditions, we may not start at 2.0. We may start at 1.3 or 1.5. because the brain is more sensitive to oxygen. And as a result of the brain being more sensitive to oxygen, you have more stress on the brain if you go to deeper pressures. So you have to be aware of that. So there's some interesting studies that were done where if you looked at a deeper pressure versus a milder pressure, the milder pressure does better and that the deeper pressure actually made people worse initially because the brain was under too much stress. So you want to be thinking about the pressure, the amount of pressure, the amount and the number of sessions, and you talked about the time. And so typically we have people going into the hyperbaric chamber between 60 and 90 minutes at a time. The milder pressures, the ones that were going for neurologic pressures, those are usually 60 minutes in length, although sometimes we'll do 90 minutes, but definitely the 2.0 pressures, we do 90 minutes. And this goes into something called air breaks. So when you're in a hyperbaric environment and you're getting oxygen, usually through a mask or sometimes in the chamber itself, you are, every 20 minutes for five minutes, we ask people to breathe just the air in the chamber itself. And what this does is it does two things. The first thing is that it simulates the body at being at altitude, which would be think kind of funny, right? Because you're in this hyperbaric chamber, you're deep underneath the sea equivalent in pressure. But what we do is we, by changing the amount of oxygen, the body sees that as that your body's all of a sudden at altitude. And then that stimulates all these things in your body to be released that happen at altitude. So new blood vessels, new stem cells, decreasing inflammation, all these things happen, something called hypoxic inducible factor or HIF1 alpha for people who care. That's the name. I wrote about in my book, Young Forever. Yeah, it's really important. Yeah. And yeah, so HIF1 alpha gets released. And so that's really important for the therapeutic nature, we think. of hyperbaric therapy. But also, this is the reason why you don't want to go into the chamber 365 24/7 is that hyperbaric therapy is creating oxidative stress in the system. Okay? It's increasing the amount of reactive oxygen species. And so your body has the natural ability to balance that out with antioxidants if you have that capacity. That's why it's important not just to go into the chamber without maybe thinking about these things and working with a clinician that can help you. But what these air breaks help do is help decrease the risk of oxygen toxicity because there's less oxygen every 20 minutes for that five minutes. So it prevents potential of the toxic buildup of these oxygen radicals. So it's very rare to have a problem with oxygen toxicity, but it does happen. And these are people that the most rare side effect that can happen in a hyperbaric chamber is a seizure. This doesn't typically happen unless you're at very deep pressure for long periods of time without air breaks and also have a preexisting reason to have a seizure, like you've had a seizure disorder before, like you've had a stroke or traumatic brain injury, you have a cancer in the brain, it's something like that. Now we can mitigate this with things like exogenous ketones and I have lots of integrative oncologists that I work with that do deeper pressure protocols using hyperbaric therapy. We didn't talk about cancer, that's one of the other ones. No, yeah. That we use hyperbaric therapy for. So you can mitigate oxygen toxicity that way by using these air breaks as well. But in general, the treatment time in the chamber is going to be between 60 and 90 minutes, sometimes as long as 120 minutes, sometimes as short as 30 minutes, depending on the protocol.

Interesting. So there is a danger, and you mentioned a word before that I talked about before on the podcast called Hormesis, which is this idea of a stress that doesn't kill you but makes you stronger. And that's really what hyperbaric oxygen therapy is. It's the stress on your body, but it stimulates your body's own regenerative repair renewal. systems that you're built in to help you deal with problems. It's already a built in, you've got a, like a built-in auto correct system, but most of us trample over it, don't facilitate it and help it. And this is a method that actually allows you to activate these ancient built-in repair regenerative renewal systems. And it's a beautiful technology because it's not like a drug that has all these side effects. It actually, you know, when used properly with the right protocol, with probably medical supervision to some degree at the beginning, that it can be a really beautiful adjunct to, you know, a health and wellness protocol, longevity protocol. It's something that people don't realize is out there, and it has the potential to help people who are struggling with many, many issues. I'm curious about, you know, the effect on the brain and whether you've seen in terms of depression. You mentioned PTSD a little bit. I know when I went in it, you know, my brain just was like, bro, wide awake, clear, sharp. I mean, I didn't even know I had brain fog until I came out of that thing, you know? So it's kind of fascinating to see how, how it changes your cognitive function in real time. Like, not like over many treatments, but even just after one session.

