Mark Bell's Power Project - Benefits of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Starting point is 00:00:00 Oxygen as a nutrient, far more so than I look at it as a drug or a treatment of disease. And as we increase atmospheric pressure, we're able to drive more oxygen into the cells. What we're doing with hyperbaric is we're filling red blood cells. You know, they'll be 100% saturated. So now it becomes a reservoir of a surplus of oxygen far beyond what's, you know, possible under normal circumstances. Every athlete knows that oxygen's critical for their performance. Hyperbaric's going to help you carry more oxygen. It's a way of really flooding the system with oxygen.

Starting point is 00:00:30 could have an incredible performance capacity to it. A lot of athletes struggle in performance because they're either over-training or just under-recovered. Hyperbaric has a long-standing evidence of really supporting the recovery process. Ligaments, tendons, discs, like, these don't have great blood supply. If they don't have good blood supply, these are notorious for taking forever to heal because we don't have the oxygen flow to really stimulate the recovery. You know, and hyperbaric is so critical for pushing oxygen into those, you know, through those barriers to really stimulate that healing and recovery. If you could, we're just going to kick things off right here, Dr. Soner's.

Starting point is 00:01:07 If you could tell us about H-Bot and how you got into it. So I got into it as a personal journey, actually. So I had a back injury that led to drop foot in my right leg, so some nerve damage from a herniated disc. And, you know, as a chiropractor, that's just not good for business. this. And my wife's a chiropractor too. So she was, you know, she was treating me and, you know, the back issues got better pretty quickly. But I was left with nerve damage for at least 18 months or so post the original accident. And I actually happened to be at a conference and they had

Starting point is 00:01:44 chambers. I didn't know what they were, but I looked interesting, so I gave it a shot. And it was in the first, you know, about 10 minutes or so after that first session, I started getting pins and needles in my foot. And it was the first time I actually felt my foot about for 18 months. And I thought, wow, is this happening because of that, you know, that chamber I was just inside? And, you know, sure enough, it was. And so after a few sessions at that conference, I decided to buy a chamber, treat myself, had no intention of ever really offering it in my office or to my patients. It was just like, I needed this for me. But once I saw how effective it was, you know, I pretty quickly started using it and, you know, running it in the clinic. And then, you know, actually we built like a whole separate hyperbaric clinic, you know, as part of the office. it's it was pretty incredible journey for me what is a hyperbaric oxygen therapy doing for people with a lot of the people you work with now that you are applying it to patients so i mean the real key here is that oxygen follows pressure you know even right now you and i were surrounded by an atmosphere that atmosphere has a pressure and that pressure is what allows you and i to even extract

Starting point is 00:02:51 the oxygen from the air that we're breathing right now we've all had an experience where we go up in elevation, you know, hiking or a mountain or, you know, go to Colorado or something, it feels harder to breathe. And it, you know, we say there's less oxygen, but it's not so much that the percentage of oxygen has changed at all. It's really just that there's less pressure at elevation. And so we, we absorb less oxygen because of that decrease in pressure. Hyperbaric is the exact opposite of that. So we're temporarily increasing atmospheric pressure. And as we increase atmospheric pressure, we're able to drive more oxygen into the cells, even if it's just air, like breathing air at pressure is still going to drive a considerable amount

Starting point is 00:03:29 of oxygen into the cell. If we add additional oxygen to that, it becomes a multiplying effect. But, you know, essentially, other than red blood cells, which are the cells in our body that carry oxygen to deliver it, every other, they don't use oxygen, they don't have mitochondria, but every other cell in your body has a mitochondria, needs oxygen. And what we're doing with hyperbaric is we're filling red blood cells, you know, they'll be 100% saturated, but, you know, for you and I, if we're relatively healthy, we're almost 100% saturated as it is. So what hyperbaric does beyond, you know, any other therapy, as far as oxygen goes, it bypasses red blood cell carrying capacity and actually starts to fill the plasma with oxygen. The plasma usually doesn't

Starting point is 00:04:14 carry much oxygen at all. And so now it becomes a reservoir of a surplus of oxygen, far beyond what's, you know, possible under normal circumstances. And that's the real, you know, quantity of oxygen that hyperbaric, you know, is able to do to create, you know, the healing and recovery and regeneration that hyperbaric does. So overall, like, what are, we see a lot of NBA players, NFL players, we see a lot of coaches doing this for these athletes when it comes to recovery. So systemically, what are some of the benefits that it can cause to anybody, but like for someone who is stressing their body out in an athletic, you know, endeavor.

Starting point is 00:04:51 So there's, there's, for me, when I talk about or think about the athlete, by the way, I mean, my background before, I was, you know, I did exercise physiology before that and nutrition before that, you know, then chiropractic and then, you know, sort of got into, you know, hyperbarics and then teaching hyperbarics. But, you know, I look at oxygen as a nutrient far more so than I look at it as a drug or a treatment of disease. And so, you know, the, you know, the, the way I view for most in athletic world, it's two prong. One, every athlete knows that oxygen is critical for their performance. And you see athletes all the time, you know, making decisions, you know, some healthy, some maybe not, some legal, some maybe not, you know, but there's always

Starting point is 00:05:35 this attempt at like, hey, you know, I mean, that's what blood doping is, right? Blood doping is all about increasing red blood cell capacity so that we can carry more oxygen. Hyperbaric's going to help you carry more oxygen, and it's actually going to bypass the red blood cell carrying altogether. And so, on a performance standpoint, it's a way of really flooding the system with oxygen, and that could have an incredible performance capacity to it. But I think, as you both would agree, and most athletes know, and trainers would know, you know, performance is one component, but a lot of athletes struggle in performance because they're either overtraining or just under-recovered, which hyperbaric has a long-standing evidence of really supporting the recovery

