The Dr. Hyman Show - Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy: A Novel Treatment for Longevity, Brain Health, and Chronic Disease with Dr. Scott Sherr

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, BiOptimizers, Levels, and Joovv. I’m willing to bet oxygen isn’t front-of-mind for most of us each day. We can get what we need at any given moment: enough to conveniently power our lungs and bodies without any conscious work on our part. So you might be surprised to learn that oxygen is somewhat of an undercover superhero, and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) unleashes its powers for dramatic healing.  HBOT uses air pressure 2 to 3 times higher than the atmospheric pressure around us, helping our lungs gather much more oxygen than would be possible by breathing pure oxygen at standard air pressure. Amplifying oxygen in this way creates an environment that helps fight bacteria and triggers growth factors and stem cells for deep healing.  On today’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, I’m excited to talk to Dr. Scott Sherr all about Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and how we can use it to maximize healing and reverse aging. Dr. Scott Sherr is a Board Certified Internal Medicine Physician Certified in Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and Health Optimization Medicine (HOMe). He is the founder of Integrative HBOT, a worldwide telemedicine practice where he consults and educates patients and clinics using his novel approach to hyperbaric therapy that includes cutting-edge and dynamic HBOT protocols, comprehensive laboratory testing (using the HOMe framework), targeted supplementation, personal practices, synergistic technologies (new and ancient), and more.  This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, BiOptimizers, Levels, and Joovv. Streamline your lab orders with Rupa Health. Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests and register for a FREE live demo at RupaHealth.com. Tackle an overlooked root cause of stress with Magnesium Breakthrough. Visit MagBreakthrough.com/Hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Right now, Levels is offering an additional 2 free months when you sign up for an annual membership. Learn more at Levels.link/Hyman. For a limited time, Joovv is offering listeners an exclusive $50 off their first light therapy order. Just go to Joovv.com/Farmacy and use code FARMACY. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): What is HBOT and how does it work? (5:19 / 3:29) Insurance-approved and off-label indications for HBOT (13:48 / 11:58) HBOT for Lyme disease, vascular health, longevity, and more (18:51 / 17:01) HBOT for neurodegenerative disease (26:57 / 22:19) HBOT for recovery, anti-aging, and health optimization (34:34 / 29:57) Types of HBOT chambers (39:28 / 34:51) HBOT protocols for frequency, dose, and duration (49:18 / 44:40) HBOT and cognitive function (57:00 / 52:23) Safety and efficacy of HBOT chambers (1:08:55 / 1:04:03) HBOT and cancer treatment (1:12:52 / 1:08:15) Learn more at OnebaseHealth.com and get a 10% discount on chambers with the code MARK.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. You can change your expression of genes to help you with healing, with optimization, with the various ways of rebuilding the scaffolding, as I like to say, of the tissue itself. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I have a question for all you healthcare practitioners listening to this show. How much time do you spend ordering functional medicine lab tests? Well, lab work is a critical tool for functional medicine. It helps practitioners find the root cause of illness, but the process of ordering, managing, and tracking lab results can take hours of time away from actually caring for your patients. And that is why I want to talk to

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this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And today, we're going to talk about a technology that's been around for a long time, and it's being used in new and interesting ways for longevity, for chronic fatigue, for Lyme disease, for a whole host of problems that are not quite approved yet, but that are very much in the conversation about how we deal with really intractable problems, like aging, for example. And what I'm talking about is something called hyperbaric medicine,

hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT, as it's known. And you might have heard about it, you might not have heard about it, you might not have heard about it, but it's used in hospitals around the country to treat wound problems and many other things. It's actually what scuba divers use when they get the bends and they come up too fast and get nitrogen toxicity. So it's been around for a long time, but now it's being used in new and interesting ways that I think we're going to get deep into today with one of the world's experts, my friend and colleague, Dr. Scott Scherr, who's a certified internal medicine doc in hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And he's also focusing on health optimization medicine, which is very similar

to functional medicine. He's the founder of Integrative HBOT, a worldwide telemedicine practice where he consults, educates patients in clinics using his really novel approaches to hyperbaric medicine and therapy that includes cutting-edge and dynamic HBOT protocols, comprehensive lab testing, targeted supplementation, personal practices, synergistic technologies, old and new, and lots more. He's also the co-founder of OneBaseHealth, which is an innovative HBOT ecosystem leveraging synergistic technologies to accelerate results, essentially where you can do hyperbaric oxygen medicine at home,

which was really never possible until recently. He's the CEO of Health Optimization Medicine, a nonprofit education company, and COO of Smarter Not Harder, which is great. And he's also a hospitalist. He's consulted with clinics around the world, including Upgraded Labs, Remedy Place, LMS Wellness, Porto Nurochiro, and BiFormation, and many, many others. Welcome, Scott. It's great to be here, Mark. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. All right. Well, I personally have benefited from hyperbaric oxygen medicine when I was really sick with mold toxicity and just couldn't get better. And I had autoimmune issues and colitis. And I started to use it and found really profound differences with it. And I think it's something that really is underutilized in medicine. I've

recommended it for my patients for many things, everything from autism to Alzheimer's to chronic fatigue to Lyme disease to just benefiting for longevity. So can you kind of tell us, you know, what is hyperbaric oxygen therapy and why is it such a powerful, healing, amazing technology? Well, thanks for having me again, Mark. I remember you coming to the facilities in New York and getting hyperbaric therapy and having your experience. So I appreciate you mentioning that online here and tell people that, you know, we're not just people that recommend it. We actually use it ourselves. And this is personally for me as well. I have a chamber in my house, which is a different type of chamber than you used at the facility, but there's different indications for

these kinds of things, which we can get into. So hyperbaric therapy, the definition is relatively simple. It's the increase in atmospheric pressure combined with increased inspired oxygen. So I'll take oxygen first because most people know a little bit about oxygen. So oxygen is something we breathe in the air at 21% at sea level. That's how much oxygen is in the air. The rest of it's mostly nitrogen. At 5,000 feet above sea level, where I live here outside of Boulder, Colorado, we're about 16% oxygen. So what happens is oxygen comes into the body. That's okay. We have trouble climbing the mountains out there. Yeah, I know. That's why. Right. So you get this and this is actually comes to why it's so important. So we carry oxygen typically on red blood cells, red blood cells carry this molecule on it called hemoglobin

and hemoglobin binds to oxygen. And then oxygen gets to our tissues and then it goes all the way through our cells. And then at the end of our, that whole process, it helps you make ATP or your cellular energy currency. So oxygen is really important without it. We don't live for very long. Now we have a certain amount of oxygen carrying capacity and that oxygen carrying capacity is relegated to how many red blood cells we have in circulation typically. So you have a certain amount of oxygen that could be carried So you have a certain amount of oxygen that could be carried. You have a certain amount of oxygen that can get into your tissues. Now, there's a couple of ways to increase the amount of oxygen carrying capacity that you have.

You can increase the amount of red blood cells you have in circulation. You can do that by altitude training. So when you go to altitude, for example, come to Colorado, what happens is that your body stimulates a hormone out of your kidneys called epigen or EPO for short. And EPO, what that does is it increases the number of red blood cells you have in circulation. Now you can short circuit this by taking the drug itself. This is like cyclists like Lance Armstrong and others would do this. Yeah, doping, the doping part. Doping, exactly. Or what you can do is actually you can auto-transfuse yourself. So one of these guys, some of these guys will do this. They'll actually take blood out maybe 90 days because it takes about 90 days to make new red blood cells, 90 days or even more time than that, like 180 days before a race, and then transfuse yourself

a unit of blood before you do a race. And you're going to have extra red blood cells in circulation so that you have increased oxygen carrying capacity. So that's typically what's done in the doping world, right? You have EPO, you have, you have auto transfusion. So you're just transfusing yourself, your own blood, but there's another way to increase oxygen carrying capacity and that's by increasing pressure. So we talked about hyperbaric therapy was increasing atmospheric oxygen. We can increase that up to a hundred percent, but if you're looking at a pulse oximeter, most pulse oximeters for most people are going to read between 96 and 100%, right? Which means that your bound amount of oxygen on your red blood cells is about 96 to

