Dr. A, an integrative physician with 30 years of experience, explains how hyperbaric oxygen therapy works: increased pressure forces oxygen into plasma beyond what hemoglobin normally carries, triggering cellular healing and immune activation. It's used for wounds, diving injuries, traumatic brain injury, and sports injuries, though U.S. insurance covers only a limited set of conditions.
Today we got some questions about hyperbaric oxygen therapy and we want to get into them. So the first thing is, why would I want to do that? Why would my doctor maybe prescribe hyperbaric oxygen therapy? Hey, it's Dr. A. Welcome to the channel. I've been researching and teaching in the integrative and naturopathic medical space for 30 years and been seeing patients with cancer and chronic illness for a long time. We use this YouTube channel to answer questions that people have about healthcare. Hyperbaric oxygen uses a unique combination of pressure, time of therapy, and then gas mixtures to help your body do different types of metabolic positive events. So healing-oriented events you could look at. The important thing with hyperbaric oxygen is it's different than just say breathing the oxygen or the gases that we breathe in every day or breathing concentrated oxygen because you add the pressure component to it. So in the United States, There's a list of conditions that insurance would cover for hyperbaric oxygen, and most of the reasons it's used, it would not be covered for. So we think about hyperbaric oxygen in diving injuries, pressure injuries. It's used in certain post-surgical complications. It's used in certain post-radiation complications and a number of things related to that as far as healing. So what we see all around as a The theme with hyperbaric is it is healing-oriented, and that is very important because that's why it's used for all of the reasons that aren't on that list that might get reimbursed, say, in the United States by insurance. Now, if you're in another country, it's probably very different. The bottom line is, is that you're in some sort of pressurized vessel, and the chamber is there to increase the pressure that is going in around your body, and then your body is going to increase The amount of gas exchange. And primarily what we think of is increasing the oxygen concentration in your blood. Now, people will sometimes say, well, the hemoglobin can only be so saturated. And so after that, it must be a waste of energy to put pressure on a person and have the O2 go in. The difference there is that it's not just the hemoglobin, the part that normally holds our oxygen, but the plasma also gets saturated with oxygen. Now, normally there's a tiny of free oxygen in your plasma, but not very much. When you're under pressure with either room air or oxygen or a mixture of gases coming in, the oxygen in your plasma increases. And then that is above what your body could ever do on its own by, say, breathing at whatever atmosphere you are, whatever part of sea level you're at. So then you might say, well, what does that do for me? Well, it does a number of things. One is the pressure on its own has epigenetic signaling capabilities, which means that it helps smooth out genetic signaling. Essentially, epigenetics are what help to turn on and off your genome, the code of your genetics. And a lot of the epigenetic signaling that pressure brings helps to turn on some of the healing types of processes that might be muted by, say, toxicities or exposure to certain things or other things in life. What about all this extra oxygen into the plasma? Well, oxygen in the plasma is going to go, and when you get down to the cellular level, So after I breathe it in, we get down on the arterial side to the cell level. I'm not only going to unload oxygen from the hemoglobin to go into the cell, I'm going to unload some of that free plasma oxygen to go into the extracellular space and then into the cell. Now, a good thing about gases like oxygen is they don't need transporters to get in and out of our cell. They run on concentration gradients. So normally at the arterial side, there's a big gradient between the partial pressure of oxygen on the outside side into the inside to the mitochondria of the cell. It's very big, like a slide going in. So naturally it goes in. Well, if I have more oxygen available in the plasma, I'm going to put a bit more of the oxygen on top of that to go in. It's going to rush in. It's going to help the nucleus of the cell and especially the mitochondria to get more O2. And it's going to run oxidative phosphorylation faster. And then it's going to cause cell respiration. So we're going to export CO2. When we export CO2, we're also speeding up the export of Of the vesicles that take the trash out of the cell because that's part of the cell respiration, OXPHOS activity and complex. And then we have another benefit, which I always think of as an up and then a downswing, which is we get a transient increase in an oxidative burst. And what oxidative bursts are used for naturally in our body, so we have them all the time, would be to trigger immune activity and to trigger, again, kind of cleaning up around what's going on. So if you are recovering from a problem, like say you had a head injury or something, your neurological system has a lot of cleanup and healing work to do. This burst of oxidation and then reduction is going to help with that. If you have another tissue that's damaged, you're recovering from surgery or you're recovering from radiation therapy or you're recovering from any other insult to the body, same thing. This is going to trigger more of a healing cascade. So it does it through a couple of ways. One is the the prooxidation, then that leads us to cytokines or chemical messengers that trigger our immune system downstream. When we trigger the immune system downstream, that also helps us with these cell maintenance and cleanup actions that go on. What happens after we signal this oxidative upswing is then the downswing goes and signals a compensatory reduction or antioxidant cleanup afterwards. And that's also part of this cleanup job that's done. So who might need hyperbaric oxygen. One of my mentors, Dr. Paul Harch, likes to say that hyperbaric oxygen is indicated for a wound of any kind anywhere in the body because it's not segregated to an organ system. It is not segregated to anything other than the way the mechanism by which hyperbaric works. And so any type of dysregulation or disruption, such as a trauma or some other issue, is going to be aided in healing by the addition of the pressure, the gas, and then the time that you're under treatment. We find the most common reasons it's often prescribed would be head trauma, traumatic brain injuries, concussions, things like that, post-surgical healing, any other injuries that you're trying to get over. Could be sports or orthopedic injuries, could be recovery of an organ system like your digestive tract when you're trying to get over something like too many antibiotics or microbiome disruption, et cetera. It can help any of The healing processes move forward. Now, the final thing I usually like to say is that hyperbaric is wonderful because it affects all the tissues, and you also want to have synergistic treatment with it. Now, that then becomes dependent on what you're treating. So for example, if you are doing it in a certain cycle and your goal is a lot of cell healing, whether it's say brain or peripheral tissue, orthopedic, whatever, what we usually do is we do the hyperbaric and then we'll have people take antioxidants in between hyperbaric so that when they go through that sine wave of Oxidation and triggering of healing, and then reduction in antioxidant signaling. They have the antioxidants on board to get in and help out. That's one type of synergy. So hyperbaric is pressure, time, and then gas, usually oxygen, but gas because there are some other types. And it is oriented to healing. And it's oriented to healing because pressure, time, and gas trigger all of your cell processes that not only help to maintain cell function, maintain cell junk removal or cleanup, but also maintain cell repair and removal systems. All right, I hope that answers your questions. We'll do some more on this topic. I'm Dr. A. Thanks for all of you subscribers. Thanks for your new subscribers. Please do like, share. If you're not subscribed, please subscribe and do the notifications so you know when we do these. I'll see you all on the next video.