Starting point is 00:06:20 process. So for both that, and you would utilize the tool differently in both of those scenarios, but for most of these athletes, I really try to structure a program of recovery first, because performance will increase as recovery improves, everybody knows. And then once we got, you know, a better baseline, then we could start, you know, trying to use it from a, you know, more performance-specific standpoint. Real quick, going back to what you were mentioning as far as, like, your personal nerve damage, because you said that, you know, what you were doing with your wife helped your back,

Starting point is 00:06:49 and you still had that nerve damage. How did the hyperbaric chamber help you with that nerve damage, or did it? Yeah. I mean, so that was, I mean, literally, that was my question. First of all, I was like, how did I get this far in my professional life and not even ever hear of what a hyperbaric oxygen chamber was? You know, this is all, by the way, it was like 20 years ago. you know and so um and you know why didn't anybody tell me like why did i have to find this by

Starting point is 00:07:13 accident there wasn't like a clear hey nerve damage hyperbaric you know so what i realized was especially in a lot of these injuries and you know any athlete has a history of injury you know whether it's you know brain injury or musculoskeletal but you know injuries that have healed but maybe they haven't healed you know quite as well as as we needed them to and so let's just use my case because you brought that up uh there are times when then there are barriers to oxygen getting into the cell. Inflammation, toxicity, scar tissue, right? All these musculoskeletal components that could become a barrier for normal oxygen to be delivered.

Starting point is 00:07:52 And so at this disc injury, the immediate surrounding tissue healed and improved. But because there was still inflammation around the nerve in my back, it still showed up as nerve damage in my foot. and so it wasn't that even i don't think that i needed any maybe additional oxygen to my actual leg or foot as much as it became a driving force to push oxygen past those barriers of inflammation and scar tissue that actually allowed the nerve to heal at the root and as the nerve healed at the root the symptoms of the neuropathy you know were able to improve and that's the case you know more recently a couple years ago i had torn my shoulder you know ligaments tendons discs, like, these don't have great blood supply. If they don't have good blood supply, these are

Starting point is 00:08:41 notorious for taking forever to heal because we don't have the oxygen flow to really stimulate the recovery. You know, and hyperbaric is so critical for pushing oxygen into those, you know, through those barriers to really stimulate that healing and recovery. How much treatment would somebody have to do and like how long, you know, to maybe overcome something? I'm sure there's individual variants, but like, if someone go three times or five times, like how many times they need to go into a hyperbaric chamber to notice the positive benefits?

Starting point is 00:09:13 So, yeah, I mean, you know, what tissue is being affected, how long have I had that problem, how severe is that problem, how many repetitive injuries have I had to that same location, you know, that those are all the, you know, let's say the individual components. And then how much pressure am I using,

Starting point is 00:09:34 what percentage of oxygen are, breathing and then frequency and duration. So we have to understand, you know, what the person's issues are and or what their, you know, goals happen to be. And then what kind of equipment am I using? All of that would go into sort of a thought process of, you know, protocol. But essentially what I would tell you is, you know, I like to break these down into short term and long term changes and benefits. So short term could happen every session or five sessions or less. So, you know, right, as soon as you start getting more oxygen, you get more ATP, right, more cellular energy being produced.

Starting point is 00:10:09 That's very well known. And almost every session, you start to get some reduction of inflammation. Those things happen pretty quickly. But some of the other mechanisms like collagen synthesis, fibroblast formation, so like stimulating the cells that will actually repair, let's say, soft tissue injury, or even bone, like there's osteogenic or like bone repair mechanisms that are stimulated. through hyperbaric. A lot of those don't even start for the first 15 to 20 hours. So, you know, this person's going to be using, you know, let's say for my back injury, even though I started

Starting point is 00:10:44 feeling changes almost right away, which, you know, that's not everybody has that. A lot of people, it takes a few sessions before you even start noticing it. But, you know, I essentially ended up doing closer to like 60 or 70 hours to get full recovery of that nerve. When I tore my shoulder, which was a pretty bad tear, which, by the way, thank you very much, I was using the slingshot as part of my recovery.

Starting point is 00:11:13 I wanted to talk to you later about that, maybe if it'll come up. But, you know, I probably did another 80 hours, you know, for that shoulder in very, you know, very frequent pattern to really recover from,

Starting point is 00:11:28 with other things, too, peptides and other things. But, you know, those long-term, those long-term impacts, they take time you know they really take time to heal so it's a it's a longer term therapy this really changes the entire conversation now that we know that you lift and you know that your bench press specific well so you know um i had i had an impingement like i don't know eight years ago and a guy that i work out his guy uh he's a great trainer john chipko uh he uses you know he's

Starting point is 00:11:58 used your stuff for for many years and he said you know he was working with me i couldn't bench at all I just, I couldn't even get into the position. So we started using the slingshot for that. And then we used that once I got better, you know, to really build into, you know, much stronger lifts. When I tore my shoulder, it became literally an incredible component to my recovery from that. I'm both just regaining mobility, regaining strength. So I thank you really quite a lot for for that. I appreciate that.

Starting point is 00:12:31 Are people, like, usually in these chambers for maybe, like, usually, like, around 20 minutes, like, if they're going for a session. Because I imagine, like, just for, like, logistical reasons, like, you can't have someone in there for, like, 90 minutes unless you have your own home unit. So in my office, so I would say probably about 30 to 45 minutes is really the shortest sessions people do. But people do, I mean, whether it's at home or even in my office, you know, we do, we, I'd say most of our sessions are 60 minutes. we sometimes if someone can't get in frequently enough we might do 90 minute sessions just to make sure they get like a cumulative dose long enough for performance components shorter sessions seem to do great so like those 30 seconds like before a big lift or before a race you know you'll see changes in short sessions like that but for for real healing like the you know if someone's coming out of an injury or a brain trauma you know 45 to 60 minutes is is very standard. what can it do for the brain so you know again if we just look back at um let's say metabolism you know so you know i talk about cars i you know i work on cars a lot so cars need fuel and they need oxygen and oxygen oxidizes the fuel to create power and heat essentially inside the engine

