Our founder, Dr. Grace Johnstone, just had an email Q&A with a fellow named Adam, who had a number of questions about HBOT that were both pertinent and charming.
These questions are incredibly common for people considering HBOT treatment, and speak to the kind of details that our well-informed patients are thinking about.
We hope you both enjoy and benefit from this exchange between Dr. Grace and Adam:
Adam: Is there any danger of decompressing too quickly from the homeowner style devices? I can’t seem to find any info on that but it would stand to reason that 1.3 -1.5 ATA is not enough pressure to make decompression sickness a concern, regardless of whether one takes 10 minutes to decompress or 1 minute. Is this true?
Dr. Grace: These chambers have been “burst tested” as part of the FDA testing process and no harm to participants was incurred. They are below the threshold to result in decompression sickness. Decompression speed can be controlled by the user, and is normally performed to tolerance – so for some this means gradual decompression over a few minutes, whereas others can open the valve fully and be out in less than a minute.
Adam: There is a facility whose advertisement comes up on Google when the search parameters for the definitions of the measurements of pressure are asked about.
This other place was saying that ATA of 1.3 or 1.5 is sort of a waste of time. I have read a lot of anecdotes to the contrary and was wondering what kind of device you used to treat your Lyme [Ed Note: Dr. Grace first encountered HBOT when she spent a year struggling with Lyme and Meningitis. HBOT was how she healed herself.]?
These folks in question are advocating for the hard shell chamber that can go up to 6 ATA, which seems quite high, and can only be accessed at highly expensive treatment centers. Perhaps they are just trying to funnel all as much of the potential income to their facility as possible, like a whale eating up all the krill?
Or maybe the higher pressures, which aren’t possible for a soft shell unit, really do work better, but the soft shell is still a good option? Sort of like saying having a billion dollars is great but that doesn’t mean that having a million isn’t also pretty darn good?
Dr. Grace: Any increase in pressure has a clinical effect, which is one of the reasons one cannot effectively perform double blind studies with mild HBOT as the placebo – which is what they did for years.
This is counter to how we generally approach medicine in the US – more is better, in general, and not what anyone promulgating hospital based high pressure HBOT wants to recognize.
The newer research demonstrates that (with rare exceptions – the bends, for example) mild HBOT is as effective and safer than high pressure HBOT.
High pressure can be stressful to the central nervous system, and one needs to monitor for oxygen toxicity, seizures and the issues one reads about if one searches “risks of HBOT.” Mild HBOT is under the threshold for these issues.
Recent research on COVID and Long COVID, for example, seems to bear this out – the most successful treatment pressures were between 1.2 – 1.6 ATA.
Adam: Is there any danger to staying inside a unit for say, 3 hours? I’m wondering if, as with most things in life, more isn’t necessarily better? Or is this one of those few things like kindness; you can never have too much of it.
Dr. Grace: There is no danger, per se, and some professional athletes sleep in these on occasion, particularly if they have been on the road traveling. That said, that is not the normal lifestyle for most of us.
There is some research that indicates that frequency has some greater effect than just duration – pressure change (as well as additional O2) has clinical and epilepsy-genetic effects, so, for example, it appears that one gets slightly more out of three 1-hour treatments than one 3-hour treatment.
Adam: I also have a chronically ill family member who suffers mainly from asthma, but I see that, from a few different sources of information, asthma has been cited as a contraindication for this type of treatment. Can you speak to that at all?
Grace: We have had a number of patients with asthma benefit from HBOT.
An undiagnosed collapsed lung is a clear contraindication, but asthma can respond very well, as there is often chronic inflammation in the bronchi that can be relieved.