100% once they leave the lungs. So there's not like a lot amount left for you actually to bind any more oxygen there. So if you put a face mask of oxygen on your face and you breathe 100% oxygen, there's not going to be a whole lot more oxygen you can carry because there's only about 4% more of those sites. Maybe that could be bound. And the trucks are already loaded, right? Yes, exactly. So the pulse ox is something you guys can check. Everybody knows about a pulse ox now from COVID, et cetera. So if you add pressure though, if you increase atmospheric pressure, which means that you simulate the pressure you feel under a certain amount of seawater, that pressure changes your physiology

and allows oxygen to drive into the plasma or the liquid of your bloodstream. The physics law that's around is something called Henry's law for people who like physics. The only physics law I'm going to talk about today is Henry's law. So the more pressure you put on a gas, the more of that gas is going to go into liquid form. And as a result of that, you get more oxygen into circulation and drive it into the plasma of the liquid of the bloodstream itself, getting up to 1200% more oxygen in as a result of that liquid O2 combined with that pressure with oxygen together. So that's how hyperbaric therapy works. Incredible. So what are the benefits? Because sounds like a great idea. Okay. More oxygen, oxygen is good, or maybe not always right. You mentioned oxygen toxicity. So what are the benefits? Because it sounds like a great idea. Okay, more oxygen,

oxygen is good, or maybe not always right. You mentioned oxygen toxicity. So too much is not always good. But what, you know, what are the benefits that we're seeing, both from the perspective of diseases that we can treat with hyperbaric medicine, as well as health optimization, longevity research. And I think there's been a number of studies out there, and I think we're still learning, but I'd love you to sort of unpack, you know, how is this used in traditional medicine and how is it used outside of traditional medicine? Sure. I first learned about it in a trauma center in medical school, and they were using it for really bad wounds. They were using it for carbon monoxide poisoning. They were using it for acute infections like necrotizing fasciitis, which is also known as flesh-eating bacteria.

Nasty. That's a nasty one. That's a nasty one. Yeah. So the way I like to think about how hyperbaric therapy works is that you have all this oxygen in circulation, and then something happens acutely, or many things happen acutely or all of a sudden, as soon as you have all that oxygen in circulation, then you have what I call more the long-term benefits of a hyperbaric protocol. And that's related more to what's called epigenetics, which I'm sure you've spoken about many times in the podcast. The idea that you can change your expression of genes to help you with healing, with optimization, with the various ways of rebuilding the scaffolding, as I like to say,

of the tissue itself. So when you get into a hyperbaric chamber, you acutely infuse 1200% more oxygen. What's that going to do? That's going to reverse low oxygen states. So if you have tissue that's at risk of dying, if you can get more oxygen to that tissue faster, it may not die. And this has been studied in strokes. It's been studied in traumatic brain injury. It's been studied in acute heart acute heart attacks acute spinal cord injuries if these people get hyperbaric therapy very quickly they're going to save tissue because you're getting more oxygen infused into the body so you have more liquid o2 and it's going to diffuse out more into the tissue you're going to prevent it from potentially dying as a result of getting all that oxygen in yeah just a quick anecdote on

that and then they keep continue on the disease thing uh, my partner fell off a golf cart and had a concussion, smashed her head and had real bad post-concussive syndrome. So I contacted a local hospital that had a hyperbaric and I convinced them to off, off label, we call it off label, give her hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And it was a game changer. She literally came out of there and her brain woke up. It was really quite stunning to see, you know, in person as opposed to, you know, in a scientific article that I read. Yeah, no, it's always nice. I appreciate the anecdote. I mean, it happened to me. I gave myself an acute concussion maybe four or five years ago and I did my whole protocol, got into the hyperbaric chamber and I felt like a million bucks after three days.

And, and what's, you know, what's going on when you have an acute injury like that is you have acute inflammation. You could have some swelling, you have some tissue that's at risk of dying, depending on the severity of the injury. And you have hyperbaric therapy that's coming in here now, reversing low oxygen states, decreasing inflammation, immediately decreasing swelling, starting the release of stem cells, which are the baby cells in our body that can make new tissue and help mature the tissue in the various areas so that you can make new cells in the area. So you always have these sort of backup cells in all the tissues that you have in your body that are kind of waiting in case they're needed. And hyperbaric therapy can help stimulate the

maturation of those. So you start getting them to start healing that area at the same time. And so you have all these things happening along with you have all the immune system cells starting to start getting involved very quickly too. So your immune system starts revving up as well. And you have the immune system cells like your neutrophils and your macrophages, which are really important when you're starting to clean up tissue to help be able to do this. So from an acuity perspective, you have an acute issue. What hyperbaric therapy really does is just rev up the whole healing process to make it work better. Yeah, it was actually, I also had another patient who had

a stroke and he was, you know, it was a hemiplegic stroke, meaning like paralyzed on half and, you know, couldn't move that side of his body. And we did a lot of things, you know couldn't move that side of his body and we did a lot of things you know a lot of nutritional things we gave him you know ib and ad and other things but i i was pushing him to do really aggressive hyperbaric treatment and he did and he's fully recovered it was really quite shocking because you don't see people recover from stroke like that you know you don't no you don't i mean yeah i mean that's what i always say the, obviously, if you have an acute issue, go to the hospital. Don't try to find your local hyperbaric facility if you have a heart attack or a stroke. No, no, no. You know, your ABCs, we call them. Yeah, exactly. But as soon as possible. Yeah. But truly, as soon as possible, if it's possible for

you to get into a hyperbaric chamber. Now the data is still controversial. Let's call it that. These are off-label indications, right? We have certain on-label indications for hyperbaric therapy, which are covered by insurance that would be covered by Medicare and all your private insurances. But the things that we're talking about- Which are very limited, by the way. Very limited. Which are very limited indications, like wound care. You know, diabetic foot ulcers. Diabetic foot ulcers. Radiation injury from cancer treatment. This is delayed radiation injury.

So if you have an injury from radiation six months or later after your radiation exposure, you can get hyperbaric therapy covered by your insurance companies. There is sudden hearing loss, sudden sensorineural hearing loss. This is when you lose hearing. It's gonna be pretty devastating for people.

Hyperbaric therapy is covered for that. Chronic bone infections, something called osteomyelitis. If wound care hasn't been helpful, then hyperbaric therapy may be something that you can use. And then at-risk flaps and grafts, this is in plastic surgery. So if you get plastic surgery, then you can potentially get hyperbaric therapy covered for that reason as well. Yeah. But it's very limited compared to actually what it does it's like you know it's such a powerful medicine and it's like it's only approved for you know nosebleeds but nothing else you know i know i know and so when it comes to it it's it's all the baseline physiology stuff that we're talking about here like decreasing inflammation reversing low oxygen states stem cell release it's an

anti-infective if you have an infection that does not like high oxygen environments, like your Lyme infections, like your clostridial infections, like your staph infections, like these do not like high oxygen environments, they don't do well. The infections don't do well in these environments too. So you have that as another piece. So I always go back to the physiology of it and how we're thinking about hyperbaric therapy in that more global context, as opposed to just for a specific indication, usually. So you mentioned the approved indications, which for most insurance companies and Medicare, Medicaid will reimburse. What about all the non-approved indications that there's evidence, science for?