Starting point is 00:13:49 it's a little more complicated in that but essentially that's what it does you know we all learned in like you know seventh grade biology that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but it's literally the engine of the cell. And so, you know, we take in food, but we break that food into, you know, the actual fuel a cell can use, which is essentially NAD for the most part, but we still need to oxidize it. So we bring in fuel and we have to bring in oxygen and really we oxidize that fuel inside the mitochondria to produce energy. Our brain makes up only about 2% of our body mass, but it uses up almost 20 to 25% of all the oxygen that we breathe. So the oxygen demand of the central nervous system is incredibly high. So when you start

Starting point is 00:14:32 driving 30%, 60%, you know, two times, three times, seven times the amount of oxygen, we start to get incredible cognitive changes in people, whether that's, you know, neurodegenerative and we're trying to like heal a brain. But traumatic brain injury, you know, longstanding concussions, that's, you know, quite honestly, I think that's one of the reasons we see it growing inside of, you know, a lot of like professional sports, especially, let's say, we're seeing a lot of it in MMA, we're seeing a ton of it in football, even soccer, it's growing quite a bit. And I think a lot of that is just, you know, trying to make sure that we're healing the brain so that we're not just getting all of those cumulative, you know, concussion patterns that we're seeing. They're so consequential,

Starting point is 00:15:14 especially for people, you know, they might have had those, you know, in college or even early in their pro careers, but then they have all these consequences, you know, decades later. So, you know, to try to ameliorate those consequences, hyperbaric is incredibly powerful for that. Just kind of curious about this on the brain front. Have you ever noticed if people, with extra oxygenation of the brain, do people think differently? Does it spur creativity? Like, is there any aspect of that, or is it just good at healing the brain from? Yeah, so it's kind of like what we were saying before about, you know, even athletic performance. You could use hyperbaric for brain recovery. like injury or disease, but you could also use it for brain performance. So, you know, I speak a lot. I write a lot, articles, books, or creating talks. Like, I do a lot of my creating and writing in the chamber because I do. I have a very, like, noticeable shift in my thought process, my processing

Starting point is 00:16:13 speed, my creativity inside the chamber. So I do a lot of my brainstorming and thinking in there. And I think a lot of people, if they're doing it regularly and see that, you know, would agree and also use it for that purpose. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it? I got a secret, man. It's called Good Life Protein. Okay. Tell me about that.

Starting point is 00:16:35 I've been doing some Good Life Protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef. And you can get that under the umbrella of Good Life Proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallis. all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb. There's another one that comes in mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy, kind of depending on the way that I'm eating.

Starting point is 00:17:05 So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat, and that's where I might get the sausage, and I might get their 80-20, grass-fed, grass-finished, ground beef. I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style, where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why, like, neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're

Starting point is 00:17:30 always enjoying the food we're eating. And protein, you talk about protein leverage it all the time. It's satiating and helps you feel full. I look forward to every meal. And I can surf and turf, you know? I could cook up some, you know, chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it. Or I could have some steak. I would say, you know, the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorite, so it's hard for me to lock one down.

Starting point is 00:17:54 But I really love the bovette steaks. Yeah. And then I also love the ribbyes as well. You can't go wrong with the ribies. So, guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat, pause, you can have to Good Life Proteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website. Or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save. to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world.

Starting point is 00:18:23 There's many different types of chambers, too, right? Like there's some smaller ones, but there's some units I've seen before where there could be a few people in there at a time. It's like maybe the size of like a large sauna or something like that, right? Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, there's soft chambers and hard chambers,

Starting point is 00:18:38 like what the material's made out of, and that really dictates what pressure it can go to. So soft chambers are what we call mild hyperbarics, which is really how, like, all that nerve injury and stuff, That was all done in a soft chamber, at mild pressure. When you get into the harder materials like steel or acrylic, you can go up much higher. So the soft chambers go, we usually measure it in what we call atmospheres. So right now, you know, at sea level, I'm at one atmosphere.

Starting point is 00:19:03 You know, soft chambers go to 1.3, so like 0.3, you know, 30% more of an atmosphere. Clinical hard chambers can go up to three atmospheres. So three times the atmospheric pressure to what we're getting right now. You could fill these things with air. or you could fill them with oxygen. So what gas we're using to fill are different. And then they could be designed for one person or they could be designed for two, six, eight, twelve. You know, there's a really beautiful facility in Florida.

Starting point is 00:19:30 They have, it's a 48-person chamber. I mean, it's an incredible, incredible chamber. This might be odd, but what does it feel like to be in a high atmospheric chamber? Like, does it do you feel like the air is different or is it something that's a noticeable, but the air is obviously different. It doesn't, you know, most people, so the first experience is that your ears pop, just like an airplane is landing, you know? So as the pressure's building, the only place most people will feel it is in their ears,

Starting point is 00:20:01 and you just have to, you know, like swallow, yawn, like the same thing most people would do when an airplane is landing, because you have to equalize that pressure. But it's kind of, you know, in an airplane, you know, takes off. You might feel some, you know, pressure changes. But the whole time you're flying, you have no idea, but you're in. inside a pressurized machine. And you don't really notice it until it starts to land again. I would almost say the same thing in a chamber. You'll feel it for the first few minutes. You'll have to equalize your ears a couple times. But most people would say the entire time

Starting point is 00:20:30 they're in the chamber, you don't feel the pressure on your body. You don't really feel any differences in the way that you're breathing or anything like that. If you were measuring, you would see that respiration rate goes down a lot. Art rate goes down a lot. It's like a It's basically like a cardiovascular vacation because you're getting so much oxygen, the body doesn't need to work very hard in order to oxygenate. So it's a very calming effect, you know, the sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic, like fight or flight, right? So fight or flight is like that stress response.

