 About Oxygen Therapy or Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, High Pressure Oygen Therapy and Ozone Therapy...
Oxygen Therapy is also called Hyperbaric (high pressure) Oxygen Therapy. But the term Oxygen Therapy covers a wide range of treatments besides Hyperbaric Therapy, including Ozone Therapy, Hyper-Oxygenation, Iodised Water, Hydrogen Peroxide, and Vitamin ‘O’ (salt water).
Oxygen Therapy has been used for:
- Serious and stubborn infections (gangrene, brain abscesses, and sinus, bone, or skin infections, including necrotising fasciitis, which is caused by a deadly flesh-eating bacteria)
- Reducing swelling
- Healing of injuries due to car accidents, gunshot wounds, radiation treatments, burns, or falls
- Therapy for stroke treatment
- Multiple sclerosis
- Migraines
- Spinal cord injuries
- Sports accidents
- Ulcers and inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease)
- Treating autism
- Near drowning
- Chronic Lyme disease
- Ringing in the ears
- Epilepsy
- Cerebral palsy
- AIDS
- Rheumatoid arthritis
Hyperbaric Therapy delivers pure oxygen to your body as you sit or lie comfortably in a pressurised chamber, delivering it at pressures two to three times above normal levels.
With Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, as air is pumped into a sealed chamber to drive pressure up, you also breathe 100% oxygen through a specialised tube or mask. All this occurs at a pressure you would expect at a depth of about 50 feet under the sea. The end result is that when you breathe 2.8 or more atmospheres of oxygen in the hyperbaric chamber, the gas is forced into the blood and tissues receive up to 20 times more oxygen than usual.
Forcing oxygen in forces other gases such as nitrogen and carbon monoxide out of your body. This mechanism helps to explain the benefits of Oxygen Therapy for ‘the bends’ (decompression sickness in divers that's caused by the build-up of nitrogen bubbles in the blood), as well as for smoke inhalation (due to carbon monoxide poisoning) and related ailments.
Raising oxygen levels has other healing properties as well. It fights infections by killing bacteria (many of which cannot survive in an oxygen-rich environment) and suppressing their deadly toxins. It creates ‘free radicals’, unstable oxygen molecules that are lethal to germs. And it stimulates roving immune cells called phagocytes, which scavenge for infectious microbes.
An elevation in oxygen also helps heal injuries by fostering the growth of tiny blood vessels that funnel in important nutrients and by keeping existing blood vessels open. Oxygen is also conducive to the production of collagen, the main wound-repairing connective tissue in the body. By speeding up healing processes, oxygen may also boost immunity and the regeneration of nerve cells.
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy sessions are commonly referred to as ‘dives’ because much of the equipment has been adapted from use in deep-sea dives and has a nautical look and feel. How you experience your ‘dive’ will partly depend on whether the equipment is built for one person, or for many. If you don’t like confined spaces then you would be better finding a facility with more spacious equipment that holds several people as each single treatment lasts over an hour.
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