Kind of give us the landscape of what are the kinds of things people are treating sure and i you know i have many you know i've seen anecdotes myself but you've been in this medicine a long time and i think it's really quite striking how powerful this medicine is when when it's applied for a certain condition so can you kind of take us through the off-label indications and where it's most effective? Yeah, sure. So when hyperbaric therapy is typically used as in more chronic indications, and these are things that have been going on for long periods of time. And when we're not looking at just that acute infusion of hyperbaric therapy of oxygen to really help, but also the long-term benefit of what I would call an oxygen infusion

protocol, where we're shifting on the epigenetic side, expression of various genes, at least 8,000 different genes that are responsible for growth, for healing, for decreasing inflammation and preventing cell death. And so there's been a lot of research that's been done in multiple different conditions out there looking at it from this perspective. And we mentioned a couple of them as we've been discussing in the podcast so far, but one of the major ones is stroke, for example. So people with strokes do very, very well if they can get into hyperbaric therapy immediately or very close to it. But also there's a study that was done three months to three years post-stroke, people getting significantly better even three years after a stroke, which is just unheard of. You

just don't see that happening. You also have traumatic brain injury. So we talked about concussion here with, with your, with your partner, Mark. Um, but also with, uh, with people that have post-concussive syndrome, which is, this is people three months or longer after a concussive episode. Like we see people with reversal of symptoms a year later, which is not possible. Like if you've had a concussion, it's three months after your concussion, the, the challenge, the chances that you're going to get completely better if you're not better at that point are very, very low. And so, and we know that this is the case. We can see, I mean, we see it in hyperbaric facilities all over the country, all over the world, in the words that, excuse me, the places that I work with and, and the clients

that I work with as well. So you have stroke, you have concussion, you have the dementias. So we're talking about vascular Alzheimer's and Parkinson's associated dementia. There is some evidence that hyperbaric therapy can be effective in these patients as well. Now, especially when used in a functional context, of course, we're not, and that's a big thing with a lot of these indications. It's not just about getting into a hyperbaric chamber. It's about what are you doing before, during, and after your hyperbaric environment? Like much before, right before, what are you doing during hyperbaric therapy? What are you doing right afterwards? You know, I know that's a big thing for you too, Mark. I mean, it's not just one single therapy, but especially with all these indications, it's much more of a broad swath of

integration that we're looking for. Yeah. I mean, you can't be eating an inflammatory diet and then, you know, not taking care of yourself and then just expect it to fix you, but it's, it's really powerful. So stroke is really clear. Traumatic brain injury is really clear. And these are big problems, you know, obviously these, these are also being used, you know, um, for athletes. A lot of this is for recovery. Uh, if not, and we'll get into the performance thing in a minute, but what other health disease sort of indications do you see this being most effective for? So we're using it a lot in Lyme disease and co-infections. I think it's something that can be very, very effective, but it's something that has

to be done in the context of working with a Lyme expert as well, like a Lyme literate doc or a functional doc that has expertise in Lyme. Because what I found with Lyme disease as well, like a Lyme literate doc or a functional doc that has expertise in Lyme. Because what I found with Lyme disease especially is that for most people, I need to get them about, they need to be about 60 to 80% better already before them to significantly benefit from hyperbaric therapy and have long-term benefit after hyperbaric therapy is completed. That's been my experience there. But that's why the ground game, the foundational stuff is so important and working with a provider that has expertise. So Lyme is one of them. Another one would be complex renal pain syndrome. So also known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy.

It's a very difficult to control difficult pain syndrome that's unfortunately not uncommon and very difficult to treat. Hyperbaric therapy can be fantastically effective at recalibrating the whole tissue bed that was injured. Typically, it's an injury that causes this to happen, and then there's a dysregulation or the area, the tissue itself becomes dysregulated. The nerves get all confused, and the blood vessels and everything else, they constrict when they don't constrict. And what we think hyperbaric therapy can do is actually help with what's called blood auto-regulation, basically helping re-regulate how the flow of blood is getting into tissue. Because we talked about that pressure. It's that squeeze that's happening on the microcirculation on the very

small blood vessels that the pressure itself from a hyperbaric chamber is helping exercise those blood vessels and helping recalibrate them. It happens in the brain. It happens in the heart. It happens in the genitals. We know that there's anti-aging studies for all those places, including your natural Viagra, maybe hyperbaric therapy, and if it's a vascular issue, at least. So we know that hyperbaric therapy has this anti-inflammatory capacity. It actually down-regulates or decreases some of these major inflammatory markers that you see in autoimmune disease as well, like some of the interleukins, for example, or TNF-alpha, which are some of these cytokines is what they're called. So we know hyperbaric therapy down-regulates or decreases those. So that's another type of

condition or group is the autoimmune conditions as well. We know hyperbaric therapy can be very helpful in those. On its ownbaric therapy can be very helpful in those. On its own, maybe not as much as being in more of a holistic perspective. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Well, I think people are going to want to buy one now that it fixes erectile dysfunction. That's how the Israelis got everybody to sign up, it's kind of funny you mentioned. They show all the guys pictures of, it's actually one of my favorite things to show as a lecture slide when I lecture is a functional MRI of the penis before and after hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Nobody knows what it is. Nobody knows what it is. It just looks like a tube and there's colors on it and then there's more colors on the other one.

But I just like to tell everybody it's a penis that I'm putting up on my lecture slides, talking about how hyperbaric therapy regenerates blood vessels. That's one thing that we haven't talked about is that what hyperbaric therapy does immediately is reverse low oxygen states by getting more oxygen in the tissue. But over the long term, it's actually rebuilding and regenerating blood vessels, something called angiogenesis. So if you have more blood vessels, you're going to get more oxygen to the tissue over the long term. And that's important. And then we can see functional MRIs of the brain, of the heart, of the genitals here,

and you can see how you can rebuild this tissue. And that's where it comes into sort of the anti-aging, reverse aging world. But yeah, the Israelis would have been the main people that have done a lot of this research on the reverse aging side. So they did studies on the brain, the heart, the genitals, and showing that you could see new vascularization, new blood vessels growing in the brain and the heart. And so in the heart, it gives you more exercise tolerance. And in the groin, it gives you more sexual tolerance i guess or sexual you know possibilities um and then then they've also done studies looking at senescent cells and telomere length which are you know fancy words for things that get bad as we get old basically yeah zombie cells we call them

there are cells that don't die that spew out inflammation and your telomeres are the little things at the end of your chromosomes that tend to shorten as we age and so uh actually in those studies that seem to lengthen telomeres more than any other treatment and actually kill zombie cells more than any other treatment, which is important as those are just part of the hallmarks of aging we talked about. Right. Yeah. The zombie cells are a big one too. I mean, I think of all the research that came out, the senescent sellers of the zombie cell decreased population by about 30% after 30 treatments was pretty impressive. There's no other, other treatment out there that we're aware of that

can do something like that. But you mentioned chambers at the house market. I probably should mention a little bit about the different types of chambers out there because I think people get confused about before you get in, we're going to, we're getting into the, what chambers we're going to get into, how to use them, how long to be in and what atmospheres we're going to get into all that, getting ahead of yourself. I just, how long to be in them, what atmospheres, we're going to get into all that. I'm getting ahead of myself. You're getting ahead of yourself. I want to just linger a little bit more on the treatment side. Please. On the things that actually it can help. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. You know, I'm always experimenting with the latest health events and I found that tracking my blood glucose is one of the most insightful and

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Can you talk about its role in neurodegenerative disease? Is there any evidence? What do we know? Does it work? Is it helpful? Should I be thinking about this for that? Yeah. David is one of the pioneers of using hyperbaric therapy for neurologic injury. There's a couple other clinics that were in Florida doing very similar things. This guy, Dr. Neubauer, one of the older guys that kind of took hyperbaric therapy from the wound care world and started using it for the brain. And it's always like the happenstance kind of thing, right? You have somebody go into a hyperbaric chamber for the bends, but their stroke symptoms get better, or their diabetic neuropathy improves, or their traumatic brain injury that they've had

for a year suddenly improves, or their nightmares from PTSD from Vietnam suddenly disappear and don't come back. And these are the things that happened in the early 1990s. And so the pioneers of this world were a guy named Dr. Neubauer and Dr. Paul Harch. Paul is still practicing in Louisiana and has been doing this for a while. And along with Dr. Perlmutter, they were all looking at how specifically the brain worked under hyperbaric pressure and how hyperbaric therapy could potentially be a modality to help in the ways that we've discussed, you know, decreasing inflammation, improving blood vascularization.