Starting point is 00:21:03 The opposite of that is your parasympathetic. It's like your rest and digest side of your nervous system. Hyperbaric is very parasympathetic. Most people come out of a chamber are just like, you know, very, calm, very relaxed. It has this, you know, that kind of experience, but you don't really feel it from a pressure standpoint. What kind of a percentage of oxygen are you usually going to, again, I know it's going to vary quite a bit. Right. Experience level and stuff, but I think our atmosphere is like 21% oxygen, I believe, right? And then you go inside one of these chambers

Starting point is 00:21:37 and is there any, like, do you feel, do you feel any panic at all if it's like too high or something like that? Or is it still pretty calming no matter what? Yeah, I mean, it's still really calming either way. Most people would say you could like that whole, when I first got into hyperbarics, it was a mild chamber. So 1.3 atmospheres. And I did air only, mostly because I didn't know anything else to do. That's just what I had, which is also partially why it probably took me so many sessions initially to get to get that response. But as an example, right now, if I put you know, a pulse oxymeter on your finger, if you're pretty healthy, like, it's going to say 98, 99% saturated, which means you don't have a lot of room for extra oxygen.

Starting point is 00:22:25 If I gave you 100% oxygen right now at the surface, like you might get 1% or 2% because you have no issues in your red blood cell carrying capacity. If you go into a chamber, even if it's air only, let's say a 30% greater pressure chamber, like a soft chamber, even on 21% oxygen, you're still going to get about 30% more delivery. Because again, we're bypassing that whole red blood cell carrying. If you went to that same chamber and you were breathing, let's say, 100% oxygen, you'd get almost three and a half times the amount of oxygen.

Starting point is 00:23:00 So it's incredibly large once you add enriched oxygen. For our office, as an example, if you're just very healthy and you're really just looking for optimization, For most people, I think that the mild chambers are more than enough. Like, the chamber I have in my house and I've had for 20 years is air only and it's mild. I'm not really treating anything right now. When I tore my shoulder, I went to my office and I got higher pressure and 100% oxygen because I had a real specific issue that I was trying to solve for, and I didn't want to wait

Starting point is 00:23:32 as long to get that response, right? So, you know, what I would say is hyperbaric is mild all the way to pretty high pressure, and then from air all the way up to 100% oxygen. And our job is to try to figure out, you know, based on your issues and your goals, you know, what's the best pressure and what's the best percentage of oxygen? A lot of people, and you see this not just in hyperbaric, you see it in all of really health care, even exercise or other things. Like, everyone thinks more is better, right?

Starting point is 00:24:01 If this much is good, this much must be better. I'd say there's really a more specific formula to understand different tissues and different objectives should receive different pressures and different percentages. You know, with the fact that you're getting more oxygen, I would assume that probably people have attempted to breathwork or psychedelics with this. We were having a conversation with someone recently who was talking about breath holds, and, you know, the cold plunge became very popular, and then people started doing Wim Hof in there,

Starting point is 00:24:32 and then some people passed out in the cold plunge, and a few people died in the cold plunge. So my curiosity is, is there any, do people do breath work in the chambers? And is there any danger to any of that breath? To a good question. Yeah. So the rule I would say is when the pressure is changing, so as you're pressurizing the chamber, right, the first five or ten minutes, and when you're depressurizing the last

Starting point is 00:24:57 five or ten minutes, it's really actually, it's very important that you're just relaxed and you're breathing normally. when you're at pressure and the pressure is going to stay consistent and constant, you could do breathwork and breath holds. And, you know, I've done many. I've done Wimhoff and I, you know, I free dive. So, you know, having longer breath holds is important to me. For people who do that, because you're getting so much oxygen,

Starting point is 00:25:24 you can really shift your baseline of like, it helps you build your car. carbon dioxide tolerance, partially because you're getting so much oxygen inside that chamber. So, you know, we've seen breath holds increased two or three minutes inside of the chamber versus outside. And then that helps them even once they're retraining from inside the chamber, that helps build those breath holds even outside the chamber as a result. But so it is safe. I mean, you could, I mean, a lot of people pass that with whim off just because of that, you know, that repetitive breathing and then that breath hold, you know, but if, you're in the chamber and that were to happen, you're in a really safe, high-oxygen environment,

Starting point is 00:26:07 you know, but I would still recommend not necessarily trying to find that limit. Is the pressure, like, almost like related to altitude, or is it different than that? Well, it's essentially, but it's the opposite, right? So it's, you know, altitude, with going up in altitude, we're losing pressure. I see. Inside the chamber, we're literally mimicking below sea level. So it's most similar to scuba dive. It's like going below sea level and increasing the pressure. That's really the acting driving force for the oxygen absorption. I would assume that there are probably athletes who are using this before. I mean, you have to have quite a bit of access. But with what you're mentioning in terms of the breath holds, et cetera, I could see athletes

Starting point is 00:26:55 using this before a game or before events. Is that something that's common? Yeah. I mean, I think more and more. if they're ever asking for my opinion, like they're getting a chamber and they're looking for, you know, some advice and I get brought into that conversation, I'm always trying to steer people into recovery first because their performance will improve as their recovery is improving. And if you do longer sessions, like if you do 60 to 90 minute sessions, you sort of come out, I would say, too relaxed to compete. You really want that adrenaline, you know, you need that excitement and adrenaline as you're getting ready for performance, which is why I typically recommend shorter sessions before performance. But definitely, you know, endurance athletes,

Starting point is 00:27:39 lifting athletes, you know, we see a lot of shifting in capacity to do work, you know, very quickly like session, competition. What do you sometimes coupling this with? I would imagine, you know, being a chiropractor, at your practice, you probably have many gadgets, devices, therapies. You know as well. And things people would do. So from like a physical perspective, what are some things you are adding in? And maybe even from like supplemental.