And that's the, that's the acute infusion of oxygen and peace. And the, there are some people that are pretty, what I call the quick responders, the massive responders, the people that go in initially after their first couple of sessions, they're like, holy. like this is amazing. Like my brain is hadn't felt this good in forever. And that's usually a good sign that if they do a full protocol that they will maintain at a higher level before they started. Now that usually means that the body or the brain in this case is not getting enough oxygen chronically. And this can happen for a number of different reasons. It can happen from mitochondrial distress. It can happen from vascular degeneration. It can have from inflammation. and once you get more oxygen in there, your mitochondria, which are the part of your cell that make energy, are like, holy crap, this is awesome. We're making more energy. This is great. But then after about three to five sessions in is when that starts to trail off for most people. And then the brain starts doing the hard work of actually regenerating itself. And that's all that epigenetic stuff we were talking about before. And so I have people that go in there to take, they go in there for tests and they go in there. They actually did an interesting study in China. where they put Chinese students in for five days before they did major exams and they did amazingly better. And they had, they did MRIs of their brain and their ability to take short-term memories or take long-term memories and bring them to short-term was massively increased and their executive function increased as well. So that's a short-term benefit. And like there are utilization ways that I use it, I use that in clinical practice. I use that for myself. when I know I'm going to have a big week at work or lots of podcasts with people like Dr. Hyman here. And so you want to have- you-'re cheating.

I don't have one.

Not yet. But the key with it always is that when I work with clients, and I know you do the same thing, Mark, it's about the holistic perspective here. And what wasn't available until I started doing this with my team was creating a full educational platform and an application for people to actually see how they can use hyperbaric therapy in real time and how they can get educated on it and how they can integrate it with other technologies that they might or might have, might not have, but maybe want to have in their homes. I mean, that's the problem with hyperbaric therapy I found, and I've been doing this now for a decade, is that I thought that it was the Wild West like three years ago and then COVID happened. And now we know from a post-COVID world too, hyperbaric therapy can extremely effective at helping decrease inflammation in the brain, helping with regeneration of blood vessels, everything we've talked about. It works in post COVID syndrome fantastically well in so many. And so, and even during the acute COVID part of things, we were using hyperbaric therapy to keep people out of the hospital. I mean, this is not using, I mean, even hospitals were trying it in the beginning, but like using other protocols and using other compounds and, and I've had a lot of success with other kinds of things too, but for a post infectious inflammation, hyperbaric therapy is fantastic as well.

So if you have an acute thing, we mentioned, you know, the shorter time frame, if you want to do it for longevity, it's, you know, 30 to 60 sessions. And then you just do it once a year, is that the idea? Like as a kind of reset or?

Yeah, thank you for mentioning that. I meant to mention it before. So nobody really knows, okay? I've developed protocols over the years working with people from all walks of life in very different professional backgrounds. But what it seems to work best from what I can tell, because if you ask the Israelis is so that you do this hyperbaric protocol, you do 60 hyperbaric sessions, right? And you've done, you've got all these amazing changes to the brain, all these amazing changes to your lab work. And then I go, what happens six months later? And they go, we don't know. Nobody knows. How long does it last? You know, nobody knows how long it lasts. And that's why such a big part of this is like, you just can't go into a chamber and expect that that's going to fix your, your diet and your supplements. in your mitochondrial stress. It may help a little bit, but in six months to a year, you might start going back to the way you were. But even in somebody that's pretty well optimized, that's just doing the natural aging of life, I think that re-upping on these kinds of protocols is going to be necessary. Now, how often? I don't know. So what I typically say is if you're over about 60 years or 65 years of age, depending on how old you are, if you have a hyperbaric chamber available to you, going to do a deep pressure protocol every year, to every two years would be probably optimal. Now, would it have to be as long every single year? I don't know. The way I typically work it is that the people that I work with in their own homes and with the, you know, the chambers that we have and the protocols that we use is that I think about it in this way. And I think about you're doing a protocol every six months, but one's for systemic optimization, one's for brain optimization, or you're doing one protocol every year for one of the alternating. And then, and then in between, you're using pretty much just mild hyperbaric chamber pressures just for day-to-day recovery optimization, not using it every day, maybe using it on average, maybe two or three times a week, using it more when you're getting off an airplane because you're, you were hypoxic when you, or you were low oxygen on a plane, or using it more when you have like a mild injury, or if you have family members that are gonna use it. I mean, of course, everybody that goes into a hyperbaric chamber should make sure that they're okay to go into a hyperbaric chamber. It's not just, it's a medical technology. It's not, a wellness technology. So you have to make sure you get screened by a physician and all those kinds of things. But in general, it's important to the way I think about it is sort of in two different types of tranches, whether you're doing like everyday protocol or you're doing it sort of intermittently for maintenance and then alternating those things over time.