And we know that this can happen. We know that brains can start lighting up again, even if they've been degenerating because of cognitive impairment. I mean, you and I both know, Mark, that after about the age of 50 or so, if you put somebody under MRI scanner and you look at their brain, even with just a regular MRI, it's going to call, is going to have something called microvascular ischemic changes of the brain, which is basically means that blood vascular, blood vessels themselves, the vasculature is just starting to deteriorate. And so we know that if we can get somebody into a hyperbaric chamber and start rebuilding those blood vessels, they're going to have more tissue. That's not going to die, right? Because as the brain gets older, it shrinks because the

blood vasculature starts to shrink around it and degenerate. So we think that hyperbaric therapy works in these contexts for cognitive impairment, for Alzheimer's, potentially, especially in the early stages, by decreasing inflammation, by increasing the vascularization of the brain, by actually helping more stem cells populate that area, and then also helping with flow. The one thing that we forget in hyperbaric therapy, actually most of my colleagues forget, is that pressure is actually the main thing that's happening. Of course, oxygen is important, but it's pressure that's driving everything. And pressure itself is driving flow, and it's driving vascular and lymphatic flow. So it's the pressure

itself that's helping with the brain's actually detoxification systems and helping you actually get some of that cerebral spinal fluid to flow out and help rebuild and regenerate after getting all that garbage out too. So I think it's a garbage collecting capacity as well that's happening in the chamber. So if you just scuba dived at 60 feet or like for an hour a day, would that do the same thing? It's a lot of work to go scuba dive every day because, I mean, that goes into protocols. We're not usually just talking about just going once. But there's actually a funny story about that, Mark, because they published a study on these veterans that had traumatic brain injury and PTSD. And they took them diving for five days,

something like 60 feet a day. And they all said that their TBI symptoms were dramatically better. Their concussion symptoms, their PTSD, all were better. And they attributed it to going diving and looking at the fish. How about the pressure guys? How about the oxygen? But they said, no, no, it wasn't that. It was just because they got to look at fish. So, okay. A couple of things on the, on the other end of the age spectrum. Um, I've seen people use it for autism. Uh, what are your thoughts on that? So, or cerebral palsy? Uh, yeah. Yeah. So my father, who's a chiropractor, his name's Alan. He's a, he runs a facility in, in New York called the Northport Wellness Center. And he's actually the guy that got me into hyperbaric therapy in the early 2000s because he was looking at how you could use hyperbaric therapy in the context of autistic spectrum

within the functional context that you're very much in, in the sense that could you optimize blood flow to the brain and help with blood flow, what I would call regulation, in the sense of oftentimes in autistic patients, the way that blood flow is regulated, the way it kind of goes to various areas of the brain is abnormal. And if hyperbaric therapy could help regulate that, would it help with actually helping the brain work better? And the answer is that it seems like it does and there's been some small studies in Canada in India in other countries and even in the US looking at how it does seem to help autistic kids but it's not a treatment in of itself without doing all the other work really is required

16 yeah but it's an adjunct for me amazing and so okay in terms of you know the mechanisms of action to recap you know it increases blood flow it stimulates angiogenesis regional blood cell formation it increases stem cell production it increases telomere length it kills zombie cells it helps with wound healing it helps reduce inflammation it's an anti-infective kills bugs did i miss anything no you did well that was a good look at everything wait maybe i don't have too many microvascular changes yet i'm gonna be 64 this year maybe my brain is still working well you've done some hyperbaric therapy you do a couple other things not enough i'm like desperate to get one honestly i'm like i just wait until i've been stationary enough long enough to get one. Well, once you get stationary, I can help you. Yeah. I think you did a good job with the overview

or just the rundown there, Mark. I think the key for people to know, and it's something that I'm very emphatic about, is that I don't think that hyperbaric therapy is right for everybody right now, but I do think that at some point in your life, hyperbaric therapy will very likely be helpful for you. So it's not an if thing, it's a when thing. But the when thing is important because what happens a lot in my field is that if you own a hyperbaric facility, everything looks like you need to go in a hyperbaric chamber right now. Yeah.

All I have is a hammer. Everything looks like a nail, right? Exactly. So I got disinvited from a lecture because I said, please, my lecture title was, please do not put them in the chamber. And it's a provocative, right? But the idea here is that it's not if, but when, ladies and gentlemen, right? Don't take this pill. Yes, exactly. So what I often find, if you have a chronic issue, Mark, I need them to see you first. I need them to get optimized first. I need them to start working on their vitamins, their minerals, their nutrients,

their gut health. Now, but if you have an acute issue, then do not pass go. Do not collect your $200. Find a local hyperbaric facility and start getting treated if it's safe to do so because it's going to help the whole process. But if you have Lyme disease,

if you have a chronic concussion even, if you have a chronic stroke or dementia or chronic pain, like these things screw up your cellular metabolism and they need to be addressed. If I put something in a hyperbaric chamber, I flood their body with oxygen. That's awesome, except if their body cannot tolerate all that oxygen. And what does that mean? Because if you have a lot of oxygen in circulation, you're also causing something called oxidative stress. This is the buildup of free radicals and reactive oxygen species. That's okay. That's what exercise does. That's what heat does at high level. Temporarily.

Temporarily, right. But if you're going into a hyperbaric chamber every day, you're not going to be able to potentially neutralize that oxidative stress, and that could be a problem. So it's not like it's a cure-all for everybody right now. I think I just want to emphasize that too. Yeah, great. Thanks, Scott. So it's not like it's a cure-all for everybody right now. I think I just want to emphasize that too. Yeah, great. Thanks, Scott. So we covered the diseases and the sort of pathology that maybe benefited from hyperbaric. Let's talk about the flip side, which is health optimization, recovery from sports, longevity.

That's kind of a whole new field. So it's not just like if I'm sick, I'm going to go there if I bang my head or if I got a big diabetic foot ulcer, but I want to live a long time. I want to feel good. I want to recover from my workouts. Tell us about the research around recovery, health optimization, longevity, and what are the benefits and what are we seeing? So some of the stuff we've been talking about so far, I'm almost all of it to some degree, you know, what is, what is aging, but wounds that kind of build up over time that we need to address. Right. But I mean, what it comes down to is that the, the Israeli group, it's run by a guy named Dr. Shai Frati. They published a number of studies on a healthy population, greater than 65 years of age, and looking at all these markers that we've been

discussing, senescent cells, telomere length. They looked at blood vascularization in the brain, in the heart, in the genitals. So this is in a normal population. So this is making a normal population, a normal for a 65-year-old, healthier. So i.e. reversing their age by giving them these markers that give them signs of having a lower age, better cardiac output or heart capacity, better brain function, better genital function, et cetera. So we know that from like a reverse aging perspective and anti-aging perspective, that's how hyperbaric therapy is working. There's no doubt about it. And we're getting more and more people that are interested in these kinds of protocols doing diagnostics before doing cellular testing before then doing diagnostics afterwards. Maybe it's brain imaging. Maybe it's

neuropsychological testing. Maybe it's additional types of blood work and things like that, looking at before and after inflammatory markers. There's lots of different ways to go about it. I do various things in my practice depending on the patient and the clinic and things like that. When it comes to the athlete, there are some really interesting studies that have been done in the regenerative world. So looking at PRP plus hyperbaric oxygen therapy for recovery, which has been pretty effective. There's also some studies looking at stem cells and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. We make stem cells mobilize more in a hyperbaric chamber, but using them exogenously or getting injections or putting them in various locations, there may be a benefit from doing that as well. And there's interest in exosomes and V cells and all these other fancy

different types of regenerative technologies, although we don't have a lot of data for those quite yet. So through the same mechanisms of reducing inflammation, of increasing stem cells and repair, of helping new blood vessel formation, it seems to really be sort of something that is promising for not only, you know, just health optimization and actually recovery from injury or exercise, but actually for longevity itself. Right, yeah.