Starting point is 00:28:09 Is there supplements that could go along with this as well? Something like methylene blue or something pop up. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, I always say the oxygen is just this foundational ingredient, right? Every cell is going to use it. If, you know, again, what's the goal, right? So sometimes, let's say the goal is energy production, like mitochondrial changes.

Starting point is 00:28:31 Well, hyperbaric is going to change mitochondrial function a lot. Methylene blue is going to change mitochondrial a lot. Red light therapy is going to change. So we often will stack, you know, methylene blue in the morning and then red light right before a hyperbaric session. You know, you're taking three of the rate limiting steps to energy production and you're just driving them full steam ahead. you know, take some NAD precursors in the morning or go in fasting. You know, if you're

Starting point is 00:29:01 when in fasting, you're going to drive fat metabolism much faster in a chamber than you would outside the chamber. So, you know, like an NAD, methylene blue, red light, and hyperbaric oxygen is like, you know, a mitochondrial dream, essentially. But if let's just say, you know, the goal was detoxification, you know, hyperbaric helps upregulate a lot of our detoxion. pathways, but maybe we'll mix that with some glutathione afterwards, or maybe with charcoal, let's say afterwards to really absorb some of the toxins that are being, you know, pushed out. If it was tissue repair, I might use, you know, shockwave therapy, hyperbaric, because hyperbaric's going to have like all these stem cell responses also.

Starting point is 00:29:49 Shockwave is going to also stimulate some good repair and stem cell mobilization with a few peptides, you know, same thing with inflammation, you know, red light's great for inflammation, hyperbaric's great for inflammation. I'll mix that with, you know, maybe PPC 157 to really, you know, another peptide to bring inflammation down. So, you know, there's a lot of things that we can mix it with and I try to choose, you know, what combination is going to drive whatever pathway we're trying to achieve. What does it take to like, you know, own one of these in a home? I'm not sure about like so what some of these things cost, but, you know, Over time, cold plunge pricing has gone down.

Starting point is 00:30:27 More companies have cold plunges, so more people are able to get them in apartments and homes. Same thing with saunas. You see saunas that actually fit in an apartment now. So when it comes to hyperbaric chambers, you know, you were mentioning how some people wouldn't notice any type of change until 60, 70, 80 hours. So that would be, that would mean having to go ahead. Well, they would see changes sooner, but sometimes to get the full, you know, depending on how robust a person's problem is, they may do that many.

Starting point is 00:30:55 to get the full, you know, the full-blown recovery, let's say. But usually you would start to see changes 8 to 10, you know, 10 to 12, that kind of thing. I mean, so I'd say the soft chamber market has been predominantly designed for home use. There's plenty of clinics that use soft chambers also. We did for many years and still do a little bit. You know, and you can get a soft chamber for between like maybe on the lower end, like 10 grand. On the higher end, maybe you could spend up to 30 on a soft chamber. Hard chambers, you know, have always been designed far more for clinical use, but, you know, people who can afford it and really want it and feel that, you know, the more is better, you know, and they put a hard chamber, but, you know, hard chambers are a hundred grand and go up from there. So it's kind of like a whole, it is a whole different animal. The soft chamber comes in boxes. You set it up in your apartment. You could put it next to your bed, you know, it doesn't take up that much space. A hard chamber, you're almost going to want like a room dedicated to it, you know.

Starting point is 00:31:55 Yeah. Can you inform us about shockwave therapy? I've heard a lot of good things about that, but I'm not super familiar with it. Yeah. So it's basically like it's an acoustic sound wave. I think most people, it gets applied similar to what looks like ultrasound. So there's like a wand and a gel. But it feels a little bit more like electric stem. Like there's a definitive like electric sort of experience with it. It's a little bit. I'd say it's a little sharper and stronger than electric stem, but it's also a totally different modality. So what it does, not so much for pain relief or muscle spasm, but what it does is it stimulates a lot of growth factors, stem cells, and a lot of repair mechanisms. So for those like repetitive injuries, you know, sprain, strain or tears of especially like, again, tendons and ligaments, things that don't have good blood supply. And this is something, unlike hyperbaric, where, you know, for that tear, you know, 40, 50, 60 plus hours, you know, you only do maybe six to 12 sessions of shockwave in that over that same period of time. So it's something that's very powerful. It's relatively short acting. And again, in concert with some other healing tools like hyperbaric and peptides, you know, when I tore this shoulder, I would, you guys don't know me well enough, but I would. wouldn't get surgery for anything like for me to have to go get surgery would be like there's

Starting point is 00:33:29 nothing else as possibly you know when i tore it was a 75% slap tear and i tore 30% of my subcapularis my arm was like hanging and i was like within days i was like melissa i'm getting surgery she's like what you know she's like what would you tell a patient to do and i was like that's a good question so you know i made up a you know i made up a you know i made up a you know i I wrote up a protocol like I would have for a patient, and I followed it to a T. And I say this to all my patients. Worst case, I go into the surgery as healthy as I could possibly go, which means I could only have a better response.

Starting point is 00:34:06 Best case, maybe I avoid it, but I wasn't very hopeful. But I followed it to a T and I used, you know, all those things, hyperbaric, red light, laser, peptides, shockwave. I did all my rehab exercises and, you know, and it's now a couple years later. I've never had surgery, and I'm back to, like, you know, full function, full range of motion. So, you know, these things really work. I mean, it was time-consuming. Your surgery is much faster.

