HYPERBARIC OXYGEN THERAPY - WHY CAN'T I GET BETTER - THERAPIES

Good day and welcome to Medicine Health. Today in our series, Why Can't I Get Better, we're going to talk about helpful therapies or potentially helpful therapies, and today's grouping of those therapies are going to be more interventional. So sometimes we talk about things that are, you know, things you can eat or take or do or maybe even a medication or something. Today, these are more things that are done with your body, and we get a lot of questions about them, so I wanted to do that. The first one that we were gonna talk about today as far as synergistic therapies for healing and chronic illness is hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And so hyperbaric oxygen therapy, some of you have, you know, seen pictures maybe of like a— what looks like a big cylinder or a tube or a tank that people are in, and they're getting pressure and oxygen while they're in there. It's a very useful therapy. Now, in the United States and to a large degree in Canada, the therapy is limited in what insurance will cover for it. So for example, in our oncology practice, we can Uh, have people who have radiation damage use hyperbaric therapy, and there's a few other things like wound healing and diabetic ulcers, etc. But what reality is with respect to this particular medical therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, is it's useful for a large number of things. And so it's one of those things that is a conundrum, and this will be really all, all 4 of the things we're going to talk about in this part of the series. Which is a lot of these more maybe cutting-edge or more advanced treatments, etc., are often behind the curve as far as insurance covering them, etc. Hence the, you know, right now Medicare in the United States has a list of like 12 or 13 items it'll cover it for. Everything else is non-covered. But how does hyperbaric oxygen work? Well, With hyperbaric oxygen, you, you have some sort of a pressure chamber that you go in as the patient, and then there is a pump that pressurizes the chamber, and then there is a source for oxygen that will also go in, and that will either go into the entire chamber or it will go in through a device like a mask or a nasal cannula or something so that your body is breathing more oxygen while you're under pressure. So the 3 parts of a hyperbaric baric prescription are going to be the amount of time, the amount of pressure, and then the amount of oxygen that you are getting. Now, there is modern research, some of which was just published, and I have not got my hands on it yet, but I am going to get it soon, which is looking at instead of adding oxygen to the pressure, so you have got time, pressure, and oxygen, having time, pressure, and then what we call room air, which is the normal mixture of gases that we are breathing in, in our regular oxygen and carbon dioxide, nitrogen. So the research on hyperbaric oxygen has gone, you know, very quickly over time. And it is an area that I have used clinically for a number of years. I speak and teach about. the use of hyperbaric oxygen in oncology and in chronic illnesses. And the research has really shifted and changed in the last number of years. We used to think you could only achieve hyperbaric oxygen effect with real high-pressure chamber systems, like we would see for, say, somebody who had a diving accident and got the bends or something like that. Certainly for diving accidents and certain other things, you need those high-pressure systems. But There's also lower pressure systems and systems that use both extra oxygen and room air, and it's turning out now with newer research that those are probably very amenable to helping people who have chronic illness problems, which could include pain, poor healing, infectious problems, any number of things. So how does it work? Because people will say, well, isn't it true that if you put an oxygen mask on me, I am going to breathe in, you know, more oxygen. But at a certain point, uh, my blood through the hemoglobin is going to buffer the oxygen, uh, and so I will— I can only get a certain amount of concentration of oxygen. That is true. The difference with hyperbaric oxygen is when you add the pressure You not only fill the tank of the blood component carrying of oxygen, but then you fill the plasma free oxygen. So it is carrying extra oxygen when you have got pressure. That is what pressure does for you. Now, why would that be important? That is important because it goes to the most important part of your cellular system, which is the mitochondria. And that is where your cellular respiration happens, where you take in oxygen, and nutrients and you make energy and you put out carbon dioxide and toxins and junk and stuff and export them from the cell. So we always talk about like the mitochondria as sort of the beginning of a lot of illness, especially with chronic illness. But one way to help them is through the use of hyperbaric oxygen to get more oxygen going into the mitochondria and then moving more energy, creating more energy, and then moving out more junk. So that's one of the basic ways that it works. One of my teachers and mentors in the hyperbaric oxygen world who has been researching it for decades and decades at this point, also uses it clinically, um, would always say hyperbaric oxygen is indicated for a wound of any kind in any location in the body. So we think of it to use it in wound healing, certainly, but what if you have a wound that is on the inside or a cellular wound that is based on toxicity that you have received or is based on the inflammation and damage from chronic infections, or that may be due to some collusion of genetic factors and inflammatory factors that are affecting the way your brain works? Uh, Hyperbaric oxygen is used a lot in families that have children in the autism spectrum and certain other childhood disorders. It's really common to see it used there. It's very useful there. We use it after head injuries