What is HBOT and why does it matter?
Like nature, I try to take the path of least resistance, so my entire adult life I have searched for the short cuts for longevity and optimal health, those science based practical and albeit esoteric longevity and human performance practices that exploit the synergy between man and nature.
In terms of radical life changing health optimizations, we do not have to go far.
If anyone ever asks you to tell them what is the most important thing in your life, I want you to know this question is a trap. I know because I often ask it! “What is the one thing you can’t live without?” I’ve gotten many answers, the usual is “my children,” “my family,” “my bank account, or “my collection of Barbies.” Rarely does someone understand the question, because I keep getting the wrong answer. So, “what is the most important thing to you in your life?
What is that one thing you cannot live without for even a minute?
It’s Oxygen!
The 8th element. 8 protons, 8 neutrons, 8 electrons. Oxygen is so important to respiration that life cannot be imagined without it. Wouldn’t you agree?
We know we are composed mostly of water, and if it’s live or die, we can actually go without it for a week or more. But a few minutes without O2 and we turn blue. We breathe in oxygen in the form of O2 and breathe out carbon dioxide (CO2). This fact most of us learn in Kindergarten.
So how does this oxygen thing work?
Each breath stimulates the life processes of each and every cell in your body. Pulmonary respiration, i.e., breathing, makes O2 available for cellular respiration which uses food broken down to hydrogen and O2 to produce ATP, (the energy currency of our biology), metabolic H2O, and CO2.
Together hydrogen and oxygen are the spark, fuel, and fire of life. Just like everything in nature is starved for food, it is also starved for oxygen.
So, how do we get more oxygen?
Proper breathing is one, and that means breathing slow and deep into your diaphragm with ease and silence. The ancient Vedic science of Pranayama passed down for thousands of years is an exact science devoted to teaching the many facets of proper breathing. In more contemporary development, HRV (Heart Rate Variability) researchers in Eastern Europe discovered eleven breaths per minute to be the optimal rhythm for heart coherence and a parasympathetic state, (nature and nurture).
Better heart coherence means lower resting heart rate, and lower resting heart rate is a cornerstone of health and longevity.
In the U.S., breathwork called Valvasva Wave or Coherence Breathing is clinically well researched, but accessible mostly to practitioners. (In 2024 Breathrite™, the Author’s own Breath Coherence Entrainment app will be available).
Even if you know Pranayama, Coherence breathing, Buteyko Method, and other techniques to regulate oxygen and carbon-dioxide, and if you have mastered the perfect breath, when it comes to oxygen, there is still a physical limit to what you can breathe and retain.
Your ability to retain oxygen radically changes as pressure is applied. If we want to increase the maximum physical volume of oxygen that can be dissolved in our blood, all we need to do is increase the pressure. If we want a reserve of oxygen we need to get down, and I mean this quite literally.
This is where the story of HBOT (Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy) comes in. HBOT is a medical and wellness treatment in which a subject sits in a pressure chamber where the ambient pressure is higher than the atmospheric pressure.
The way it works is the earth’s atmosphere weighs down on us with a specific amount of pressure. Standing at sea level you experience 1 “atmosphere” of pressure. When you descend 33 feet underwater, for example, the additional amount of pressure your body is exposed to is equivalent to another “atmosphere.” The rule is when talking about pressurized environments, we “count” the fact that everyone starts at sea level, which is 1 Atmosphere Absolute” ( 1 ATA).
So, at 33 feet underwater, you are at 2 ATA. Thus, HBOT sessions are called dives.
Recently there has been a resurgent interest in HBOT chambers for medical and general health use. This is largely credited to a recent study that showed HBOT therapy increased telomere length and reversed the age of the cell.
It can hardly be believed, our good fortune, to have so many next level radical life extension technologies being invented in the 21st century, but alas, HBOT is not one of them. It’s been around for a long time!
Apparently Sumerian kings from 3000 BC sat in special hyperbaric chambers to live for thousands of years; sorry I am making that up, but HBOT does go back to 1662 when one Nathaniel Henshaw, a British doctor and priest, invented a system of organ bellows with unidirectional valves to change the atmospheric pressure in a sealed chamber he called the Domicilium. He claimed it was a remedy for many afflictions. Nobody knows where he got the idea, maybe he was a time traveler from the future? The future we are now in coincidentally.
The therapeutic benefit of HBOT lies in its ability to drastically increase partial pressure of oxygen in body tissues. The O2 partial pressures achievable using HBOT are much higher than while breathing pure oxygen under normobaric (normal atmospheric pressure) conditions. This is achieved by an increase in the O2 transport capacity of the blood. Under normobaric conditions, O2 transport is limited by the red blood cells hemoglobin oxygen binding capacity.
