Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy: Wound Healing

Hyperbaric Medicine (also known as Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy or HBOT) is a method of safely delivering therapeutic doses of oxygen to the body to promote healing and enhance well being. It is administered by breathing 100% oxygen through a mask or hood while lying comfortably inside a pressurized chamber (hyperbaric chamber).

Hyperbaric oxygen provides a therapeutic dose of oxygen, the most basic of cellular fuel, in a unique way which promotes rapid healing. HBOT is capable of healing chronic injury, chronic pain, tissue damage throughout the body including the brain. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment effectively accelerates surgical and wound healing, cures exposure to toxins, helps people sleep better, energizes the mind and relaxes the body.

Boyle’s Law of Physics states that liquid under pressure can absorb additional molecules of any gas. HBOT dissolves oxygen directly into the liquid portion of the blood called the blood plasma. By this way, hyperbaric oxygen treatment increases the delivery of oxygen to the body’s tissues. Oxygen concentrated in the plasma can then bypass blocked or damaged blood vessels to reach the site of injury or trauma and induce healing of acute or chronically damaged tissue.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is the only therapy that can permanently restore function to “resuscitatable brain cells” in this unique fashion. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy allows oxygen to go beyond the blockage, delivering much-needed oxygen to those parts of the brain that are still capable of being healed. Along with these, hyperbaric oxygen treatment induces neovascularization or angiogenesis, the production of new blood vessels, which can permanently restore blood supply.

Hyperbaric Medicine has been limited by the lack of ready availability of hyperbaric chambers for a long time and the fact that the focus of its use has been in Diving and Undersea Medicine. Undersea medicine is not included routinely in medical training, so most MDs are unaware of its value.