From aging to chronic wounds, is hyperbaric oxygen a cure-all?

It’s easy to see why Prof. Shai Efrati has been flooded with inquiries since the publication of his study showing that hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) can reverse aging at the cellular level. Is this really the fountain of youth? ISRAEL21c had a Zoom chat with the Israeli physician to find out more about HBOT’s wide-ranging benefits. Efrati explains that in HBOT, patients breathe in high-pressure oxygen at various concentrations through a mask or a hood, while seated inside a pressure chamber, to stimulate healing. HBOT has long been used to treat conditions such as divers’ decompression sickness and diabetic skin wounds, even bone infections and carbon monoxide poisoning.

Efrati’s team at Shamir Medical Center’s Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research — one of the largest hyperbaric medicine clinics in the world – has found HBOTcan improve brain function in some stroke, fibromyalgia and Alzheimer’s patients. “An injury is an injury no matter where it is or what caused it,” says Efrati, who also teaches at Tel Aviv University’s medical and neuroscience schools. This innovative principle guides all the studies led by Efrati and the center’s chief medical research officer, Dr. Amir Hadanny. “If we can see a wound, we can treat it,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “A leg wound you can see clearly, while in the brain you need high-tech advanced imaging methods to see it. It doesn’t matter if the cause of the brain injury was a stroke, trauma or the occlusion of small blood vessels that happens in normal aging. In the end you have injured tissue.”-- More...