Very little oxygen is transported by blood plasma at normobaric conditions. Because hemoglobin is nearly saturated with O2 at atmospheric pressure, this transport route is exhausted for exploitation. O2 transport via plasma, however, is significantly increased using HBOT because as pressure increases, so does the solubility of oxygen.
Nearly two-hundred years lapsed before interest in HBOT resurfaced. James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, designed an HBOT chamber for a physician in Paris in 1834. It was called “Le Bain D’air com-Prime” (the compressed air bath) and went to 4 ATA. These doctors were pushing boundaries!
Another fancy design featured an antechamber to allow a physician to enter and exit without disturbing the pressure.
By 1837 in Lyon, France, a twelve-seater was built to treat all sorts of pulmonary conditions using pressures of 2–4 ATA, reporting increased circulation to organs, cerebral blood flow to the brain, and production of feelings of well-being.
In 1860 the first medical HBOT chamber in North America was built in Oshawa, Canada with one installed in New York the following year for the treatment of “nervous and related disorders.”
In 1877 a Frenchman named Fontaine pioneered performing surgery in an HBOT chamber, later copied with immense success in the 20th century in Amsterdam by pediatric cardiac surgeon Ite Boerema, whom many cite as the father of modern-day hyperbaric medicine.
In 1885, C. Theodore Williams published his “Lectures on the Compressed Air Bath and its Uses in the Treatment of Disease” in the British Medical Journal. Even then you can say HBOT was well on its way.
And this was just in time for futurist entrepreneur and Lawrence, Kansas local Orval J. Cunningham. In 1920 Cunningham patented a HBOT ‘High Pressure Hospital’ train.
Although the train never made it off the drawing board, ‘The Tank’ did. It was a multi-person chamber Cunningham used with alleged success in treating victims of the early 20th century pandemic known as the Spanish Flu.
The roaring twenties welcomed novelty and innovation and our boy Orval was at the front of the line. In Cleveland Cunningham healed a rich carriage maker named Henry Timken, who subsequently gave him the $1.5 million dollars to build his hyperbaric magnum opus.
Cunningham’s Oxygen Sanitorium was five stories tall with three hundred and fifty sealed windows, there was a library, a cigar lounge, and other amenities. This 900 ton HBOT “Epcot Center” operated for a rare moment of time, 1928–1937. Coincidentally, the biggest HBOT chamber today is the 22 ton, 32’ long and 14’ wide unit at the Utah Regional Medical Center.
As WWII approached, the US Navy took an interest in HBOT for treating decompression sickness.
and gas embolism, It is still considered the definitive treatment for these conditions. HBOT chambers treat decompression sickness and gas embolism by increasing pressure to reduce the size of gas bubbles, to improve the transport of blood to tissues. After elimination of bubbles, pressure is gradually reduced back to 1 ATA.
Modern HBOT pioneers in the 1950’s and 60’s treated many conditions from pulmonary defects to neurological conditions, cerebral palsy, stroke, MS, autism, infections, carbon monoxide poisoning and many other pathologies. HBOT therapy gained even more popularity when President John F. Kennedy used it to treat his sick young son, JFK junior.
In the 1970’s major medical institutions such as Duke University, New York Mount Sinai Hospital, Presbyterian Hospital, Edgeworth Hospital in Chicago, Good Samaritan in Los Angeles, St. Barnabas Hospital in New Jersey, Harvard Children’s Hospital, and St. Luke’s Hospital in Milwaukee created HBOT wings.
In the 20th century HBOT has been called the Cinderella of Allopathic Medicine since it was not taught in medical schools and had no pharmaceutical companies’ interests, yet it simply could not be denied.
Fifty plus years ago, in 1972, American College of Hyperbaric Medicine co-founder and executive director Richard A. Neubauer set up the Ocean Hyperbaric Neurologic Center in Florida exclusively for HBOT in the management of various central nervous system disorders. He claimed that injured neurons are capable of surviving years or decades after the original injury and could be re-activated with HBOT and that the greater the number of “idling” neurons, the better would be the patient’s response to HBOT.[1]
In 1976 it was discovered by Hollback and Wasserman that HBOT therapy optimizes O2 and glucose metabolism in the brain. [2] The human brain uses 20% of the entire body’s oxygen and calorie intake, despite only accounting for about 2% of an adult’s body mass. No wonder that in 2002, a US Army study showed HBOT can repair white matter damage in the brain. [3] In 2006 Thom discovered HBOT causes stem cell mobilization. [4] In 2010, Godman discovered that HBOT activated 8101 genes, resulting in reduction of inflammation and increase in growth in body tissues. [5,6] God man indeed!