Yeah. I mean, like if you're working out all the time, you want to use it all the time, but you're saying that's a bad idea to actually get.

That much hyperbaric treatment. Yeah. You definitely want to take breaks because of the, because of the stress of being under high oxygen environment. and so, and I see this, I see this people with, with traumatic brain injury, for example, and like they're getting better, maybe their treatment 40 in and they're like, oh, we should continue because they're continuing to improve. And then at treatment 42, some of their symptoms start coming back, like their brain injury symptoms start reverting and they start having difficulty sleeping and then their sleep had gotten better. And then that could be a sign that it's too much oxygen. You need to take a break. So it's not just more is better.

And that's not, it's not the American way in a hyperbaric chamber. Unfortunately, really important to people to hear. You know, it's really, it's a medical therapy. You don't take it all the time. It's, it's very much customized to what your particular needs are, and you can overdo it. So it's all, you know, it's, it's actually this whole field of, of the decentralization of Health Care. The democratization of Health Care is happening across the board, whether it's, you know, with home hyperbaric oxygen therapy or whether it's with things like, you know, access to lab testing, like I'm doing with function Health, where giving people access to over 100 different biomarkers that they can order outside the healthcare system and directly get their results and have an optimized plan. You also are, I see the bridge are the bridge between the traditional hyperbaric medicine world and hospitals and sort of the consumer interest in this space and making it safe, effective, training people. So tell us a little bit more about how you have developed tools and programs and services to help support doctors and also patients or even, you know, health hackers or whatever you want to call them, biohackers who want to do this on their own.

