Book Report: The Oxygen Revolution

The Oxygen Revolution, Third Edition: Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT): The Definitive Treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) & Other Disorders by Paul G. Harch Md and Virginia McCullough

I came to seek out and read about hyperbaric oxygen after reading Tripping over the truth and realizing it was an important part of cancer care. I happened to choose this book because it was available as a kindle download before i was boarding a plane, and i am glad it was!

Dr. Harch has been utilizing HBOT in his Louisiana practice for many years, and the results have been amazing. He takes us through much of the areas that oxygen can impact our biology.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy is delivering 90-100% oxygen to a patient under elevated atmospheric pressure, usually in a chamber or special room that can pressurize. The pressure helps drive the oxygen into the blood and distribute faster than it would at normal pressure, and only 20% oxygen at room air.

The first note I saved from this book was on epigenetic:

In 2008, Dr. Godman and colleagues, basic science researchers all, found that a single hyperbaric treatment to the human cells that line all of our blood vessels turns on and turns off as many as 8,101 genes in the 24 hours following HBOT. If the cells are given another treatment at 24 hours, even more genes are activated, and the cells begin to roll up and form small blood vessels. So: not one gene, not two genes, or even the handful of genes that were implicated in the previous 12 years of research, but 8,101 genes—8,101 genes! Furthermore, the turned-on genes are those genes which code for growth and repair hormones and the anti-inflammatory genes; the turned-off genes are the pro-inflammatory genes and those that code for cell death.

That is a pretty profound tool to change the phenotype from inflammatory to anti-inflammatory. It has drug-like effects on the DNA as well as at a cellular level.

HBOT is normally associated with decompression illness from SCUBA diving. They use high-pressure treatments to help these divers recover, but eventually determined that they were treating the effects of the nitrogen bubbles, not the bubbles themselves.

There are a number of applications for HBOT, the most profound to me was the neurological recoveries. Improvement from stroke injuries, even years yearlier, were impressive to read about.

In 1990, he sent a letter to The Lancet showing SPECT brain blood flow images of a woman severely neurologically disabled by a stroke 14 years earlier.3 After a single hyperbaric oxygen treatment, she showed improved blood flow in an area of the brain thought to have been dead.

They treated 74 patients 6–36 months after a stroke using 40 HBOTs. They were able to show neurological, cognitive, quality-of-life, and brain blood flow improvements in nearly all of the patients, while no improvement occurred in the control group

We started offering HBOT to patients shortly after I read this book, and I got to see a few patients improve after neurological injuries. It has been a privelege to bring this service to our community.

The applications for HBOT are many, basic inflammatory in nature, neurological, and even cancer in some conditions. Please reach out if you would like any additional information.

This Book Report collection is meant to provide some of the best take-home points from the health and science genre I read. I will continue to go thru my notes of the 160+ and counting (as of January 2019) Kindle books I have on file. To view ALL the notes I saved on this one AND many others without a Book Report post yet, THAT IS ALSO SEARCHABLE, please click here.