What YOU NEED TO KNOW About Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy | Science Behind Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

When you're thinking about hyperbaric across the spectrum, ideally you would have, you know, all pressures available. But the other side of that is I've done a couple of case studies that I did one at the National Hyperbaric Meeting a number of years ago, and I've done some others where hyperbaric as a monotherapy is good. But if you do hyperbaric as a monotherapy and then you add things to augment it, You can take a big step up in your efficacy. So, for example, one of the case series I did was a young man who had a very pretty significant traumatic brain injury. And in normal TBI studies, they go you know forty treatments, hopefully four or five a week. And then if you still are having trouble, they go another forty, right? Or twenty more and then twenty more. So we were sort of looking at that and then saying if we added because this is a fresh injury and there were, it was very obvious because we had to do a standardized brain injury score so we could track them. If we also then get you in the chamber and when you get out, we give you an IV that is focused on brain healing. And then in between your hyperbaric sessions, you take oral supplements that are focused on brain healing. Could we do better than 40 treatments? And essentially we had in the first 15 treatments, we had this giant slope downward in all of the concussion symptoms. And by 20 treatments, they were at As much better or better than you would have been with 40 HBOT treatments all on its own. So I think that there's a big thing, a big positive in using synergy. And again, we, we have capabilities other people don't have. So if you don't have access to do IV therapy, you can do oral things to be helpful, right? So I think, you know, you look at an injury model, definitely there's synergy. And then, you know, with acute injuries, higher pressures, you know, is what I would do first. But if what you have is mild, I would do that rather than zero HBOT, right? So that's one thing. But when we get to cancer, which is unique where hyperbaric is concerned, the synergy that you do with a cancer patient to help the hyperbaric is different. But also cancer is a chronic immunologic insult. So it's not going to act like an acute, you know, brain trauma or surgery or something like that. And something, you know, like in the class I bring out all the time, which is really, you know, it's in the research, but nobody talks about it this way, is cancer cells affect by gas pressure and time is different than say normal cells or brain injured cells or, you know, or just injured normal cells. And a lot of the pathways that go one direction with non-cancer cells go completely the opposite direction in cancer cells. This is partly why, and I, I remember cuz I was there at an annual hyperbaric conference in 2012 when the first, the first paper that started to turn the ship saying, Maybe it's not bad. Maybe hyperbaric would be good in cancer. And they were trying to reconcile this and like, well, we know these things about hyperbaric and 4 of those things are pro-cancer. Then this research shows that it's probably anti-cancer. How do we reconcile that? That was a big turning point. Now I was there listening with ears of, I was doing cancer research at the time and I was listening. I said, yeah, those, these things are pro-cancer. What I found as I dug in over the next 7 years is tumor bed, tumor tissue, cancer stem cells, all the bad guys, those pro- Pro-cancer things that might go on in a normal set of tissue are the opposite in cancer. So they go the other way. And it's because of the nature of cancer. So part of this is getting to, we don't normally treat cancer like an acute injury because it's a chronic immunologic injury. It will respond anywhere across the pressure spectrum. So cancer itself, if you're trying to affect it with hyperbaric, anywhere in the pressure spectrum is going to be better than none. And you are probably safer to be in mild to low-high pressure than anywhere else, really, as far as safety goes. Because there are some other factors when you have cancer. And you can augment it if you have the capacity by other types of therapies like oxidative therapies and other stuff like that. So I think it's just important to understand, like, the biochemical rules as far as what hyperbaric does are different with cancer than they are with normal tissue, even if you injure it. And it's not an acute injury, so the rules for treating an acute injury don't Really apply. Quick interruption from the regular video. If you are a healthcare practitioner and you have an interest in this topic, we're going to put a link in the description below to my CE website and specifically the webinar that is about this topic. So see you over there. Thanks. In this modern toxic environment where we have so much, it's sort of like our immune system is here between you know us and health and disease. You know, and the immune system in the human, the human generally is under so much more stress. You know, biologically and chemically. And all this stuff. So things like, you know, augmented light therapies and hyperbaric therapies and all the other stuff. If you look at trying to stay in prevention, either primary where you don't have cancer and you don't want it, or secondary where you did have cancer and we want to keep it away, it makes more sense to me to optimize the system in the middle, which is largely your immune system. And hyperbaric is one of those things that could do it. And it does generally, if let's say you were in, in a durable remission or no evidence of disease, it usually takes less effort to keep you There, once you get there, maybe the treatment intensity would be a lot bigger during the cancer treatment time period, etc. But you get over to remission, and yes, I think punctuated treatment makes a lot of sense because there are things that hyperbaric does beyond the oxygen and pressure delivery that we think of on the macro. One of which is it literally kind of wakes up the mitochondria, the energy-producing parts of our cell, and that's great. They need to work correctly to not go and be recruited as cancer cells. That's one. But the other thing. Is that we forget is hyperbaric or other things, but hyperbaric that makes my mitochondria work more at a normal speed forces the removal of junk from my cells. And then, you know, hopefully we're doing other things to remove the junk from our body. It forces not only cellular respiration, but