And then when it comes down to the recovery piece of it, it's everything that we've discussed before. And so for my athletes that use hyperbaric chambers, we talk about it using pre-treatment, like sort of pre-workout as a way to kind of boost your hyperbaric therapy. You can actually, so interesting thing about after you get out of a chamber, you have about 30 minutes to an hour where you have more oxygen in circulation. So you're going to have more oxygen carrying capacity for that 30 minutes to 60 minutes after you get out of the chamber. And so that you can actually leverage that to do some additional work or increase your oxygen carrying capacity in the sense of what kind

of work you're going to do when you get out of the chamber, you're going to try to do some more exercise that you wouldn't typically do. And I've had lots of patients that tell me that they can run for 30 minutes longer after their hyperbaric treatment that day, as opposed to when they didn't do it that day, for example. So you can use it on the recovery side. So after, after you do your, your hard workout, after you do your, your exercising, you can use hyperbaric therapy on the other end of it for helping with the recovery. So it's going to help with decreasing inflammation and increasing blood flow and, and helping with lymphatic and, and detoxification. So, but I mean, it's, you want the hormetic stress, you want the stress of the exercise. So you don't want to typically do it right after exercise. You want to wait maybe three

to four hours afterwards, but the same, the same things apply. And I work with athletes. I work with people with stage four cancer. I mean, everyone in between, because we know hyperbaric therapy from its base mechanisms, what it's doing. And then it really just depends on how much you need, what kind of pressure you need, what kind of chamber you need, how often, you know, those kinds of metrics and variables that we play with. And then also not only those, but what are your integrations? What are you doing before hyperbaric therapy? What are you doing during? If it's the type of chamber you can bring something in there, what are you doing afterwards? So these are all the things that are very much involved in sort of the ecosystem that I've

developed with my company, OneBase and everything. But it's something that I've developed with, with my company, one basin and everything, but it's, it's, it's something that I've been using in clinical practice for a decade now. Yeah. Amazing. So now let's get into the sort of the nitty gritty, um, because I'm sure by this point, people are like, I want one, I want to get in one. I need it. Uh, you know, it's not like, oh, here's a, I can get a cold plunge and just, you know, bump bump or get a little sauna. It's, it's a, it's a substantial piece of equipment. And for those listening, there are different kinds of chambers. There's ones that are medical grade chambers that are used in a hospital where you require a technician. There's soft chambers, which are things that have been sold for a while at home, which have much lower pressure.

So we'll get to talk about what is an atmosphere, what are the atmosphere ratings, and what is the difference of them, and how do they apply to our health. But there's soft chambers, and then there's hard chambers, and there's now home hard chambers. So there's a whole new era of people actually learning about this, wanting to do this at home. It's not cheap, but the benefits are pretty substantial. So I would encourage you to sort of help us walk through the difference between hard and soft chambers, take us through the science of the protocols around different things. For example, how many atmospheres should we be using? How long do you stay in the chamber? What do you use for

different problems? And sort of take us through a little bit, and we'll sort of go deep in this, because I think it's an important conversation about how is this applied? Yeah. Thanks, Mark. That was a great overview. So the best way to think about it is that let's forget about the type of chamber for a minute. Let's just talk about pressure.

So for the most part, what we're talking about is we have two different types of pressures that we typically use in the chamber. We have what we kind of call neurologic pressures, and we have systemic pressures. Now, of course, there's going to be crossover. But in general, neurologic pressures are an atmosphere between 1.3 and 2.0. So that means about 15 feet of seawater to about 33 feet of seawater. So that if you can imagine, if you're 33 feet below the sea, you're looking up, all that water is extremely heavy. You pick up a bucket of water, it's extremely heavy. So we're actually simulating that pressure you feel in the chamber. So neurologic pressures tend to be about

1.3 atmospheres to about 2.0. And the systemic pressures tend to be about 1.8, 1.7 to about 2.4. Now we can go deeper than that, especially if there's an acute injury, like if there is an acute lack of blood flow to a limb, or if there's carbon monoxide poisoning, or if there's the bends. But in general, our therapeutic pressure range is between 1.3 and 2.4. Okay. And so home chambers are soft. So let's talk about soft chambers now. So soft chambers in general typically go between 1.3 and 1.5 atmospheres. These are chambers that can be used at home very easily and very safely. It's a bit of a wild west when it comes to finding chambers out there, which we can talk about.

But when it comes down to it, the mild units, the soft-sided units typically go between 1.3 and 1.5. And then you'll have different varieties of soft chambers that can do that, but that's more for neurologic pressures in general. So for neurocognitive optimization, I call them sort of your overall day-to-day optimization chambers. They're safe to use at the house. They're easy to use at the house. You can stack them or have protocols where you can find different integrations. This is what my team has been really emphatic about is how you can make these mild chambers more therapeutic by enhancing blood flow before you go in, for example, doing various types

of therapeutics while you're in the chamber itself and even afterwards. But in general, the mild units are for neurocognitive optimization, day-to-day wellness and recovery. Now, the hard chamber units, as you were alluding to Mark, there are medical grade units that you can go to a facility for that these are single occupancy chambers, sometimes multiple occupancy chambers as well called monoplace or multi-place. And all of the medical indications for hyperbaric therapy at this point right now are either a 2.0 or greater. So if you're going to go to a medical facility, typically that's the pressure they're going to treat you at.

Although there are some hyperbaric facilities that do both on-label and off-label hyperbaric therapy that will allow you to have more of a range of pressures that you can do. There are facilities that do both insurance work and non-insurance work. So you can get hard chambers for your house as well, although that's a newer area and it's not as easy logistically. The chambers are much heavier. They just take more work to operate in general and there's more of a safety component to it. I mean, they're very safe, but at the same time, you have to make sure you're getting it from a good manufacturer, from a company that's going to give you good safety. Just overall, it's going to work with you in a very specific way. I mean, the challenge that you have with hyperbaric chamber companies in general in the US is that it's just sell you a chamber and then no longer talk to you.

You're on your own. Right. Yes. And actually, that's why I got involved in the business side of this, because I was just tired of talking to people after they got a chamber, had a bad experience, or didn't know what they were doing, didn't know how to use it, didn't know what kind of protocol. But in general, the way I see the soft chambers, at least, going, Mark, is kind of like the way of the Peloton over time, is that you're going to have your Peloton, you're going to have your sauna for people that can afford it. I know these are not inexpensive things, but you're also going to have a hyperbaric chamber because it's going to be your recovery tool, as it is with your cold plunge. I mean, one of my favorite protocols is 30 minutes in a hyperbaric chamber and then get into your cold plunge afterwards. And it's called our optimal performance or cognitive performance protocol on our app, for example, that we use. So, I mean, there's lots of fun ways you can go yeah that's amazing so the the

higher pressure chambers the hard chambers um seem to be more effective maybe for longevity for some things you're talking about the stem cells the recruitment the inflammation issues the telomere length the zombie cell killing effectiveness effectiveness of them. Is that fair to say? So right now that's the data. Yeah. If anybody tells you that the soft chamber they're trying to sell you does the same thing as what they've shown in these studies, the answer is that they have no clue and they're not being truthful because we just don't know. There is some indication though that we do know actually that stem cells do get released in these mild units, even without oxygen, interestingly. So typically what we're doing is that you have a hyperbaric chamber and you're getting oxygen that's usually being piped in it via either an oxygen concentrator or if it's a deeper chamber, it may be through oxygen tanks or liquid oxygen, even at deeper pressures. So, but we do know that even at 1.3 atmospheres, which is a mild unit hyperbaric

protocol or hyperbaric chamber, you're getting about two times or 200% more stem cells in circulation. So this is not a small amount, even without any oxygen added, this is just hyperbaric air. So all that means is that you're pressurizing the air in the environment around you. And when you do that, you're getting more stem cells released. And another argument that I get a lot from the hard chamber people in hyperbaric therapy. And again, I'm not a purist. I use hard chambers. I use soft chambers. I use them both that the, one of the arguments that you get from the soft chamber, the people that do not like soft chambers is that you, they don't think you can get a huge amount more oxygen in circulation at that level. And if it's from a pure oxygen perspective, it's not a huge amount more, but it's the pressure as well that people forget about

because the pressure itself increases energy production directly, even without oxygen being around. So we do know that absolutely the data shows that stem cells, the more, the deeper you go, the more stem cells you're going to release. The 2.0 pressure is what's been studied for senescent cells, for telomere length, for, for angiogenesis, for, for the brain, for the heart and the genitals we were talking about before. Okay. But 2.0 is the way to go. But I can say, Mark, clinically, clinically using the soft chambers for a long period of time, if you have the ability to optimize before you go in, so you're doing functional medicine,

you're doing, you know, some sort of foundational testing and then optimizing vascular flow using various types of technologies, maybe lights, maybe cold therapy, maybe even things like supplements to help with vascular flow, which I'll use. This is something that I've developed for many years. And you're looking at this cadence of how you do things to enhance vascular flow, you can potentially, I think, simulate for some indications, not all, in the mild unit by doing this integrative kind of approach. But simply going into a hyperbaric chamber at mild pressure is not going to do the same thing ever as going into 2.0. It's just not possible. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I think know, obviously imagine the costs will come down for these units over time.

