Safety is No Accident

At Sara’s Garden, our mission to provide safe and effective Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) treatments is no accident. The safety of our clients and staff is our top priority. Hyperbaric oxygen chambers are considered safe when used appropriately with trained staff who follow strict safety protocols. These safety protocols are crucial because increased oxygen concentration and pressure, while therapeutic, can also pose risks like ear and sinus pain, middle ear injuries, oxygen toxicity and fire hazards. Following these protocols helps to minimize these risks and maximize the benefits of HBOT.

Not all hyperbaric chambers are the same. It is important to understand the difference in how these chambers operate and the benefits you receive so that you may safely achieve your health goals.

Multiplace chambers, such as the one used here at Sara’s Garden, are the safest type of chambers in existence. Still, given the oxygen rich environment, a risk of fire and injury to the client in the chamber exists if you do not adhere to sound safety and maintenance protocols. Multiplace chambers are pressurized with ambient air, and oxygen is delivered through masks or hoods. This reduces the likelihood of a fire compared to monoplace chambers, which are pressurized with 100% oxygen.

The medical grade oxygen we use here at Sara’s Garden fills the client’s hood during the time of treatment only. This also reduces the chance for oxygen toxicity. While oxygen is beneficial for healing, high concentrations and pressures can lead to oxygen toxicity. Multiplace chambers reduce this risk by delivering oxygen through the masks or hoods since the chamber itself is pressurized with air.

The greatest risk of fire present in a multiplace hyperbaric chamber comes from unsafe items being brought into the chamber. Staff at Sara’s Garden do a pre-treatment safety check prior to anyone going into the chamber to avoid any unsafe, banned items from going into the chamber and potentially causing a spark.

Multiplace chambers hold more than one client at a time. This allows us to provide a health care professional attending to the clients in the chamber. The inside attendant aides the clients with any issues that may arise. Clients walk into the chamber and sit on their seat. Clients may also stand up and stretch during the treatment. Having more than one client in the chamber at a time, helps clients pass time by chatting with each other as they develop a sense of camaraderie, many becoming friends long after the treatments are completed.

The four registered nurses at Sara’s Garden are all Certified Hyperbaric Registered Nurses. (CHRN). According to the Baromedical Nurses Association, hyperbaric oxygen therapy requires nurses to have a heightened degree of patient assessment skills, advanced knowledge of specific disease processes, and the technical ability not elsewhere seen in nursing environments. CHRN signifies that a registered nurse has made the commitment to provide the best care for hyperbaric clients and to value education and nursing research in the hyperbaric community. We also have an EMT/Paramedic who is a great asset due to her knowledge in emergency care and assessment of clients.

The other type of chamber available is a monoplace hyperbaric chamber. One client at a time goes into a monoplace chamber at a time. The healthcare professional is outside the chamber. Clients who may have serious medical diagnosis may not be a candidate for a monoplace chamber since they don’t have an inside attendant to aide them in any medical or health issues that might arise. A claustrophobic client may not be able to go into a monoplace chamber due to the small space. Another disadvantage of a monoplace chamber is it poses a higher risk of fire. The entire chamber is pressurized with pure oxygen, not ambient air, so the risk of fire is much higher than in a multiplace chamber. Clients and staff need to be very diligent to follow strict safety protocols to maintain a safe environment.

While monoplace chambers are considered safe for human occupancy, these chambers carry the inherent dangers of creating a pressurized pure oxygen chamber environment. Monoplace chambers are as therapeutically effective as multiplace chambers. However, they are far more restrictive, as you cannot interact with others except to speak with a technician via an intercom system. Treatment in a monoplace chamber has often been described as being very claustrophobic and lonely. These factors lead to a high percentage of patients failing to comply with their HBOT program.

While both monoplace and multiplace chambers offer the same benefits of HBOT, multiplace chambers are often considered safer, especially for critically ill patients, due to the use of air pressurization, improved oxygen delivery, ventilation and circulation systems, patient interaction, and the ability to provide the highest level of patient support. No matter which type of chamber is used, clients receive 100% oxygen under pressure, thus allowing the body to begin the healing process.

No matter what you’ve been told, there is hope… for this and many other conditions. HBOT is treatment without drugs… without surgery… without pain.

If HBOT is so Good, Why Is It Not More Widely Accepted?

Article published by Elmer M. Cranton, M.D.

