Change Your Brain Every Day - What is Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment (HBOT) and How Does it Work?

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

In the second episode of a series on healing with oxygen, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen take you under the hood to see exactly how hyperbaric oxygen treatment works, and why it can be effective when other treatment types have been less successful. Daniel and Tana also break down the many circumstances in which hyperbaric oxygen can be efficiently used, ranging from reducing simple inflammation to saving someone’s life.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are talking about hyperbaric oxygen. Before we talk about why hyperbaric oxygen works, I want to read this review.

I've been a longtime fan of Dr. Amen since Change Your Brain, Change Your Life came out. Somehow, I didn't know this podcast existed. I just discovered it recently and I love it. I find topics that are important to me. The shows are informative and entertaining. Wonderful information. Vinny F. Awesome. So I want to explain to people what hyperbaric oxygen is and why it actually is stimulating the healing process. So it's under pressure, correct? Explain to them what it means. So hyperbaric oxygen, you go into a chamber, and generally people don't feel claustrophobic because it's not really close to your body.

Think of it almost like you're in this big balloon. Right. close to your body. Think of it almost like you're in this big balloon. You go inside a chamber where they blow it up, put you under pressure. Almost like diving. And often increase the amount of oxygen in the air. Not always, but often. So there are soft chambers and hard chambers. If you go in the soft chamber, you can take your computer, your phone, whatever. If you go in a hard chamber, you can't. You take a book. Well, it depends on the chamber. But soft chambers can go up to 1.3 atmospheres of pressure. So basically, it's the level of pressure as if you were 10 feet. Underwater.

Underwater. Okay. Right? So it's like you're diving. For people who have more significant problems, the doctors often recommend higher levels of pressure, 1.5. I talked about the head trauma study we did on soldiers, and we did that at 1.5 atmospheres. So you need a hard chamber. You can't do that with soft chambers. And sometimes to really enhance stem cell production and healing of broken bones and things like that, they'll go up to two atmospheres of pressure.

And for most of my patients, they use soft chambers. And the reason they do is they can rent them and have them at home. Since for all eight of our clinics, half of our patients come from out of state or far away, and their local communities may not have hard chambers i mean you clearly google hbot hyperbaric oxygen therapy and find places in your community that have it so by by being under pressure it's forcing the oxygen into your blood that's the theories it's forcing it into your blood so you're forcing more oxygen into your blood that's the theories it's forcing it into your blood so you're forcing more oxygen into your blood which is now stimulating stem cells it's stimulating what else something called angiogenesis which is your body actually producing

more blood vessels okay and so i'm going to read this from hyperbaricmedicincenter.com. Breathing oxygen under pressure causes oxygen to diffuse into blood plasma. This oxygen-rich plasma is able to travel past the restriction and gets up to four times further into the tissue. And that helps with blood vessel regeneration, stem cell production, some evidence it can also decrease inflammation and promote healing overall. One of my favorite stories is Grace.

You remember Grace, who basically had a mitochondrial deficiency and was in the hospital for three years. And when her insurance ran out after they spent like $10 million in the hospital, they- This was in the UK, right? No, this was here in the United States. This was here in the hospital. This was in the UK, right? No, this was here in the United States. This was here in the US. They were basically going to send her home to die. And the mom was like not having any of it and took her to a hyperbaric chamber in Florida,

had a spec scan, which showed overall very low blood flow to her brain. And on very low pressure, actually 1.1 atmospheres, she began to see better for the first time. She's like three and a half years old. And she's had many treatments and just graduated from high school. She went to prom. She went to prom. Yeah. No, it's just a stunning story. But she was pretty disabled.

She was very disabled. Yeah, very disabled. And I have a whole list of scans of people before and after they've had a stroke, before and after they've had a head injury before and after they had toxic exposure and it can just make a really significant positive difference. I just, I have on my computer under research for hyperbaric oxygen, they've used it to enhance memory with people who have Alzheimer's disease. It's been used in autism, and there's published studies on that. Carbon monoxide, poisoning, fibromyalgia,

head trauma. There are a number of head trauma studies, mold exposure, Lyme disease. Just I think of it for anything that decreases blood flow or activity to the brain, it can be a potential treatment. And it's not without any side effects. Sometimes if you go under the higher pressures, you get that increased pressure in your ear and that's a possibility sometimes it'll change your eyeglass prescription but by and large of the hundreds maybe more patients we've referred um side effects aren't the issue it's really it's compliance it's getting able to do it consistently on a regular basis. Decreasing inflammation.

And like I said, we use it in the hospital for infections and things like that. Improving healing. So just an option. Learn more about it. You can learn more about it actually in Memory Rescue, my book Memory Rescue, or Feel Better Fast and Make It Last. I talk about the healing powers of hyperbaric oxygen. You can also call our call center at Amen Clinics. Go to amenclinics.com and learn more about hyperbaric oxygen where we have our eight clinics. So if there's anything you learned today, please post it on any of your social media sites and hashtag BrainWarriorsWayPodcast. Leave a review or questions for us at BrainWarriorsWayPodcast.com.

We'll enter you into a raffle to win one of Tana's cookbooks, the Brain Warriors Way cookbook. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from BrainMD, you can use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.