In 2011, Stoller treated the first retired National Football League (NFL) player for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. [7] And in 2012, Harch et. al, proved HBOT’s efficacy for concussions and PTSD. [8]
In the last twenty years HBOT became increasingly embraced by professional athletes, not only for injury recovery but mitochondrial optimization. Football quarterback Joe Namath credits HBOT with curing his decades old neurological damage from head trauma on the field. In 2012/13 he underwent over 100 treatments. This was validated by ‘before and after’ SPECT scan analysis which led to an FDA approved study on HBOT and the founding of the Joe Namath Neurological Research Center in Jupiter, Florida. Maybe he should sell hyperbaric chambers on TV and not just reverse mortgages.
Famous athletes that swear by the benefits HBOT include the most decorated swimmer of all time Michael Phelps and number one ranked tennis star, winner of 20 Grand Slams, Novak Djokovic. For the last ten years the NFL and other professional sports leagues have embraced HBOT for increasing injury recovery time.
In the future, elite athletes will have hyperbaric chambers in their homes to maximize their performance, decrease injury recovery time, and increase the longevity of their athletic career. And many non-elite athletes will follow.
And now we come to the age reversal study of 2020. 358 years after Nathanial Henshaw’s Domicilium was invented and promoted as a health panacea, a Tel-Aviv study revealed HBOT can halt the aging of blood cells and reverse the aging process. Interest in HBOT has surged ever since.
Research led by by Dr. Shai Efrati, founder of the Sagol Center of Hyperbaric Medicine at the Shamir Medical Center in Tel-Aviv, found a unique HBOT treatment protocol can reverse two major processes associated with aging and its illnesses: the shortening of telomeres (protective caps on the ends of all chromosomes) and the accumulation of old and dying cells in the body. Immune cells from the participants’ blood showed a lengthening of up to 38% in telomeres, and a decrease of up to 37% of senescent cells. “Today telomere shortening is considered the ‘Holy Grail’ of the biology of aging,” says Efrati. “Researchers around the world are trying to develop pharmacological and environmental interventions that enable telomere elongation. Our HBOT protocol was able to achieve this, proving that the aging process can in fact be reversed at the basic cellular-molecular level.”
The typical effective HBOT protocol is 60–90 minutes per day, 5 days a week for 3 months at a time.
As I write this, Star Date 2022, from my research, personal use and experience I can unequivocally say that regular HBOT use leads to true next level health optimization. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is an overnight sensation 400 years in the making!
HBOT is FDA approved and used clinically for many serious pathologies. [10].
Biohacking nerds will be pleased to find out oxidative stress markers tumor necrosis factor-alpha, interleukin-1beta, neopterin, myeloperoxidase, and malondialdehyde are severely reduced by HBOT. For the gut obsessed, you too will be pleased to know HBOT assists to improve and normalize stomach acid and reduce digestive dysbiosis. HBOT also prevents 75 percent of all major amputations that would otherwise be necessary for diabetic wounds. A 450% increase in complete recovery in patients with traumatic brain injury receiving HBOT vs. standard intensive care is also widely recognized as a major benefit.
The author has incorporated HBOT therapy into a “metabolic supercharge protocol” which includes deuterium depleted water, a ketogenic or keto adapted diet, supplemental molecular hydrogen, marine plasma, key supplements, light, and magnetic therapy. This is a metabolic water optimization strategy. The more optimized the metabolic water in the mitochondria, the more efficient the production of ATP, and longer life for your mitochondria, the more mitochondria, the more ATP, (the energy currency of our biology).
A new theory points to cell signaling, even more so than O2 uptake, as the reason HBOT works so well. Immediately after an HBOT session you experience a temporary relative internal hypoxia, vasodilation, and increased Superoxide Dismutase (SOD) signaling which regulates glucose, improves angiogenesis (new blood vessel formation), and enhances production and quantity of stem cells.
The more we learn about HBOT, the better it gets!
Today we find ourselves at the crossroads of old style design and technology that accomplished its job very well and properly maintained has served the needs of patients for decades.