I think, you know, it used to be, you know, 150,000 to get a hard chamber. Now you get one for 25,000 for 50,000 for less. It's still a lot of money, but you know, it's, it's kind of a, a long-term piece of equipment that I think it has profound benefits for health if you can get it. Yeah. One of the things I think about is sort of like my hub and spoke model for this, which is like, I have a soft chamber in my house that I use regularly, and I have a clinic close by that has a hard chamber that I can use in case I need it. So I think from a day-to-day wellness perspective, overall, if you don't have a severe condition, some of the things that we talked about before,

that I think having a mild unit can be very, very helpful. But having an access to a hard chamber so that you can use it periodically, I think is very, very helpful for the reasons that we mentioned as well. So I think from an affordability perspective, it's significantly less cost to get a mild unit for the house than it is to get a hard chamber for the house, that's for sure. And logistically, but then if you have somebody close by, you have a facility close by that you can trust. And I work with many facilities and a lot of them are great. Some of them, you have to be careful, but most of them are great. And then you have a great place close by to get hard chamber hyperbaric therapy when you need it. And I think about these longevity protocols, like how do you use a hyperbaric chamber over the long term? And I think having the ability to go to 2.0, uh, for a protocol

once every year or two is likely awesome. If you can do it. Or you can, you can buy a one with 10 friends and you're going to call up on your chamber. I like it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about the protocols. I mean, you know, these longevity protocols were like 60 sessions over three months. So it's basically Monday to Friday and skip the weekends. And can you talk about what do we know about the frequency, the dose duration? In other words, should you be 60 minutes, 90 minutes? How many days a week?

How many times a year? Is this something you can do every day? For example, if you have your chamber, would you go in a hard chamber every day for 365 days or is there a danger to doing that please don't do that yeah yeah yeah talk us through what is because the thing is you you buy a chamber if you use it for 60 days and what happens the other 305 days of the year right so let's talk about unless you're a big family yes or you've gotten like a hyperbaric share like it's like your timeshare or something. Yeah, like a timeshare.

Exactly. I think that's a way to go. That's a new business idea. I like that. Yeah. You have your condo. You have your hyperbaric chamber. I dig it.

So protocols are important. So oftentimes, the way to delineate this is a couple different ways. So if you have an acute indication, meaning you just got an injury, you just had a trauma, you have an infection, typically, you don't need that many hyperbaric sessions to see a massive benefit. Maybe one, maybe three, maybe five, maybe up to 10. But in general, for an acute indication, this actually includes surgical indications. So if you just had a surgery, you're going to heal faster if you get into a hyperbaric environment. And in the studies, we're talking about anywhere between 30% to 70% faster. So I mean, on average, about 50% faster overall.

So that's a big deal. If you're an athlete, that's a huge deal. If you're somebody that just had plastic surgery and you don't want to have raccoon eyes for two weeks and you want to have them for 10 days, that's also nice too, right? So these are shorter protocols, typically, as you were mentioning, Mark, Monday through Friday. And the reason for that is not so much for the shorter-term protocols, although it's important, but for the long-term protocols, where we're talking about 20, 40, 60 hyperbaric sessions,

it's the cumulative exposure of the oxygen in your cells that creates this shift in your epigenetics, which we were discussing about before. It's that change in expression of helping you heal, helping mature those stem cells, helping decrease inflammation. All that stuff takes time. It doesn't happen. It starts happening pretty quickly, but it doesn't really start solidifying itself up until about treatment 20 or so. So if you have more of a long-term goal or a chronic indication, like for example, Lyme or dementia or a chronic pain syndrome, you don't necessarily want to stop before at least 20 hyperbaric sessions, but that's your minimum. Typically, so the hyperbaric protocol you were discussing before with the Israelis, the reverse aging protocol, that was

60, six zero hyperbaric sessions over three months. But in general, I find, and if you look at their study itself, their max benefit was around treatment 30 to 40. That was when senescent cells dropped the most. That's when telomere length increased the most. That's when angiogenesis, the rebuilding of blood vessels, was happening. So in general, what I say is for an anti-aging protocol and for most of the long-term benefit for chronic indications, we're talking about at least 30 hyperbaric sessions, sometimes 40 and sometimes more than that. It just depends on how people are doing. And you have to also think about the pressure. So we were talking about the various types of pressures. So for neurologic conditions, we may not start at 2.0, we may start at 1.3 or 1.5, because the brain is more sensitive to oxygen. And as a result of the

brain being more sensitive to oxygen, you have more stress on the brain if you go to deeper pressures. So you have to be aware of that. So there's some interesting studies that were done where if you looked at a deeper pressure versus a milder pressure, the milder pressure does better. And the deeper pressure actually made people worse initially because the brain was under too much stress. So you want to be thinking about the pressure, the amount of pressure, and the number of sessions. And you talked about the time. And so typically, we have people going into the hyperbaric chamber between 60 and 90 minutes at a time. The milder pressures, the ones that were going for neurologic pressures, those are usually 60 minutes in length, although sometimes we'll do

90 minutes. But definitely the 2.0 pressure is we do 90 minutes. And this goes into something called air breaks. So when you're in a hyperbaric environment and you're getting oxygen, usually through a mask or sometimes in the chamber itself, you are every 20 minutes for five minutes, we ask people to breathe just the air in the chamber itself. And what this does is it does two things. The first thing is that it simulates the body at being at altitude, which would be think kind of funny, right? Because you're in this hyperbaric chamber, you're deep underneath the sea equivalent in pressure. But what we do is we,

by changing the amount of oxygen, the body sees that as that your body's all of a sudden at altitude. And then that stimulates all these things in your body to be released that happen at altitude. So new blood vessels, new stem cells, decreasing inflammation, all these things happen, something called hypoxic inducible factor or HIF-1-alpha for people who care. That's the name of- I wrote about it in my book, Young Forever. Yeah. It's really important. Yeah. And yeah, so HIF-1-alpha gets released. And so that's really important for the therapeutic nature we, of hyperbaric therapy. But also, this is the reason why you don't want to go into the chamber 365, 24-7, is that hyperbaric therapy is creating oxidative stress in the system, okay?

It's increasing the amount of reactive oxygen species. And so your body has the natural ability to balance that out with antioxidants, if you have that capacity. That's why it's important not just to go into the chamber without maybe thinking about these things and working with a clinician that can help you. But what these air brakes help do is help decrease the risk of oxygen toxicity because there's less oxygen every 20 minutes for that five minutes. So it prevents potential, the toxic buildup of these oxygen radicals. So it's very rare to have a problem with oxygen toxicity, but it does happen. And these are people that the most rare side effect

that can happen in a hyperbaric chamber is a seizure. This doesn't typically happen unless you're at very deep pressure for long periods of time without air brakes and also have a preexisting reason to have a seizure. Like you've had a seizure disorder before, like you've had a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, you have a cancer in the brain, it's something like that. Now we can mitigate this with things like exogenous ketones and I have lots of integrative oncologists that I work with that do deeper pressure protocols using hyperbaric therapy.

We didn't talk about cancer, that's one of the other ones. Yeah, that we use hyperbaric therapy for. So you can mitigate oxygen toxicity that way by using these air brakes as well. But in general, the treatment time in the chamber is going to be between 60 and 90 minutes, sometimes as long as 120 minutes, sometimes as short as 30 minutes,

depending on the protocol. Interesting. So there is a danger. And you mentioned a word before that I talked about before on the podcast called hormesis, which is this idea of a stress that doesn't kill you, but makes you stronger. And that's really what hyperbaric oxygen therapy is. It's a stress in your body, but it stimulates your body's own regenerative repair, renewal systems that you're built in

to help you deal with problems. It's already a built-in, you've got like a built-in autocorrect system, but most of us trample over it, don't facilitate it and help it. And this is a method that actually allows you to activate these ancient built-in repair regenerative renewal systems. And it's a beautiful technology because it's not like a drug that has all these side effects. It actually, you know, when used properly with the right protocol, with probably medical supervision to some degree at the beginning, that it can be a really beautiful adjunct to, you know, health and wellness protocol, longevity protocol. It's something that people don't realize is out there. And it has the potential to help people who are struggling with many, many issues. I'm curious about, you know, the effect on the brain and whether you've seen in terms of depression.