Starting point is 00:34:34 It was expensive. Surgery is probably cheaper, but, you know, I wanted to try to do it and see if my body could heal. And certainly, you know, as we both know, we have the capacity to heal if we get the right ingredients. It's got to be very rewarding doing what you're doing. you know being able to help people out of pain we sometimes forget like when we feel healthy and we feel pretty good and we're able to do the stuff that we enjoy we just take it for granted and we just go and do the stuff that we love but the second that you have something that's hurt like it's very crippling and very depressing in a lot of ways because you can't do the stuff that you love to do so it's got to be

Starting point is 00:35:11 rewarding for you to be able to probably troubleshoot and say oh like this guy needs the oxygen therapy or this guy needs the shockwave, you know, and you can probably help them figure out a recipe to help them get better. Yeah, I mean, literally, you know, we've always had a few rules in our office, but, you know, obviously, first, do no harm, second, be as effective as we can be, but third is, you know, I would never recommend something to a patient that I wouldn't do myself or haven't done myself or wouldn't recommend to my family or friends or my daughter or my wife, you know, and, you know, a lot, unfortunately, a lot of these things aren't covered by insurance. And like I said, a lot of these things are time consuming and costly.

Starting point is 00:35:57 But when you give somebody their life back, their independence back, you know, I mean, I could tell you stories on stories, but like, you know, we have kids with, let's say, on the spectrum, like autism spectrum, that say their first words, like tell their mother that they love them for the first time. in our office after a session, you know, we have people post-stroke who could feed themselves again and go to the bathroom again, get their independence, get their driver's license back again, you know, we see, you know, these things where it's like, it should have been impossible. But again, with the right ingredients and a little bit of time, like, you start to see

Starting point is 00:36:29 these recoveries that are, and quite honestly, Mark, I mean, that's why I do that, yeah, that's, A, that's why I've always run the office and ran the office the way we did, but it's why I've spent so much in my life now teaching, you know, other people these concepts and trying to get this stuff out there because, you know, I can't treat that many people in my own office. You know, I need more people, more offices, you know, thinking and doing and putting these pieces together because that's when we could have, you know, a really big impact, you know, worldwide. Can you go into that example you mentioned of that nonverbal child having their first words? Like, how long of a time was this? How old was this kid? Was this kid like two, five?

Starting point is 00:37:09 So, I mean, we have, I mean, literally hundreds of examples of that exact scenario. It's incredible. Gaining, you know, for a child with autism, gaining their speech. You know, sometimes they're completely nonverbal and we just get a few words at first. Sometimes they come in with a few words, but they're not, you know, sentences or they're a couple short sentences, but they're not conversational yet. like we see language development in children on the spectrum on a regular like I at this point I make no promises to anybody but quite honestly these are things I expect to see change one of the things with autism is that we know that there's what's called hypoprofusion like not a lot of blood flow

Starting point is 00:37:53 to certain areas of their brain specifically the temporal and prefrontal cortex of the brain and so language lives in the temporal lobe and a lot of behavior and executive function live in our frontal and prefrontal cortex. And so if those areas of the brain aren't developing properly because of low blood flow, you're going to see a lot of symptoms in those, you know, expressed because of that. As you drive oxygen into those areas of the brain, you know, it takes, again, these aren't short-term effects. I mean, a standard protocol, initial protocol for somebody on the spectrum would be 40 hours over like two months. You know, so like let's say five hours a week for eight weeks is a pretty standard program. But inside that time, we see a lot

Starting point is 00:38:33 of these changes. Many of these kids might do more sessions over an extended period of time mixed with other therapies. But to see even other less severe, let's say, developmental delays and neurological issues that kids have, we see a lot of kids in our office and we see incredible changes in brain improvement performance regularly. It's pretty incredible. One more thing on this, just curious, do these children have to maintain, like let's say they they gain a level of speech. This is something that had to keep doing to get more oxygen without those areas?

Starting point is 00:39:09 Yeah, no, typically not. Because when you look at the mechanisms of action, like hyperbaric, in the short term, hyperbaric will drive oxygen to that area and actually you could start seeing some changes in performance. Long term, hyperbaric actually stimulates new blood vessel growth.

Starting point is 00:39:26 So as a result of those long-term exposures, where there was hypoprefusion, there's now entirely new capillary beds being built. And so once you pull the therapy, unless, let's say in some cases, there could be a toxicity issue or some other, you know, comorbidity that's stimulating some of these issues, right? So, but for the most part, these kids, as they get certain benefits, they'll keep, that'll become like the new baseline, you know, then we'll do other therapies or more hyperbaric over time, then we get to a new baseline. And there's very little regression. Things that you see regression with would be something like autoimmune disease or neurodegenerative disease. We're like the disease itself, this isn't a cure for that, you know.

Starting point is 00:40:12 And so the disease process may still be going on. So my stepdad was my second patient. So before I ever offered it to my office, my stepdad was diagnosed with MS. And so after I saw what it did for my nervous system, he, you know, I love the detail. of biology, but I still think very simply, right? So I was like, I had a nerve problem. He has a nerve problem. They couldn't be more different. Ryan was a disc herniation. His is an autoimmune demilinating autoimmune disease. Like, they're vastly different, but I said, it helped me with nerve damage, and he has nerve damage. I think we should try it. And we saw incredible changes.

Starting point is 00:40:48 I mean, his gate narrowed, his got his feeling back in his feet. He started walking stairs again. they saw improvements in cognition, you know, so again, like, it's, it gets a bad name hyperbaric because it's like, it's a cure all, it's a magic bullet, it's not, you know, it doesn't really treat anything, it doesn't cure anything. But when the body needs oxygen, there's no, there's no, there's nothing else we could use. But it needs oxygen, it needs oxygen. And, and when it can't get enough, it suffers. And this is one of the only tools that could really make a meaningful impact in oxygen quantity and delivery to really see some of these kinds of changes that we're talking about.

