Discover the Science Behind Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Entering a sealed chamber to heal your body sounds a lot like science fiction, but the field of Hyperbaric medicine is entirely grounded in science fact. It’s a critical service that gives many people a jump start to healing. Dr. Christopher Auvenshine, a Hyperbaric Treatment specialist, joined Dakota News Now to give viewers a better understanding of this unique therapy option.

What exactly is Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and how does it work?

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy is the application of oxygen as a medication in a high pressure environment. So we take patients and place them in our Hyperbaric chamber. We have them breathe 100% oxygen, and then we will pressurize the chamber to a 2 or 2.5 atmospheres of pressure. So if you consider the surface of the earth to be one atmospheric pressure life as we know it, 2 or 2.5 atmospheres of pressure would be the equivalent of being a scuba diver diving to almost 50 feet underwater. Then we have our patients breathe 100% oxygen for 90 minutes while they're in the chamber and that high dose of oxygen stimulates a number of different mechanisms within the body to promote healing. First would be the body increasing the body's ability to make new blood vessels. We help the body stimulate or increase the production of collagen, and then we also help to decrease inflammation and all of that put together helps chronic wounds to heal.

Is helping wounds heal the only use for Hyperbaric medicine?

So Hyperbaric oxygen therapy can be divided into two categories. One would be a clinical application, and then the other is clinical, but more related to dive medicine or dive related injuries. Here in South Dakota, we don't see very many dive related injuries, but Hyperbaric units are on the coastal regions of the United States would obviously see more of that. So in our particular setting, we primarily use it for the treatment of chronic non-healing wounds, carbon monoxide poisoning, we will treat radiation and soft tissue injuries as well. So patients who receive radiation to treat cancer can either develop wounds within the treatment area itself or down the road can develop problems related to their bladder or their bowel and how that functions.

What can people expect when undergoing Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?

It can it be jarring for someone that's undergoing a treatment like this. Certainly, we do have patients that suffer from claustrophobia and we can help to give them an anti-anxiety medication to alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with that feeling. But the chamber itself is a large plexiglass tube that has two steel caps on the end, one of which is a door that will be open and closed to allow the patient to be entered and exit the chamber is see through and at the foot of the chamber is a television. So many patients will like to watch a movie or a television program of their choice while they are receiving their treatment. Sometimes they'll want to take a nap or just listen to music.

Are there any side effects to this kind of treatment?

Most patients will feel the effect of the pressure on their eardrums and so just as if you are landing in an airplane and you feel the pressure on your ears, patients will feel that pressure when the pressure is increasing inside the chamber. So we teach them how to equalize that pressure so that they can be comfortable. In addition, there are some side effects, some patients who have cataracts. We tend to make those cataracts worse. If they're receiving a large number of treatments patients can experience a short duration of decreased vision at a distance, but that's not permanent. Once the treatments are stopped or they've completed their Hyperbaric treatment, their vision will come back to normal.

Is Hyperbaric therapy becoming a more popular therapy option?

Yes, it is. I think it's grown significantly in the United States, mostly in the field of wound care. It's been more heavily utilized as an adjunct to ongoing current practices and we've been using a combination of surgery and medical approaches to wound care, so we will continue to grow over the years. There are some exciting areas of research that are also expanding its use. We are seeing it have quite a positive effect in treating patients who've had mild traumatic brain injury, such as post-concussion symptoms among those patients. There's also been some exciting developments in treating post-traumatic stress disorder and so forth.