Doctors are rarely taught about hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) in medical school and therefore most do not know about it. Only about 20 medical schools, less than 15 percent, have actual hyperbaric oxygen facilities, while perhaps another 20 have access to HBOT facilities. If physicians don’t know about a therapy, they obviously won’t prescribe it. If they don’t prescribe HBOT, there is no incentive for more hyperbaric treatment facilities to be established. Therefore, there exist very few hyperbaric chambers, compared with potential need and benefit that could otherwise be achieved—only about 400 chambers in the entire U.S.A. Many of those are dedicated to diving accidents (bends) and are not available for other medical conditions. And, many are located in hospitals that restrict HBOT to a small number of medical conditions reimbursed by Medicare.

Hyperbaric facilities are very expensive to establish and outfit. Because only a few of the many medical conditions that might be helped by HBOT are reimbursed by health care insurance, patients must commonly pay the cost out of their own pockets. Fees for HBOT can range from $150 per hour to almost $1,000 per hour. This denial of insurance reimbursement discourages the creation of new facilities and many patients cannot afford the cost of HBOT when refused medical insurance coverage. It is not uncommon to require 50 to 100 of the hour-long treatments for full benefit.

Advertisements and marketing claims for hyperbaric oxygen therapy is regulated like a drug by the government’s Food and Drug administration (FDA). It costs tens of millions of dollars to conduct medical research that meets FDA standards to allow claims for successful treatment of a specific illness. Medical insurance companies commonly take the position that if the FDA has not issued a formal approval, then the therapy is experimental and they refuse to pay. Because oxygen cannot be patented, profits on sales of oxygen are too small to pay for studies that meet FDA requirements.

Psychological defense mechanisms also come into play. If a doctor is not taught about HBOT in medical school (and most are not), and if a doctor therefore does not routinely use or prescribe HBOT for patients, then one of two things must be true in their minds: 1) either that doctor’s medical education was deficient and he or she is not providing the best of care for patients; or, 2) other doctors routinely using and prescribing HBOT for conditions that are not FDA-approved (off-label) must be “quacks” who exploit desperate patients. Which do you think their choice will be? It’s apparently difficult for many medical doctors to shed an attitude of God-like omniscience and admit that they simply do not know everything there is to know.

The medical profession is becoming polarized concerning HBOT. A large and powerful majority of medical doctors believe that HBOT should be restricted to treatment of those rare conditions with prior FDA approval. That majority now criticizes and even attacks the growing number of physicians who have become familiar with more than 30,000 published scientific papers the subject, and who advocate or use HBOT to treat patients with so-called off-label (non-FDA-approved) conditions. Opponents of such expanded utilization of HBOT should admit that they are remiss in their care of patients, they should open their minds, educate themselves further, and change their ways.

The medical community eagerly accepts scientific research buttressing a therapy it already approves. Somewhat more reluctantly, it examines and debates entirely novel approaches. But what it really hates is reappraising a treatment once rejected—getting the egg off their collective faces. Medicine, after all, is made up of people—people trailing MDs after their names—who, like the rest of us, do not enjoy admitting error.

Someday when HBOT therapy is an established part of standard medical care, historians of twentieth century medicine will wonder how so much supportive research on its benefits could have been published by skillful medical researchers and even more scrupulously ignored by the guardians of our health. By that time, most of the individuals who attempted to keep HBOT on the fringe will probably not be alive to blush, sparing them extensive embarrassment.

The amount of positive research is certainly formidable. And some studies that purport to demonstrate that HBOT doesn’t work actually show the opposite. For example, a recent Canadian study of cerebral palsy showed significant benefit. Under political pressure from parents, the study was reluctantly designed and conducted by Canadian physicians who were inexperienced in the use of HBOT. Both the treatment and placebo groups were pressurized and both groups benefited. The published conclusion in that study mistakenly stated that HBOT did nothing. It’s easy for opponents to design flawed studies and interpret the results to support their biased positions.

In a sense, we’re attempting to set the record straight and to tell people—especially physicians—to become familiar with the published scientific evidence . Mainstream medical journals engage in unconscionable editorial censorship. They refuse to publish positive research studies on alternative therapies, and are quick to print editorial criticism and anecdotal letters to the editor that are biased against such treatments. They have also been quick to uncritically print flawed studies that erroneously allege to disprove a controversial therapy.

Elmer M. Cranton, M.D. retired in 2007 after 40 years of busy medical practice. For many years he was associated in practice with his son, John A. Cranton, ARNP. Dr. Cranton and his son, John, stressed evidence based medical therapies to enhance each patients’ inherent ability to heal, including primary care, family medicine, internal medicine, preventive medicine, nutrition, and healthy life-style. Additional specialties included EDTA chelation therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), clinical nutrition, geriatrics, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, preventive medicine, and cardiovascular disease.