Starting point is 00:41:29 It's my understanding that it's also helpful for infection, and what does it do with infection? Yeah. So, you know, just this summer, so there's like four categories of mechanism for hyperbaric. There's mechanical effect, and that's really, like, hyperbaric was developed because of scuba diving accidents, decompression sickness, decompression illness, like the bends. of this probably so what it does for you know shrinking bubbles like nitrogen bubbles that's all dive medicine those are the mechanical effects then there's immunological effects the effect on the immune system there's hyper oxygenation effects the effect on the mitochondria and then there's all these

Starting point is 00:42:09 regenerative effects like the growth factors the stem cells the new blood vessel growth all that kind of stuff um so inside the immunological side it does two main things number one of most of the infections that really cause problems for humans are anaerobic. They don't like oxygen, and they grow in low or no oxygen environments. And they build what's called biofilms around them to protect them from things like antibiotics and other things. So they have like a protective fence around them. So hyperbaric breaks down biofilms, and it creates this high oxygen environment that a lot of those bacteria or other, even viruses, can't thrive in that environment. The other side is that it actually your white blood cells that fight infection use oxygen, reactive oxygen species as a defense

Starting point is 00:43:00 to kill bacteria and mostly viruses. And so it's actually activating your immune system to fight infection more effectively. And it's exposing these infections to an environment that they really can't live in. And so together, we use it for a variety of infections pretty regularly. I think it's fascinating. It seems like it does such a multitude of things. I also heard that it's great for dementia and Alzheimer's, which is something that people are trying to learn more about because it seems like so many Americans are going to run into it because of how much diabetes we have in this country. The numbers aren't good. It seems like a lot of people maybe like over half our population might be heading in that direction. So it can help with that as well.

Starting point is 00:43:45 Yeah. I mean, you're right. I mean, I think it was like by 2050, it's like almost like a one and two situation. in the U.S., which is scary. You know, my original injury was 20 years ago. You know, I've never had any type of recurrence from it, right? Like, to your point earlier, do you have to keep doing it? You don't have to keep doing it, especially for injuries.

Starting point is 00:44:09 It's like once it's teal to teal. My stepdad has used it for the last 20 years because he has an autoimmune disease. It's not going away. So even though we had incredible benefit, he's needed to keep at it as like, a maintenance type of tool. I can't say that I've needed it, but I've chosen to keep it. I've done thousands of hours over, you know, two decades of time. Part of that, to me, is actually because I have dementia in my family and I see what it does, not only to the person. It's almost like, you know, I hate to say it this way, but, you know, the person even becomes unaware of how bad

Starting point is 00:44:43 that they are. It's like, really for the sake of their family and all the caregivers and the costs and the emotional components that come with that. You know, so my mom continues to do hyperbaric. I continue to do hyperbaric. I believe it's a preventative, quite honestly, as part of a preventative strategy for trying to avoid dementia in the future. You know, we do see quite a few mild to moderate,

Starting point is 00:45:07 you know, Alzheimer's and vascular dementia or other kinds of cases like that. But as we upregulate oxygen to the brain, we upregulate performance. So, you know, oxygen, again, red light. a lot of those people I'll put either into ketosis or put them on exogenous ketones because the nervous system does really like a ketone as a fuel source in a lot of those cases or at least in and out to try to stimulate different metabolic flexibility, you know, for those people.

Starting point is 00:45:38 Nicotine actually is a great neurological stimulant. So again, we put together, you know, quite a robust multidimensional approach to dementia, but oxygen is definitely, definitely part of it. I first started hearing about transcriptions from Thomas to Lauer. Yeah. And, you know, Thomas is somebody that's an animal with working out. You got a chance to work out with him. I worked out with him.

Starting point is 00:45:58 And he's kind of always on the front lines of like, you know, finding out about these new companies that have cool things. But I didn't really realize that proscriptions was the first company to put out methylene blue. Now look at methylene blue. It's so popular. It's everywhere. It's one of those things.

Starting point is 00:46:14 If you guys listen to this podcast, you know, I'm very iffy with the supplements that I take. Because there's a lot of shady stuff out there. You've got to be careful. The great thing about transcriptions is that when people want to get methylene blue, usually they'll go on Amazon, they're going on with these other sites. It's not third-party testing. It's not dosed.

Starting point is 00:46:30 A lot of people end up with toxicity from the blue that they get because there's no testing of it. Transcriptions, they have third-party testing for their products. It's a dose so you know easily what exact dose of methylene blue you're getting in each troki. So you're not making some type of mistake. There's not going to be anything in it. It's safe. You can have it dissolve and you can turn your whole world blue if you want or you can just swallow it. They have two different types of methylene blue. They have one that is, I believe, dose at 16 milligrams and they have another one that's dosed at 50 milligrams.

Starting point is 00:47:02 So make sure you check the milligrams. I don't recommend anybody start at 50 milligrams, but the 16, I feel, is very safe. You can also score the trokeys and you can break them up into smaller bits. Yeah, so I do. And in addition to that, on top of the methylene blue, they have a lot of other great products of stuff as well. They got stuff for sleep. They got stuff for calming down, all kinds of things. I got to say, I use it about two or three times a week.

Starting point is 00:47:25 I use it before jiu-jitsu. And the cool thing that I've noticed, and I've paid attention to this over the past few months, is that after sessions, I don't feel as tired. So it's almost like I've become more efficient with just the way I use my body in these hard sessions of grappling. And it's like, cool, that means that, I mean, I could go for longer if I wanted to, and my recovery is better affected. It's pretty great. I know Dr. Scott, sure, we had him on the podcast, and he talked quite a bit about how he recommends methylene blue to a lot of the athletes that he works with. And they're seeing some profound impacts.

Starting point is 00:48:01 And one of the things I've heard about it is that it can enhance red light. So those are you doing red light therapy, or those of you that have some opportunities to get out into some good sunlight. It might be a good idea to try some methylene blue. before you go out on your walk or run outside or whatever activity is that you're gonna do outside. And this stuff is great, but please, like first off, they have stuff for staying calm, they have stuff for sleep.