You mentioned PTSD a little bit. I know when I went in it, my brain just was like, boom, wide awake, clear, sharp. I mean, I didn't even know I had brain fog until I came out of that thing. So it's kind of fascinating to see how it changes your cognitive function in real time, not like over many treatments, but even just after one session. So can you talk about that? That's the acute infusion of auction and peace. And the, there are some people that are pretty, what I call the quick responders, the massive responders, the people that go in initially after their first couple of sessions, they're like, Holy, like, this is

amazing. Like my brain is hadn't felt this good in forever. And that's usually a good sign that if they do a full protocol that they will maintain at a higher level before they forever. And that's usually a good sign that if they do a full protocol, that they will maintain at a higher level before they started. Now, that usually means that the body or the brain in this case is not getting enough oxygen chronically. And this can happen for a number of different reasons. It can happen from mitochondrial distress. It can happen from vascular degeneration. It can happen from inflammation. And once you get more oxygen in there, your mitochondria, which are the part of your cell that make energy, are like, from vascular degeneration. It can have from inflammation. And once you get more oxygen in there, your mitochondria, which are the part of your cell that make energy, you're like,

holy crap, this is awesome. We're making more energy. This is great. But then after about three to five sessions in is when that starts to trail off for most people. And then the brain starts doing the hard work of actually regenerating itself. And that's all that epigenetic stuff we were talking about before. And so I have people that go in there to take, you know, they go in there for tests and they go in there. They actually did an interesting study in China where they put Chinese students in for five days before they did major exams and they did amazingly better. term memories or take long term memories and bring them to short term was massively increased and their executive function increased as well. So that's a short term benefit. And like there are utilization ways that I use that in clinical practice. I use that for myself when I know I'm going to have a big week at work or lots of podcasts with people like Dr. Hyman here. And so you want to have... You're cheating. I don't have one. Aha, not yet, not yet.

But the key with it always is that when I work with clients, and I know you do the same thing, Mark, it's about the holistic perspective here. And what wasn't available until I started doing this with my team was creating a full educational platform and an application for people to actually see how they can use hyperbaric therapy in real time and how they can get educated on it and how they can integrate it with their other technologies that they might or might have, might not have, but maybe want to have in their homes. I mean, that's the problem with hyperbaric therapy I found. And I've been doing this now for a decade is that I thought that it was the wild west like three years

ago and then COVID happened. And now we know from-COVID world too hyperbaric therapy can be extremely effective and helping decrease inflammation in the brain helping with regeneration of blood vessels everything we've talked about it works in post-COVID syndrome fantastically well and so many and so and even during the acute COVID part of things, we were using hyperbaric therapy to keep people out of the hospital. I mean, this is not using, I mean, even hospitals were trying it in the beginning, but like using other protocols and using other compounds, and I've had a lot of success with other kinds of things too, but for a post-infectious inflammation, hyperbaric therapy is fantastic as well. So if you have an acute thing, you mentioned

this shorter timeframe, if you want to do it for longevity, it's 30 to 60 sessions, and then you just do it once a year. Is that the idea? Is it kind of reset or? Yeah. Thank you for mentioning that. I meant to mention it before. So nobody really knows. I've developed protocols over the years working with people from all walks of life, um, in very different, uh, professional backgrounds, but what it seems to work best from what I can tell, because if you ask the Israelis is so that you do this hyperbaric protocol, you do 60 hyperbaric sessions, right? And you've done, you got all these amazing changes to the brain, all these amazing changes to your lab work. And then I go, what happens six months

later? And they go, we don't know. Nobody knows. How long does it last? Nobody knows how long it lasts. And that's why such a big part of this is you just can't go into a chamber and expect that it's going to fix your diet and your supplements and your mitochondrial stress. It may help a little bit, but in six months to a year, you might start going back to the way you were. But even in somebody that's pretty well optimized, that's just doing the natural aging of life. I think that re-upping on these kinds of protocols is going to be necessary. Now, how often? I don't know. So what I typically say is if you're over about 60 years or 65 years of age, depending on how old you are, if you have a hyperbaric chamber available to you, going to do a deep pressure protocol every year to every two years would be probably optimal. Now, would it

have to be as long every single year? I don't know. The way I typically work it is that the people that I work with in their own homes and with the chambers that we have and the protocols that we use is that I think about it in this way. And I think about you're doing a protocol every six months, but one's for systemic optimization, one's for brain optimization, or you're doing one protocol every year for one of an alternating. And then, and then in between you're using pretty much just mild hyperbaric chamber pressures just for day to day recovery optimization, not using it every day, maybe using it on average, maybe two, three times a week, using it more when you're getting off an airplane, because you're, you were hypoxic when you were low oxygen on a plane, using it more when you have getting off an airplane because you were hypoxic or you were low oxygen on a plane.

I'm using it more when you have a mild injury or if you have family members that are going to use it. I mean, of course, everybody that goes into a hyperbaric chamber should make sure that they're okay to go into a hyperbaric chamber. It's a medical technology. It's not a wellness technology. So you have to make sure you're screened by a physician and all those kinds of things. But in general, it's important to, the way I think about it is sort of in two different types of tranches, whether you're doing like everyday protocol or you're doing it sort of intermittently for maintenance and then alternating those things over time. Yeah. I mean, it's like, if you're working out all the time, you want to use it all the time, but you're saying that's a bad idea to actually get that

much hyperbaric treatment. Yeah. You definitely want to take breaks because of the stress of being under high oxygen environments. And I see this. I see these people with traumatic brain injury, for example, and they're getting better. Maybe they're treatment 40 in, and they're like, oh, we should continue because they're continuing to improve. And then at treatment 42, some of their symptoms start coming back. Their brain injury symptoms start reverting, and they start having difficulty difficulty sleeping and their sleep had gotten better. And then that could be a sign that it's too much oxygen. You need to take a break. So it's not just more is better. And that's not, it's not the American way in a hyperbaric chamber. That's really important to people to hear, you know, it's, it's really, it's a medical therapy. You don't take it all the time. It's, it's very much, uh,

customized to what your particular needs are and you can overdo it. So it's all, you know, it's actually this whole field of the decentralization of healthcare. The democratization of healthcare is happening across the board, whether it's, you know, with home hyperbaric oxygen therapy or whether it's with things like, you know, access to lab testing like I'm doing with Function Health, where we're giving people access to over a hundred different biomarkers that they can order outside the healthcare system and directly get their results and have an optimized plan. You know, you also are, I see the bridge, are the bridge between the traditional

hyperbaric medicine world and hospitals and sort of the consumer interest in this space and making it safe, effective, training people. So tell us a little bit more about, you know, how you have developed tools and programs and services to help support doctors and also patients or even, you know, health hackers or whatever you want to call them, biohackers who want to do this on their own. Yeah. I mean, I started off conventionally trained, but I was, I grew up the son of a chiropractor Yeah. I mean, I started off conventionally trained, but I was, I grew up the son of a chiropractor. So I was, I was kind of crazy from the beginning.

So this working in the, in the middle of these two things has been fun for me and dovetailing. I mean, most of the time that I spend these days is in the alternative optimization recovery, the things that are off label when it comes to hyperbaric therapy. And I have a lot of great colleagues that work on the conventional side that I can leverage that also do some of the off-label stuff too. But I think that for me, when I was looking at this world four or five years ago now, I realized that there was really an opportunity to make hyperbaric therapy better, faster, and safer in so many ways, especially because people were getting chambers in their homes.

