Lengthy daily treatments at home for the fastest, most cost-effective recovery possible.
Our at home rental hyperbaric chambers are limited in number. There is currently a waiting list. To put your name on the list, please email us at hyperbaric@drjohnusa.com.
What are the differences between the types of hyperbaric treatments available on the market today?
High pressure hyperbarics are chambers that pressurize to 5 psi or above. These generally are made of metal and are located in hospital settings. This type of treatment is needed for scuba divers suffering from the “bends,” for burn victims, gangrene, diabetic ulcers, bed sores, certain cancer patients, for stroke and head injury victims within the first few weeks or months of the stroke or injury, and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Low pressure or “mild” hyperbarics are chambers that pressurize to 4 psi or below. These generally are made of soft vinyl and are portable. Mild hyperbarics seems to be best suited for acute mountain sickness and associated symptoms. Please keep in mind that the only use of mild hyperbarics that has been FDA approved is acute mountain sickness. Any other use is considered “off label” use and is thus experimental and not covered by insurance.
Concentrated or pure oxygen breathed by patients while under pressure is a good idea for the people who also need high pressure hyperbarics. However, pure or concentrated oxygen is a drug and it can have undesirable side effects. Pure oxygen overdose can lead to blindness, seizures, spasms, or general worsening of your condition. Pure oxygen used in conjunction with hyperbarics makes the possibility of oxygen overdose much easier. The use of pure oxygen with hyperbarics should be limited to 1-2 hours per day and limited to the time it takes to see moderate resolution of symptoms or to 6 weeks, whichever comes first.
Ambient air (normal air from the atmosphere without concentrated oxygen) breathed by patients while under pressure is all that is needed in chronic cases and is the safest way to undergo hyperbarics. When using ambient air, there is no time limit to the therapy. We find fastest results come from using low pressure hyperbarics with ambient air on a daily basis for 6-8 hours per day. The only way to achieve this amount of care for most is to rent a chamber and sleep in it at night in the comfort of your own home.
Will hyperbaric therapy help me?
Hyperbaric therapy will only help if there are tissues in your body which are not getting enough oxygen. If you are already getting optimum circulation and oxygen delivery to all your tissues, then hyperbaric therapy will not help you. It is difficult to determine whether you are getting optimum oxygen delivery to your tissues. Unfortunately the only way to know for sure is to try it. If you get better, then you likely needed it. If you don’t get better, then you didn’t. We know for sure that acute mountain sickness is a lack of oxygen delivery to the tissues, especially the brain. This may be why hyperbarics is FDA approved for treatment of acute mountain sickness, but not for other conditions. Obviously much medical research is needed in the future so we can better predict who will benefit from hyperbaric therapy the most.
How does hyperbaric therapy work?
When you are inside the chamber, we pump air into it to increase the air pressure around you. When the air pressure increases, it’s as if the oxygen molecules get smaller, which allows more of them to enter your blood vessels in your lungs as you breathe. And these “smaller” oxygen molecules can then more easily find their way into injured or sick areas that don’t have good blood circulation. The oxygen also saturates your brain and spinal cord fluid more readily, making healing brain injuries of any kind more likely than without hyperbaric therapy.
An analogy to understand this better is to imagine oxygen being a tennis ball and a blood vessel as a firehose. You can fit a certain number of tennis balls into the fire hose. But if you could shrink the tennis balls to the size of a marble, then you could fit many more into the fire hose. Hyperbaric does just this, it allows many more molecules of oxygen to dissolve into your blood plasma, cerebral spinal fluid, and all your tissues than is possible at normal atmospheric pressure. This increased availability of oxygen to your body tissues allows the enzymatic processes of healing to speed up.
Why isn’t breathing pure oxygen the same as hyperbarics?
Breathing pure oxygen will increase the concentration of oxygen in your lungs, but the oxygen molecules are still the same size. You can only fit so many of them into your blood. But with hyperbarics, the molecules effectively become “smaller” so that many more of them can squeeze into your blood with each breath. In the above example, breathing pure oxygen is like trying to use a wheel barrel full of tennis balls to make more balls fit into the fire hose. Just because you have more of them doesn’t mean that more will get into the hose. The same is true for pure oxygen, just because you have more oxygen in your lungs, doesn’t mean that more is dissolving into your blood plasma. You need to effectively make the oxygen smaller with hyperbarics in order to get more in.
Can you feel the pressure?
No. But you can feel the pressure changing in your ears like when driving up into the mountains. Your ears will “pop” as the pressure is changing. Once you reach treatment pressure, your ears stop popping and there is no noticeable difference while under pressure.
Is hyperbarics safe?
Chambers that pressurize to 4 lbs or less without the use of concentrated oxygen (like the ones we use at our Fresno office and offer for lease) are safe as long as your ears are “clearing” okay. The only danger would be a bruised ear drum if your ears were not clearing and you tried to “tuff it out” by continuing to allow the chamber to climb in pressure despite the early warning signs of pain. This is why it is important to wait until any head colds or sinus or ear congestion goes away before being treated with hyperbaric therapy. If on rare occasion you feel any pain in your ears while pressurizing, by simply lowering the pressure of the chamber the pain will immediately subside.
Why would a patient want to rent a chamber for use at home?
Many chronic conditions helped by low pressure hyperbaric therapy (off label use) require hundreds of hours of time spent under pressure. In order to achieve this, it would take months or years by only logging one hour per day at a doctor’s office. By renting a chamber at your house you can sleep in it at night for 6-8 hours, thus cutting down the time of completing the necessary treatments by 6-8 times. Instead of spending months or years in therapy, it would only take you weeks or a few months.
Also, the cost of renting a chamber by the week or month is far less expensive than paying for treatments by the hour. Renting effectively lowers the cost of treatment to just a few dollars per hour. And if there is more than one person in your household who need hyperbarics, you can cut the cost down even further by sharing the rental. And this doesn’t count the time and money savings from having to drive to and from the clinic daily.