Starting point is 00:48:24 But remember, this stuff isn't a substitution for sleep. This isn't a substitution for taking care of nutrition. This is supposed to be an add-on to all the things that we already should be doing, and it's gonna make things so much better if you're doing everything else too. And I think this is just a little different too than just adding some magnesium to your diet.

Starting point is 00:48:42 I think this is a little different than, you know, Treat these things appropriately. Make sure you do some of your own research, but... Oh, if you're taking medications. It's SSRIs. You better talk to your doctor first. Don't, don't be popping these things. And if you're taking any medications at all, it'd be good to double triple, quadruple check and make sure that you're safe. Transcriptions has a lot of great things that you need. So go and check out their website when you have the opportunity. Strength is never weakness, weakness, weakness, never strength. Catch you guys later. You know, I'm curious about this because, like, for example, I think it was seven years ago and we started talking about, about and using some red light therapy,

Starting point is 00:49:15 people are like, oh, that's some quack stuff. Now people are seeing how amazing red light therapy is. So with the hyperbaric chamber, you've been doing it for 20 years. You've seen some amazing results. Are there any theories that you can't back up with scientific evidence? But are there any quack theories or ideas

Starting point is 00:49:34 that you think this could actually be really beneficial for? That just hasn't had proof yet. But because of your experience and the things that you've seen, you know that there's something there. well i mean quite honestly so there's about in traditional medicine which i do almost none of there's about 15 indications for hyperbaric and they're you know non-healing wounds you know radiation necrosis you know from cancer treatment gangrene necrotizing fasciitis like certain really bad infections all the reasons that are that it's used in traditional

Starting point is 00:50:11 medicine have to do they're either acute life threatening or limb threatening like you're about to get an amputation or you're about to die and then we use oxygen but those mechanisms that I was describing earlier they're the same for anybody that goes inside the chamber whether they have a disease or not and whether it's an on-label disease or an off-label the diseases don't know you know whether the FDA approved these conditions or not and so um almost everything I use hyperbaric before, which is also why I position it to say it's not a treatment or a cure, a lot of these things are not, you know, they don't have the amount of research that these on-label indications do. TBI and concussion does, you know, post-surgical recovery, it's not on-label

Starting point is 00:51:00 indication, but it works in wounds and surgery is basically a wound, right? It's wound healing. So there's reason that that's very, it's an easy jump to understand that. Things like autism is very non-traditional, you know, MS is very non-traditional. Bronze and colitis, very non-traditional, you know, there are not, there are studies on all of these, but not enough to say like, yes, we could, you know, we are positive. But if we really just zoom out and we're like, okay, what's the nature of the issue? and or what's the nature of the goal? And would additional oxygen move the needle for this in any way, shape, or form?

Starting point is 00:51:47 And for me, if the answer is yes, then we would choose to use it as part of the program. And if it's no, which quite honestly is rare, but if it's no, then, you know, it's just not part of the program. But there's a lot of uses, you know, they're starting to use hyperbaric for addiction, you know, part of addiction recovery. They're seeing changes in dopamine responses and serotonin responses. Like, you know, there's some research there. There's not a lot, but these addiction clinics are actually using it to help, you know, shift people, you know, away from those addictive behaviors, and it seems to be working. So there's all kinds of new uses in mental health, especially, that haven't been explored

Starting point is 00:52:29 yet too deeply, but, you know, clinically seems to be impactful. I want to I'm curious about this you know you mentioned for example your back there the areas that oxygen couldn't reach as easily right how would potentially soft tissue work pair with hyperbaric oxygen therapy just because like when you do soft tissue work you are just depending on the type of pressure you use you're getting more blood flow to the areas that you're doing that work on and I would assume that if you're getting excess oxygen in a chamber along with getting some type of soft tissue work whether you're doing on yourself you're having someone do it to you it could end up being more effective is that something that people do at all or is it just that's definitely

Starting point is 00:53:12 inside the not typical conversation, but as a chiropractor and getting into this, and everybody, you know, all the docs in my office, we do a ton of soft, you know, we do ART, we do Grasden, like, we do a lot of soft tissue work. At first, it wasn't that obvious to me either, but I'm like, why are we doing this? Well, we're doing this to, A, create an inflammatory response, but B, to really drive blood flow into an area to stimulate a healing response. So we started to do, you know, you know, short exposure, shorter exposure, so not 10, 20, 50, 60, you know, five or six hours interspersed inside of like a soft tissue program. And we certainly, especially when they're stubborn and like not, you know, sometimes if a soft tissue injury is responding to standard

Starting point is 00:54:00 soft tissue, you know, treatments, I don't add this just to add it. But in those stubborn cases, to really push them over the hump or to like get over a barrier, yeah, I mean, between shockwave and hyperbaric, those two, for a lot of those stubborn injuries, that really moves the needle for a lot of people. Thank you so much for your time. They really appreciate it. Where can people find you? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:54:23 So, you know, our main website is hbotUSA.com. We don't really sell. We don't offer anything. We don't sell anything there. It's like just an education website allowing people to learn more. Like, is this good for me? Is it not good for me? Should I consider it?

Starting point is 00:54:37 Should I not? You know, it's really just what is this? And is it something I ought to look into? To learn more, you know, we also, HBOT USA has its own YouTube channel. So just also it's just HBOT USA is the channel. I think I have 600 some odd videos on there and 10 to 20 minute increments of just very specific topics to understand exactly how this thing works and if it might be appropriate for you. We do a lot of training and education, so I do teach these classes. So the HBotCourse.com is where, you know, a lot of my classes live in terms of getting certified in Hyperbics or, you know,

Starting point is 00:55:11 know, some of the business consulting that we do on that side of things as well. And any one of those versions also has contact us pages. If you want to shoot us an email, ask us questions, I literally do this just to get the word out. And I'm happy to answer questions as often as I can as they come through. So please feel free. Keep up the great content on Instagram. Thank you. I appreciate that. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys.

Mark Bell's Power Project - Benefits of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

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