All human cells, tissues, and organs need oxygen to function. Oxygenation saturates the body with oxygen through the use of gas, sometimes at high-pressure (hyperbaric), increasing the total amount of available oxygen in the body. Insufficient oxygenation may promote the growth of pathogens, whereas excessive oxygenation may damage normal tissues. However, oxygenation employed under strictly controlled conditions can have very positive therapeutic effects.

  Otto Warburg, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Cell Physiology in Germany and a two-time Nobel laureate, proposed that a lack of oxygen at the cellular level may be the prime cause of cancer, and that oxygen therapy could be an effective treatment for it. He showed that normal cells in tissue culture, when deprived of oxygen, become cancer cells, and that oxygen can kill cancer cells in tissue cultures.

  Oxygen therapy may be professionally administered in many ways: orally, rectally, vaginally, intravenously (into a vein), intra-arterially (into an artery), through inhalation, or by absorption through the skin. High concentrations of oxygen gas can also be given orally through masks or tubes, via oxygen tents, or within pressurized hyperbaric chambers. Oxygen may also be injected subcutaneously (beneath the skin). Ionized oxygen, both positively and negatively charged, is administered by inhalation or dissolved in drinking or bath water.

 

  Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) dates back to the beginning of this century, although its modern use in the United States dates only to the formation of the Undersea Medical Society in the United States in 1967. HBOT may be administered in individual oxygen chambers that consist of acrylic tubes about seven feet long and twenty-five inches in diameter. The patient lies on a stretcher which slides into the tube. The entry is sealed and the tube pressurized at up to two and a half Atmospheres Absolute (two and a half times the pressure of the atmosphere at sea level) with pure oxygen for 30 to 120 minutes. The increased pressure makes it possible to breathe oxygen at a concentration higher than that allowed by any other means. After treatment, the chamber is depressurized slowly with the patient resting inside. Most of the hyperbaric facilities in the United States are either part of, or affiliated with, American hospitals or the military.

  Multiplace chambers which accommodate many patients at once, and in which oxygen is delivered by mask, are now used at the University of Maryland, Duke University, the University of Texas, Scripps Institute, and the Hyperbaric Oxygen Institute in San Bernardino, California. These chambers allow nurses and technical personnel to attend to patients during the treatment. An added advantage of multiplace chambers is that a patient can be removed immediately if problems arise, whereas in individual chambers, the patient cannot be removed until the entire chamber is depressurized.

 

  The scientific community has been aware of oxygen and its characteristics for over two hundred years. Oxygen was discovered by Englishman Joseph Priestly in 1771. Hydrogen peroxide was discovered by French chemist Louis Jacques Thenard in 1818, and ozone was discovered by Christian Friedrich Schonbein in 1840. The first hyperbaric operating room was created as early as 1879 by a French physician, Dr. J. A. Fontaine.

  Doctors and scientists began treating diseases and conditions with oxygen over one hundred years ago. Skin conditions were first treated with ultraviolet light (which activates oxidation when absorbed by the blood) in the late nineteenth century by Niels Finsen, and the use of peroxide appears in the health literature as early as 1884. A. L. Cortelyou of Marietta, Georgia, successfully treated diphtheria with a peroxide nasal spray in 1898. In a 1919 influenza epidemic, Drs. T. H. Oliver and D. U. Murphy administered intravenous hydrogen peroxide which significantly reduced mortality rates.

  Ozone application was used successfully in World War I to combat battlefield infections, and as early as 1924, Frederick Koch, M.D., advocated oral hydrogen peroxide for cancer patients in the United States .

 

  Today in the United States, HBOT is primarily used for traumas such as crash injuries, burns, wounds, gangrene (death of tissue, usually due to deficient or absent blood supply), carbon monoxide poisoning, decubitus ulcers (bed sores), stasis (the stagnation of the normal flow of fluids), radiation necrosis (death of an area of tissue or bone surrounded by healthy parts), and recalcitrant skin grafting (skin grafting that doesn't take). Some microsurgical procedures for the repair and restoration of severed limbs are made possible only by the use of HBOT during the surgery.

  According to David Hughes, D.Sc., of the Hyperbaric Oxygen Institute, HBOT postsurgery improves early healing in about 60 percent of time in most cases, and guarantees there will be no surgical edema (retention of excessive amounts of fluid by body tissues).

  Dr. Hughes says that in West Germany, HBOT has been used extensively to treat stroke victims, and government sponsorship of HBOT has reduced aftercare costs for stroke victims by 71 percent. In France, it is employed for peripheral vascular and arterial problems, and in Russia, it is used in drug and alcohol detoxification. In Japan, the medical establishment boasts that no citizen is ever more than half an hour away from a hyperbaric chamber. In Great Britain, more than twenty-five thousand multiple sclerosis patients have benefited from HBOT.

 

  Pulmonary crises such as carbon monoxide poisoning, low blood volume anemia, and cyanosis (a bluish discoloration of the skin due to abnormal amounts of oxygenated hemoglobin in the blood), have also been treated with HBOT, according to Dr. Hughes. Much work has been done with HBOT as an adjunct to radiation therapy for cancer and to minimize the side effects of some chemotherapy protocols. Dr. Hughes explains that non-cancerous cells are much less sensitive to radiation when the oxygen concentration in their vicinity is increased. HBOT before radiation treatment enhances its effectiveness.

  According to Dr. Hughes, HBOT has also demonstrated its value as an addition to antibiotics in the treatment of anaerobic (able to live without oxygen) infections. HBOT has begun to be used experimentally to treat the symptoms of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infection and its accompanying fatigue. 

  He recalls an eighteen-year-old boy involved in a near drowning incident, who was brought to an HBOT clinic after being in a vegetative coma for nine days. After seventy treatment sessions, the boy was able to return to school. He continued with the treatment and made good progress toward a full recovery.

  HBOT also aided a seventy-year-old woman who had been bedridden from multiple sclerosis. After eighteen HBOT sessions with Dr. Hughes, she had recovered enough of her motor skills to drive a car and walk without assistance, and within six months she was able to resume her original duties at work.

  In another case, Dr. Hughes was brought a twenty-eight-year-old woman suffering from viral encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), leaving her unable to speak and with right side hemiplegia (paralysis of only one side of the body). She couldn't walk and had acute optic neuralgia (severe, sharp pain along the optic nerves). After thirty sessions, she had improved enough to walk and talk normally, the optic neuralgia had resolved, and the only persistent symptom was right arm and hand weakness.