Yeah, I mean, I started off conventionally trained, but I was, I grew up the son of a chiropractor. So I was, I was kind of crazy from the beginning. So this working in the, in the middle of these two things has been fun for me and dovetailing. I mean, most of the time that I spend these days is in the alternative optimization, recovery, things that are off-label when it comes to hyperbaric therapy. And I have a lot of great colleagues that work on the conventional side that I can leverage that also do some of the off-label stuff too. But I think that, you know, for me when I was looking at this world four or five years ago now, I realized that there was really an opportunity to make hyperbaric therapy better, faster, and safer in so many ways, especially because people were getting chambers in their homes. They didn't know what to do with them. they had all these other technologies at their house they didn't know what to do with, along with hyperbaric therapy. So, and I've been creating protocols and working with patients and clients all over the world for the last decade. I have a remote consulting practice that I consult with people all over the world and help them create their hyperbaric protocols, help liaison with their local facilities. I know many at this point around the US and around the world. I also work with clinics, facilities that have hyperbaric therapy as a part of how they integrate their other modalities, whether it be like a biohacking lab or it might be a neurologic chiropractor, for example, and everything in between. So with all this in mind, I created a company called OneBase Health, which is really the idea behind that was to create an educational platform and a way to access hyperbaric therapy in a more holistic way. So you have access to protocols, you have access to education, you have access to some new smart technology that's really going to make the chamber faster, better, and safer. And then, and looking at those integrations in a way that how can you leverage this technology? That's my thing. I mean, like, I'm obviously biased because I'm a hyperbaric guy, but how can I leverage this chamber to work better? So how can I increase vascular flow before you go in? What supplements can I give you? What technology can I use? And then how can I help you detox afterwards? Or how can we help you boost with that, with the oxygen after you've gotten out to truly leverage the technology and go in a cold plunge. And, and we have like your optimal focus protocol for that. So it's been fun for me to actually operationalize and actually put down on paper things that I've been doing for a decade with patients and then, you know, then, then also provide the service as well in the sense that I don't want to sell or give somebody something that they don't need. And I've been very clear with my team from that, from the beginning. And it was hard because everybody just wants to sell whatever they have, right? And any team and, you know, books, supplements, it doesn't matter. And I understand that part, but you and I, like, are first and foremost clinicians. And so that's why my focus has always been, what are we doing right for the person that's on the other side of the phone or that we can help here? And so the protocols are all based on my understanding of those things, but at the same time, always keeping in mind, you know, making sure it's really appropriate for the person to be really, you know, accessing our ecosystem right now or if it's something that they need access later as well. So it's a big, big time on service. Like, that was the other piece in the hyperbaric world that I saw was, was missing is that there was really not a great amount of service and, like, long-term long-term like ambulatory care, like, actually working with people, people over a long period of time and seeing how they do and, and work with them. And that's the ecosystem that we're creating, and I'm really excited about it.

That's amazing. And, and I think, you know, your website, one www. Greenbasehealth.com has many, many articles, chambers that you actually have helped develop that are safe and easy to use and they're for home use that are both soft and hard chambers. I think it's a really wonderful resource and it fills a huge gap in the marketplace that I've seen because I have access to you, I just call.

You when I need you.

Most people don't and they can't. I got this person who needs this, what do you think? so I think this is a huge, huge help in the marketplace and I think it's really important. I think, can you talk maybe a little bit about some of the challenges? Some of the machines out there are not FDA approved. They come from other countries. Some are FDA approved in America. Some use pumping oxygen. Some have masks. So can you talk about the safety and efficacy of these different ones? what you've learned.

Yeah, thanks for mentioning that. So there are certain types of chambers that are called FDA cleared. These are chambers that have a certain sort of FDA moniker that's similar to FDA approval, but different. And there's those are the chambers that I really do think are important for people to use in a clinic setting, most likely, because if you're seeing patients and you're getting people in there, it just has a little bit of regulatory support that may be beneficial. We don't know really at this point, but there's a lot of other chambers that are coming from other countries and other developers and other companies, you know, my company included, that don't quite have that FDA certification yet, but are very safe to use. I think that the challenge is to navigate this field and find people that you trust in it to work with you, no matter what chamber you decide to get is what it comes down to. And all the soft chambers should not have, you should not, you shouldn't be getting a chamber that has like oxygen around you in the chamber itself. That's not the safe thing for you to do at the house. The only kind of chamber that you at the house you should get is one that has a mask on that you can breathe in, either that's getting like an oxygen concentrator or if it's a hard chamber, maybe something more like bottled oxygen or liquid O2 if you're at a medical facility. But waiting this is not easy because the safety of the chambers, whether it's non-FDA or FDA, it's unclear there's really any major difference. And I have one of my chambers at the house, it's a non-FDA chamber, it's a one-based health chamber. It works well and there's no problems with it. It's got a long track record outside the United States. So it's difficult to wade through this information. I know for people as you're thinking about it, but if you're looking for like a hard chamber for your house that's FDA cleared, it's going to cost $175,000. But if you get one from outside the US, it's going to cost between $30,000 and $50,000. And is safety a problem? The answer is probably not, but it really depends on your relationship with the company, how you feel about it, and how you are going to sort of access them over the long term. Most of these companies, as I said, will not do much more than just sell you a chamber and sell you the deepest chamber they can for no particular reason other than it's going to, they're going to charge you more. Are the chambers from Onebase Health, are.

Those FDA cleared or- no, not currently yet. No, they're not FDA cleared.