at the other end of cell respiration, we have the removal of cellular junk right now. This is one of the connections which I totally agree with, where let's say you do an intermittent fast that also helps you with the removal of cellular junk, right? So if I did an intermittent fast And hyperbaric. Oh, I'm really you know going there, right? What's another thing that's actually in tumor basically tumor biology literature now? It's something that your grandmother knew, and that was staying hydrated. There is less spread of cancer when there is hydration. Why is that? Because not only oxygen moving through helps with cell respiration and take the garbage out. If we are dehydrated, the cells preferentially don't get rid of garbage because there's they can't, right? Just biologically. So yes, all of these things go together. And like you said, I mean, I I've always used it as part of everything else that. We do. And a lot of times, you know, people will think, well, this is the important therapy, is this thing I get in a chamber for, I get an IV or whatever. Certainly they're important, but staying hydrated is really important too. And I think in, in a preventive setting, and of course things are a little different in prevention, you're focusing on different things, hyperbaric still supports your body on a number of levels that would be supportive to prevention. I think it was 2014, maybe 2012. It's interesting, same exact time as there was a shift in hyperbaric and cancer research. They published essentially a similar paper about red light therapy or photodynamic therapy and focusing on red near-infrared therapy. And basically, the first one said, gee, we've always said this is probably a contraindication, but it appears it helps cancer. So, we have this chasm. We have to figure out scientifically what's in the middle. And so, there's a lot. And like you said, if you look at textbooks, which are 30 years outdated by the time you get them anyway, but if you look at textbooks, It still has, you know, relative contraindication in cancer and red light or near infrared. And there's really, just like with hyperbaric, there's really no science behind that. It just seemed like a bad idea essentially from some sort of disparate connections, you know, in research and stuff. And in the 10 to 2015 time period, there's a number of publications that said that doesn't make any sense because it seems to help. Okay. It's exactly the same as red light, near-infrared, and eye problems. Used to be, you know, you had to cover your eyes and all that stuff. It turns out that it actually helps most chronic eye diseases. Now manufacturers still put all those things on all of their information because they don't want to get sued and they're unlikely to take those warnings off. So if you're reading, you know, on your manufacturer's data, I don't think they're ever going to take those things off. Cancer and eye problems, they're never going to take them off. But if you look at the way that photodynamic therapy works, it's something that in the 1800s they were using it with cancer just through different means, you know, through the sun and other. And they actually back then they actually had photodynamic units, you know, that would plug in and light up with different colors and all this stuff that they would use. And I remember when I was in medical school, we were gifted a bunch of those that no one ever obviously used, but they were from, you know, way, way back. And it was kind of curious to look at them and the wavelengths they put off. So we use all sorts of color wavelengths. Some have to be sort of inside the body because they don't absorb, but red and near-infrared absorb through your skin really well. Near-infrared a little deeper than red. And they do things through both enzymatic and quasi-enzymatic manipulation around your redox and your mitochondria and all this stuff. The idea being that what they do is really not forcing something to go the wrong way, which would be the cancer concern. They're telling the normal cells, kind of like hyperbaric does, let's work at our optimum. Let's try and work normally. What keeps us from having cancer invade an area or a cell turning cancerous is the cell working normally. And more importantly, like if you're in a preventive state, the thing you're most concerned about are cancer stem cells. And then the neighborhood they live in, which is, you know, the parenchyma or the stroma, whatever you want to call it, that area is really active and it's trying to recruit normal cells to come over and be more cancer cells, right? Well, one way around that, hyperbaric is a huge, wonderful way, but photodynamic therapies, especially in the Red end of the spectrum also can help there. So again, it's it's just one of those things where we had a lot of cautions because we didn't know, and it seemed like it would be a bad idea. Kind of like hyperbaric and kind of like other stuff. Now we know more, and will manufacturers ever take the caution off? Probably not. But there there's certainly if you go since 2012, 2015 forward, and you look at cancer and photodynamic therapy, you have a totally different story. Not for any nefarious reason or whatever. There's a lot of people teaching still, you know, because I know a lot of people. In that world, you know, from Europe and Asia and all that, and different countries kind of are letting go of the cancer warnings at different times. You know, you still hear it from some people in North America. It's sort of like hyperbaric. There's a spectrum and some people still are like, no, no, you know, this might trigger the cancer. And other people are like, actually, no, it's probably going to be good for them. Yeah. It's a, it's basically the same story as with hyperbaric, just different mechanics. I always tell people we don't look any different than our grandparents did. We're humans. But the biology of what they had to deal with versus what we have to deal with is it's not even like we're on the same planet. And so certainly all of these basic things that you and I use, whether it's dietary or body movement or hot and cold or whatever, they still are super important. But we're under so much more stress. Sometimes these things that take it to the next level are required, you know, I think under, under modern conditions. So, you know, yeah, I think that's a huge It's a point that's easy to forget because we don't look different than our grandparents did, really. But the— if we could see what's going on in the world around us, our grandparents wouldn't even recognize the chemical world that we live in.