and head trauma. We use it after strokes. We use it after any number of things where there is a quote-unquote wounding or damage in the body. Now, if you think about it and you think, well, so I have this chamber that's gonna pressurize me. So remember, it's pressure, time, and then oxygen. Those are the 3 parts of the prescription. I'm gonna pressurize for a certain amount of time, and then I'm gonna have either added oxygen of one type or another, or room air, uh, depending on the type of protocol. And the, as I say, this new research that's coming out, et cetera. What is that going to do for me? Well, the first thing that you want to think of is we supersaturate the fluid part of the blood with oxygen. And as I said, the cellular component that normally holds the oxygen in our hemoglobin structure saturates as well, which is great. But then we get down to the cell end of things, there is a natural gradient. So gases like oxygen do not have transporters generally in the human body. and they run on their gradient. So the bigger the concentration is, the more it drives the gas in. So if it's oxygen and I've maxed out my blood and I maxed out my plasma, I have all of this potential to drive the oxygen into the cell. And it turns out the mitochondria have the lowest partial pressure of oxygen and the extracellular space where the oxygen is gonna be from the hyperbaric treatment, uh, from the plasma is gonna have the biggest. And so it naturally runs into the cell and into the mitochondria. That's a really good win-win because the mitochondria then can use the oxygen to run oxidative phosphorylation and, uh, create energy. And that's gonna kick out carbon dioxide sent out the other side. Now, what else does hyperbaric oxygen do while it's doing that? Well, It's a, a, a gene therapy, so it does shifts in your genomics, your epigenetics, etc., and it tends to push your genetics in a direction where they're a little more set up like they ought to be, a little more in the healthy end of the spectrum, and so it can be very useful from a genomic regulatory position in your body. Then the next thing that it does is it triggers a lot of oxidation reduction reactions. So certainly, when we get into the mitochondria, the energy-producing part of the cell, we are going to have this, uh, OXPHOS going on to make energy and dump out carbon dioxide and waste out the other side. But also there's all these other places outside of your cell, inside of your cell, where there's a, what we call a redox cascade. And that is where you have oxidation reduction that goes on, and then that triggers a bunch of other chemistry. So the way that I would speak to my patients about this would be, what we're gonna do is have a bimodal, a double effect on your body. So initially, well, we got all this oxygen under pressure going into your body. It's gonna do all the mitochondrial stuff and the redox stuff, et cetera. So that's going to trigger a little bit of what we call an oxidative event. And then your body naturally responds to an oxidative event with an antioxidative surge. And so it forces your body through this oxidation reduction cycle. So you get a short and a long-term effect out of it. to the degree that sometimes, say, in infections or in cancer patients, etc., we may have them get in the chamber and pressurize them, etc., do a hyperbaric treatment, and then we may do another oxidative treatment after that hyperbaric dive, and so that they synergize each other. This has also been researched with more standard types of cancer therapies like radiation administration and hyperbaric oxygen. Certain chemotherapies— some chemotherapies you're supposed to avoid or separate hyperbaric, some are probably more synergized. That's again something you and your healthcare provider can work out. But the other area where this has been terrifically useful is in the setting of a person with chronic illness of any type. So there is some evidence, and certainly from clinical perspective seeing it, that, uh, people, for example, with mycotoxin exposure, mold exposure, they do very well, uh, with hyperbaric oxygen therapy as part of their overall treatment plan because it can get to the damaged area of the mitochondria and then it can help to, uh, kind of dislodge the toxins. That's a grand simplification, but it can help the body in moving things out. It also helps the liver with its detoxifying, et cetera. We use hyperbaric oxygen in people with chronic infectious illnesses. So Lyme complex illness, Epstein-Barr, and the HHV viral family of illnesses. We've used it with our COVID and post-COVID patients. And in the show notes, I will also put in some links. We've got some great links on the use of hyperbaric oxygen and in post-COVID syndrome, et cetera. But we're about to run outta time for this segment. But just to say that hyperbaric oxygen, while it may not be covered by your insurance, is a very useful and very available now treatment. The next thing is that there's a lot of technology changes over the years and a lot of science changes over the years. So our old ideas that we could only do it with very high pressure systems to get a physiologic effect are kind of out the window now because we're showing with newer data that lower pressures and times, etc., can have similar effects. And then the next thing is that it's really getting to healing your body on a very core level, if you will. And so that there's nothing really better in chronic illness than getting to the core of all of your cells and trying to get them healed up. So hyperbaric oxygen would be excellent for that. And there are many people who do and provide hyperbaric oxygen you can speak with about this particular therapy. But that's enough for right now. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. These show notes will be on all of our outlets, including YouTube. And so please like, share, and subscribe. We're building our subscribers on all the platforms. Really appreciate it. And I will see you in the next module.