But they're manufactured in the US? No, they're not manufactured in the US either. They're manufactured outside the US. But that's okay because most of the chambers in the US now that are being used are not manufactured here.

Like everything else.

Even the ones that say they're manufactured in the USA are not really manufactured. They might be assembled in the United States, but all the parts are coming from other countries. So, you know, my feel here is that as a clinician, it's important that people like are very astute at looking at, you know, what's out there and doing the best that they can. I mean, I know cost can be an issue and certainly the FDA chambers are more expensive. But if you feel more comfortable with that and you feel more comfortable that that's giving you some additional safety, then, you know, by all means go that way and get those chambers. I work with everybody. It doesn't matter what kind of chamber that they have. I have just found, as a sort of risk tolerance thing, for me personally, working and doing this work, knowing that there's a lot of great manufacturers outside the United States that are doing great work that I can get less, that I can get more chambers out there, to more people. And so that's been my thing is like, I just want, like, my thing is access and safety. So safety first, access second. But the, I, my, my, the other reason why I started this company was I wanted there to be more access for people and to be more access. There needed to be less, they needed more affordability for it.

So it's been frustrating because I, I, you know, you know, you, there are chambers everywhere in every hospital, but you can't get them because they won't let you use them for off label indications. So there are other off-label centers, but they're far and few between. And it's really a problem for many patients who I've tried to refer to hyperbaric medicine. I want to loop back to something and then we'll close out with, you know, where can people find a chamber? How do they get one and so forth. You mentioned cancer. Kind of. Can you drill down on that for a sec? Because I think people might have heard it and go, what was that? Cancer, hyperbaric for treatment, recovery.

What? How does it work? What's happening in that? build. Yeah, it's a big topic, and I'm glad you mentioned it because I, I was remiss for mentioning it earlier. So in hyperbaric, sorry, in cancer, hyperbaric therapy can be used in about six or seven different ways. Okay, so we know what hyperbaric therapy does. It regenerates blood vessels, it regenerates tissue, it rebuilds scaffolding. So the way it's FDA approved, so insurance covered, is with radiation injury. So radiation affects the tissue beds, it depletes it of stem cells, it kills blood vasculature, hyperbaric therapy can rebuild all of that. And so it's used as a treatment for radiation injury. These are in patients that have had radiation and then six months to many years later, they get an injury or a wound in the radiated field and then they have a hard time healing that. So a common one is people that have had head and neck cancer and they have a tooth that's decaying or dying. You can do a hyperbaric protocol where you go in before the surgical excision and then afterwards. to prevent the actual bone, the jaw itself, from causing necrosis or dying. So that's, it's called the MARCKS protocol. So that's been around forever. That's the only FDA insurance covered indication. And now we have a whole bunch of others. Now, there's been studies that can potentially help in chemotherapy sensitization. So help with chemotherapy work better. So if it's a chemo that's not going to work as well as you'd like it to, hyperbaric therapy may help it work better. if it's radiation. So hyperbaric therapy can make radiation work better because radiation is oxygen requiring. So radiation cannot penetrate tissue where there's no oxygen. This is why something like brain cancer or glioblastoma is so hard to treat because it's a low oxygen tumor and why hyperbaric therapy might be helpful. Hyperbaric therapy is also being used in combination with other oxidative therapies for cancer. This is something like IV vitamin C for or mistletoe or other types of oxidative therapies, especially in combination with the ketogenic diet. And, this is the work of Dr. Dominic D'Agostino and Tom Seyfried and Dr. Natasha Winters, all the people that you know and I know that are using it in something called the press pulse technique where the press is ketogenic diet, the pulse is hyperbaric oxygen therapy as a way to truly start killing more cancer cells, especially deeper pressures. So, hyperbaric therapy is also being used in surgical oncology to help with recovery from surgical procedures, just like we talked about with an athlete or, you know, somebody else that has any kind of injury. Hyperbaric therapy is gonna help you heal faster. Same thing in a hyperbaric environment. Um, and also if you're anemic, if you have low oxygen, if you have low amounts of red blood cells, you have less oxygen you can carry. Hyperbaric therapy is gonna make you feel better because you can get more oxygen circulation for, you know, three to five hours afterwards, you're gonna feel better. So, And the last thing to say about cancer is that there's no indication that hyperbaric therapy makes cancer grow. This is something that some conventional oncologists still think, but there's no evidence in any reviews that have ever been done that hyperbaric therapy can make cancer grow. And that's something just for people to.

