What is HBOT?

The Role of Oxygen in Cellular Health

Hello, Dr. Minkoff here, LifeWorks Wellness Center. I’d like to talk to you about how your cells work and why oxygen is so critical for cell health. Every cell in your body is like a tiny engine that needs fuel to run. That fuel comes from the nutrients that you eat. But in order for your cells to actually use that fuel, they need oxygen. Oxygen is what allows your cells to convert the nutrients into energy.

This process is called cellular respiration. So respiration is breathe. Oxygen comes in when you breathe. So if you don’t get enough oxygen, your cells can’t produce the energy to stay healthy and function properly. It’s like trying to run a car without enough air in the engine, it just won’t work. The car will break down. Your cells are the same way. That’s why getting enough oxygen is essential for energy, healing, and overall well-being.

Aging and Oxygen Deficiency

It’s very interesting that if you look at aging or theories of aging, the main reason is lack of oxygen to cells. And cells that don’t have oxygen go bad. They get sick, they get cancerous. So bottom line is, oxygen is the key to health.

Introducing Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT)

We have an incredible therapy here that we use at LifeWorks Wellness Center that helps the body to detox and speed up recovery because it’s able to deliver oxygen to these cells at a very high and potent level.

So this therapy is called Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy. So hyperbaric means the oxygen that we’re delivering is under pressure. So literally you can force more in. So this is a marvelous treatment. It’s not a new therapy. This has been around for probably 100 years. It was originally established in divers who would come up too fast, they would get the bends and, and you’d have to put them in a chamber and take them back up slowly.

Modern Use of HBOT at LifeWorks

But it’s a modern day treatment. We right now have 13 hyperbaric oxygen chambers in our clinic. And so we deliver thousands of these treatments every year to people. And it’s a very pleasant experience because the chambers feel like you’re sitting in a first class seat on a real nice airplane and you’re in a chamber with four people. And we can deliver different amounts of pressure depending on what we’re trying to treat.

So it might be 1.2 atmospheres or 1.4 atmospheres. That’s a measure of the pressure. It might go up to 2.4 atmospheres.

How HBOT Works: Pressure and Oxygen Absorption

So if you’re in a chamber where there’s outside pressure, you can imagine that you’re on a dive, you’re 30ft below the surface or 60ft below the surface, you can feel that pressure of the water on you. If you’re in a chamber, a Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber, we deliver the pressure from the outside, so it’s as if you’re in a dive.

But the oxygen then is given to you under pressure, and you can actually push more in. So if you’re breathing oxygen at atmospheric pressure, or sea level, you get a certain amount dissolved in the blood cells, in the hemoglobin, you get a little bit dissolved in the liquid part of the blood, but if you do it under pressure, you massively increase the amount of dissolved oxygen that’s in the liquid part of the blood.

And then when the circulation takes that blood to the other cells and tissues, you get a huge increase in oxygen delivery.

The Impact of Extra Oxygen on Cell Function

So if health is delivery of oxygen, you can revive cells that haven’t been getting enough oxygen, and they may be inflamed, they may be toxic, they may be unable to make energy in a proper way because the oxygen delivery isn’t as good. We know also that if people have acidic bodies, acidic blood, that the oxygen doesn’t get delivered as well.

And so if we force oxygen, we can make the body produce more, actually CO2. So you breathe in oxygen, you breathe out CO2. When you breathe in extra oxygen, you push that cell engine to make energy, make CO2, and then that CO2 allows the oxygen to be released from the cells, from the blood cells that deliver it, and then you can make more. So you just turn this whole cycle on.

Common Conditions That Benefit from HBOT

In many people that are chronically ill, or they have cancer, or they have neurologic disease, that that whole system is at running at a sluggish rate, and then cells can’t perform very well. So we put a person in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Usually it’s about an hour and a half. So it takes about 15 minutes to ramp up the pressure, you’re in there for about an hour, and then about 15 more minutes to ramp down the pressure.

In the meantime, while you’re in this chamber, they will be breathing 100% oxygen. So you’re delivering way extra oxygen to the body, and it revives the body, it revives cells, it heals things.

Real Patient Example: Diabetic Neuropathy Relief

One impressive thing of a family member of mine is that she was suffering from diabetes. And with diabetes, you get degeneration of nerves, and many people with diabetes have problems with their feet.

They have burning feet, or they get ulcers on their feet, or they lose nerve sensation in their feet. They might even get a cut and they won’t even feel it. So she was suffering terribly from this, and she couldn’t sleep through the night because her feet would just burn and hurt. And she was trying magnesium supplements, and potassium supplements, and infrared treatments on her feet, and it really wasn’t helping her.

Once she started to get the hyperbaric oxygen treatments, within about 18 or 20 treatments, all of the pain in her feet went away, and the burning went away. And she could actually walk around without any foot pain. It was huge. And then she could relax, she could sleep. Made a huge difference.

Supporting Healing from Chronic Conditions

So this is one of the areas that we use it, but we find in almost all problems that people come to us with, whether it’s Lyme disease, or mold toxicity, or Parkinson’s disease, that if we can deliver them extra oxygen, they will heal faster.

Cancer and HBOT

You may already know this, but the difference between a cancer cell and a healthy cell is that the cancer cell can’t utilize oxygen to make energy. So oxygen is actually kind of toxic for those cells. So in all the people that we see with cancer, we give them hyperbaric oxygen treatments because we force oxygen in the cells that are borderline can revive. The cancer cells are injured and killed by the extra oxygen.

Longevity and Wellness Optimization

The other thing on this is that this is a longevity treatment for people who want to increase their longevity, increase their cellular health, that hyperbaric oxygen works for that, too. So in our clinic, usually, we’re trying to do two things at once. One is improve the disease condition. The other thing is put them on a runway for better longevity. And these treatments, most of which that we do, they do both things at the same time.

So if the treatments that we’re delivering to kill their Lyme disease or their cancer aren’t toxic to them, and they have this benefit of this is something that you could do with even a healthy person and get improvement, then we get the best of both worlds for everybody.

Okay? That’s hyperbaric oxygen treatment.