What is Hyperbaric Treatment?

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT, is a type of treatment used to speed up healing of carbon monoxide poisoning, gangrene, stubborn wounds, and infections in which tissues are starved for oxygen.

If you undergo this therapy, you will enter a special chamber to breathe in pure oxygen in air pressure levels 1.5 to 3 times higher than average. The goal is to fill the blood with enough oxygen to repair tissues and restore normal body function.

Facts about hyperbaric oxygen therapy

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy was first used in the U.S. in the early 20th century. This was when Orville Cunningham used pure oxygen to successfully treat someone dying from the flu. He developed a hyperbaric chamber, but dismantled it after his use of the therapy for other conditions failed.

The therapy was tried again in the 1940s when the U.S. Navy used hyperbaric oxygen to treat deep-sea divers who had decompression sickness. By the 1960s, the therapy was also used to combat carbon monoxide poisoning.

Today, it's still used to treat sick scuba divers and people suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, including firefighters and miners. It has also been approved for more than a dozen conditions ranging from burns to bone disease:

• Carbon monoxide poisoning

• Cyanide poisoning

• Crush injuries

• Gas gangrene (a form of gangrene in which gas collects in tissues)

• Decompression sickness

• Acute or traumatic inadequate blood flow in the arteries

• Compromised skin grafts and flaps

• Infection in a bone (osteomyelitis)

• Delayed radiation injury

• Flesh-eating disease (also called necrotizing soft tissue infection)

• Air or gas bubble trapped in a blood vessel (air or gas embolism)

• Chronic infection called actinomycosis

• Diabetic wounds that are not healing properly

John Hopkins Medicine (Source)