Be aware of as well. Well, that's good. Yeah. So basically as an adjunct to improve.

Efficacy of therapy and also recovery from the treatments itself.

So that's great. I guess I could have said that too.

Yeah.

Incredible conversation. I, you know, it just makes me want to go get in my chamber if I had one, which I don't, and stay there for the next week.

Only 60 to 90 minutes a day, remember?

Not 60 to 90 minutes a day. Okay.

All right.

So, where can people find hyperbaric medicine in their community? Is there a website where they can find the centers that do this off-label, where can they learn more about you and I know you have onebasehealth.com, by the way, if people want to learn more, they can get it, if they send an email to onebasehealth.com, they can get a 10% discount if they want to get a chamber. And I have no other affiliation or relationship with Scott other than just as a friend and a colleague and advisor on hyperbaric medicine.

So tell us more. No, it's been wonderful to work with you over the last many years, Mark, and I think we've helped a lot of people. And I'm glad we're able to do this on a bigger platform to help, hopefully many more. So my company is called Onebase Health. And that's where you can learn more about the chambers and about education, about our phone application on our education. So we have a free app available as well. For download, you can get a good sense of what we do and get a feel of how the whole protocols work, the education works. I'm really excited about some new smart technology that'll be coming out at the end of the year. I do consulting as well. I consult with people all over the world, clinics that are interested in integrating hyperbaric therapy with other types of modalities. So you can go to drscottsherr.com, my name, Dr. S-C-O-T-T-S-H-E-R-R. www.hyperbaricmedicalsolutions.com, you can learn more about that, you can contact me directly there. I think that also just a couple more links, so for hyperbaric facilities around the United States that I really like and I trust, there is hyperbaric medical solutions, hyperbaricmedicalsolutions.com, they are in the New York metropolitan area, this is where Mark went in New York City a couple years ago, and they have locations in New York, in Boston, and in Florida. There is also There's also facilities in the Bay Area. There's a facility in Oakland that's called Holistic Hyperbarics. There's Advanced Hyperbarics in Marin. There's a number in LA. I mean, if you contact my team or with one of those websites that I just mentioned, we can also help you. Hyperbaric Medical Solutions also has lots of partners that they can help also find other locations if you're not in the New York, Metropolitan, or the Fort Lauderdale area. So those are the main things. And then I do have my nonprofit organization called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice. which is a nonprofit organization training docs and practitioners on how to optimize health. It's very similar, but slightly different than functional medicine and I think a good adjunct for people that are looking for additional training. And that's at homehope.org. so I think that's about it. And then I guess on Instagram, I'm.

At Dr. Scott Sherrif, people like that too. Thank you so much, Scott. You know, it's really a pleasure to work with you and pleasure to learn all about this. I think this is an important topic for just just people to understand because it's, it's one of those therapies in medicine that has so much potential to deal with things that we don't really have other good therapy for, right? You bang your head and they go, well, just go home and hope you don't fall asleep and never wake up again. And, you know, it'll get better, I hope, maybe. And maybe take some fish oil. But actually, there are so many problems that we have in medicine for which this is a beautiful, very safe, very effective therapy. And I think personally I've used it. I recommend it to a lot of my patients. Scott's my go-to guy for this and encourage you to check out his work. Go to onebasehealth.com and, and then follow him on Instagram and just soak it up because it's so great. Thank you, Scott. For those of you who love this podcast, I encourage you to share with a friend. I know somebody's going to benefit from this. Leave a comment. Have you used hyperbaric oxygen? Has it helped you? Make sure you subscribe for every year. and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter and in it I share my favorite stuff. From foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health, it's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S. Sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

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