Modern HBOT chambers for personal home and wellness clinic use have vastly improved. Newer hard shell chambers are computer controlled and dive from 1.2 to 2 ATA (the recommended safe limit for personal use), at programmable speeds. They must comply with NFPA-992012 Edition Chapter 14 Code in the USA and European 1997 CEN pressure vessels 97/23E standards as well as the 1998 ECHM recommendations for safety. They also utilize non-hazardous oxygen concentrators for 93%+ pure O2, vs. refillable compressed oxygen tanks. The latest HBOT chambers feature hinge-less pressure-sealed doors, antifriction bearings, antibacterial and moisture wicking upholstery, and constant circulation of air to keep carbon dioxide levels balanced.
The latest generation of chambers can be operated with both supplemental oxygen (for 1–3 hour sessions) and/or with simple ambient air for longer sessions, to be used comfortably for sleeping. This requires ambient room O2 to be maintained at 23–26% and CO2 at 2,500 ppm or less.
Breathing air, (without supplemental oxygen) at 2 ATA will result in increased O2 levels by a factor of 3 allowing you to store oxygen in blood plasma and lymphatic fluid. (Consider your hemoglobin is saturated before you enter the chamber). A lifestyle intervention that creates this radical an increase in oxygen makes it, in this author’s view, is synergistic to the most important pro-youthing intervention you can do, (other than the right state of mind), the drinking right water, deuterium depleted water. The author recommends his own brand; Litewater.
Unfortunately, as free, and fundamentally primal as breathing oxygen is, getting more of it inside you than nature allows at 1 ATA requires we must pay for it.
If you are fortunate enough to own or have access to the next generation of home and spa 2 ATA HBOT chambers, you will find that regular time spent inside this metal pressure vessel with an oxygen cannula in your nose for hours at a time is highly worth it!
One day people will recognize that it is just as important to own an HBOT chamber for their well-being as it is to own a car. Orval J. Cunningham was trying to tell us a hundred years ago!
If HBOT clinics someday spring up like health clubs and yoga studios on every corner, you will expect to pay from one hundred to three hundred dollars per session depending on how deep and how long you plan to dive.
Right now, having your own HBOT chamber is a luxury, like owning a Porsche for the weekends, , but if you’ve made it, you should live it!
As Siddhartha Guatama put it, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”
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Victor Sagalovsky is co-founder and CEO of Litewater Scientific, producers of the world’s first and finest super deuterium depleted water. In his spare time he assembles hyperbaric chambers. He is involved in all things pro-youthing, geroprotection, and optimal health.
1. Neubauer RA, Gottlieb SF, Kagan RL. Enhancing “idling” neurons. Lancet. 1990;335:542
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1968553/
2. Holbach KH, Caroli A, Wassmann H. Cerebral energy metabolism in patients with brain lesions of normo- and hyperbaric oxygen pressures. Journal of Neurology. 1977;217(1):17–30 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/75249/
3. Stoller KP. Quantification of neurocognitive changes before, during, and after hyperbaric oxygen therapy in a case of fetal alcohol syndrome. Pediatrics. 2005;116:e586-e591 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16166387/
4. Thom SR, Bhopale VM, Velazquez OC, et al. Stem cell mobilization by hyperbaric oxygen. American Journal of Physiology. Heart and Circulatory Physiology. 2006;290:H1378-H1386https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16299259/
5. Godman C, Chheda K, Hightower L, Perdrizet G, Shin D-G, Giardina C. Hyperbaric oxygen induces a cytoprotective and angiogenic response in human microvascular endothelial cells. Cell Stress & Chaperones. 2010;15:431–442 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19949909/
6. Godman CA, Joshi R, Giardina C, Perdrizet G, Hightower LE. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment induces antioxidant gene expression. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 2010;1197:178–183 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20536847/
7. Stoller KP. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (1.5 ATA) in treating sports related TBI/CTE: Two case reports. Medical Gas Research. 2011;1:17 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22146303/
8. Harch PG, Fogarty EF, Staab PF, van Meter K. Low pressure hyperbaric oxygen therapy and SPECT brain imaging in the treatment of blast-induced chronic traumatic brain injury (post-concussion syndrome) and post-traumatic stress disorder: A case report. Cases Journal. 2009;2:6538 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19829822/
9. “Hyperbaric oxygen therapy increases telomere length and decreases immunosenescence in isolated blood cells: a prospective trial” by Yafit Hachmo, Amir Hadanny, Ramzia Abu Hamed, Malka Daniel-Kotovsky, Merav Catalogna, Gregory Fishlev, Erez Lang, Nir Polak, Keren Doenyas, Mony Friedman, Yonatan Zemel, Yair Bechor and Shai Efrati, 18 November 2020, AGING Journal Vol 12. Issue 22 DOI: 10.18632/aging.202188
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbaric_medicine#cite_note-6
© copyright Victor Sagalovsky 2022