They didn't know what to do with them. They had all these other technologies at their house they didn't know what to do with, along with hyperbaric therapy. And I've been creating protocols and working with patients and clients all over the world for the last decade. I have a remote consulting practice that I consult with people all over the world and help them create their hyperbaric protocols, help liaison with their local facilities. I know many at this point around the US and around the world. I also work with clinics, uh, facilities that have hyperbaric therapy as a part of, uh, how they integrate their other modalities, whether it be like a biohacking lab, or it might be a neurologic chiropractor, for example, and everything in between. So, um, with all this in

mind, I created a company called one base health, which is really the idea behind that was to create an educational platform and a way to access hyperbaric therapy in a more holistic way. So you have access to protocols, you have access to education, you have access to some new smart technology that's really going to make the chamber faster, better, and safer. And then looking at those integrations in a way that how can you leverage this technology? That's my thing. I mean, like I'm obviously biased because I'm a hyperbaric guy, but how can I leverage this chamber to work better? So how can I increase vascular flow before you, before you go in and what supplements can I give you? What technology can I use? Um, and then how can I help you detox afterwards? Or how can we help you boost with that, with the oxygen after

you've gotten out to truly leverage the technology and go in a cold plunge? And we have like your optimal focus protocol for that. So it's been fun for me to actually operationalize and actually put down on paper things that I've been doing for a decade with patients. And then also provide the service as well in the sense that I don't want to sell or give somebody something that they don't need. And I've been very clear with my team from that, from the beginning. And it was hard because everybody just wants to sell whatever they have, right? And any team and, you know, books, supplements, it doesn't matter. And, and I understand that part, but you and I like a first

and foremost clinicians. And, and so that's why my focus has always been, what are we doing right for the person that's, that's on the other side of the phone or that, that we can help here. And so the protocols are all based on my understanding of those things. But at the same time, always keeping in mind, you know, making sure it's really appropriate for the person to be really, you know, accessing our ecosystem right now, or if it's something that they need access later as well. So, so big, big time on service, like that was the other piece in the hyperbaric world that I saw was, was missing is that there was really not a great amount of service and like long-term, long-term like ambulatory care, like actually working with people, people over a long period of time and seeing how they do and, and work with them. And that's the ecosystem that we're creating. And I'm really excited about it. That's amazing. And I think, you know, your website, onebasehealth.com has many, many articles, chambers that you actually have helped develop that are safe and easy to use. And they're for home use that are both soft and hard chambers. I think it's a really wonderful resource and it fills a huge gap in the marketplace

that I've seen because, you know, I have access to you. I just call you when I need you. Most people don't, and they can't. Oh, I got this person who needs this. What do you think? So I think this is a huge, huge help in the marketplace, and I think it's really important. I think, you know, can you talk maybe a little bit about some of the challenges? You know, some of the machines out there are not FDA approved.

They come from other countries. Some are FDA approved in America. Some use pumping oxygen. Some have masks. So can you talk about the safety and efficacy of these different ones and what you've learned? Yeah, thanks for mentioning that. So there are certain types of chambers that are called FDA cleared. These are chambers that have a certain sort of FDA moniker that's similar to FDA approval,

but different. And those are the chambers that I really do think are important for people to use in a clinic setting, most likely, because if you're seeing patients and you're getting people in there, it just has a little bit of regulatory support that may be beneficial. We don't know, really, at this point, but there's a lot of other chambers that are coming from other countries and other developers and other companies, my company included, that don't quite have that FDA certification yet, but are very safe to use. I think that the challenge is to navigate this field and find people that you trust in it to work with you, no matter what chamber you decide to get is what it comes down to. And all the soft chambers should not have, you should not, you shouldn't be getting a chamber that has like

oxygen around you in the chamber itself. That's not the safe thing for you to do at the house. The only kind of chamber that you, at the house you should get is one that has a mask on that you can breathe in. Either that's getting like an oxygen concentrator or if it's a hard chamber, maybe something more like, like, like bottled oxygen or liquid O2 if you're at a medical facility, but waiting, this is not easy because, you know, they're the safety of the chambers, whether it's non-FDA or FDA, it's unclear. There's really any major difference. And I have a, one of my chambers at the house, it's, it's a non-FDA chamber. It's a one based health chamber and it works well and there's no problems with it. It's got a long track record, a long track

record outside the United States. So it's, to wade through this information. I know for people as you're thinking about it, but if you're looking for like a hard chamber for your house, that's FDA cleared, it's going to cost $175,000. But if you get one from outside the US, it's going to cost between 30 and $50,000. And is safety a problem? The answer is probably not, but it really depends on your relationship with the company, how you feel about it, and how you are going to access them over the long term. Most of these companies, as I said, will not do much more than just sell you a chamber and sell you the deepest chamber they can for no particular reason other than they're going to charge you more. Are the chambers from OneBase Health, are those FDA cleared?

No, not currently yet. No, they're not FDA cleared yet. But they're manufactured in the US? No, they're not manufactured in the US either. They're manufactured outside the US. But that's okay because most of the chambers in the US now that are being used are not manufactured here. Like everything else? Even the ones that say they're manufactured in the USA are not really manufactured. They might be assembled in the United States, but all the parts are coming from other countries. So my feel here is that as a clinician, it's important that people are very astute at looking at what's out there and doing the best that they can. I mean, I know cost can be an issue and certainly the FDA chambers are the FDA chambers are more expensive. Um, but if you feel more comfortable with that and you feel more comfortable that that's giving you some additional safety, then, you know, by all means go that way and,

and get those chambers. I'm, I work with everybody. It doesn't matter what kind of chamber that they have. I have just found as a sort of risk tolerance thing for me personally, working and doing this work, knowing that there's a lot of great manufacturers outside the united states they're doing great work that i can get less that i can that cost less that i can get more chambers out there to more people and so that's been my thing is like i just want like my thing is access and safety so safety first access second but the my the other reason why i started this company was i wanted there to be more access for people and to be more access that people and to be more access. There needed to be less.

They needed more affordability for it. It's been frustrating because there are chambers everywhere in every hospital, but you can't get them because they won't let you use them for off-label indications. So there are other off-label centers, but they're far and few between. And it's really a problem for many patients who I've tried to refer to hyperbaric medicine. I want to loop back to something and then we'll close out with, you know, working people find a chamber or how do they get one and so forth. You mentioned cancer. Can you drill down on that for a sec? Because I think people might have heard it and go, well, what was that? Cancer, hyperbaric for treatment, recovery, what, how does it work?

What's happening in that field? Yeah, it's a big topic. And I'm glad you mentioned it because I was remiss for mentioning it earlier. So in hyperbaric, sorry, in cancer, hyperbaric therapy can be used in about six or seven different ways. Okay. So we know what hyperbaric therapy does. It regenerates blood vessels. It regenerates tissue, it rebuilds scaffolding. So the way it's FDA approved, so insurance covered, is with radiation injury. So radiation affects the tissue beds. It depletes it of stem cells. It kills blood vasculature. Hyperbaric therapy can rebuild all of that. And so it's used as a treatment for radiation injury. These are in patients that have had radiation, and then six months to many years later, they get an injury or a wound in the radiated field. And then they have a hard time healing that. So a common one is

people that have had head and neck cancer and they have a tooth that's decaying or dying. You can do a hyperbaric protocol where you go in before the surgical excision and then afterwards to prevent the actual bone, the jaw itself from causing necrosis or dying. So that's, it's called the Marks protocol. So that's been around forever. Um, that's the only FDA insurance covered indication. And now we have a whole bunch of others. Now there's been studies that can potentially help in chemo, chemotherapy sensitization. So help with chemotherapy work better. So if it's a chemo, that's not going to work as well as you'd like it to hyperbaric therapy may help it work better. Um, if it's a chemo that's not going to work as well as you'd like it to, hyperbaric therapy may help it work better. If it's radiation, so hyperbaric therapy

can make radiation work better because radiation is oxygen requiring. So radiation cannot penetrate tissue where there's no oxygen. This is why something like brain cancer or glioblastoma is so hard to treat because it's a low oxygen tumor and why hyperbaric therapy might be helpful. Hyperbaric therapy is also being used in combination with other oxidative therapies for cancer. This is something like IV vitamin C, for example, or mistletoe or other types of oxidative therapies, especially in combination with the ketogenic diet. And this is the work of Dominic D'Agostino and Tom Seyfried and Dr. Nisha Winters, all the people that you know,

and I know that are using it in something called the PRESS pulse technique, where the PRESS is ketogenic diet. The PULSE is hyperbaric oxygen therapy as a way to truly start killing more cancer cells, especially at deeper pressures. So hyperbaric therapy is also being used in surgical oncology to help with recovery from surgical procedures, just like we talked about with an athlete or somebody else that has any kind of injury. Hyperbaric therapy is also being used in surgical oncology to help with recovery from surgical procedures. Just like we talked about with an athlete or somebody else that has any kind of injury, hyperbaric therapy is going to help you heal faster. Same thing in a hyperbaric environment. And also if you're anemic, if you have low oxygen, if you have low amounts of red blood cells, you have less oxygen you can carry. Hyperbaric therapy is going to make you feel better because you can get more oxygen circulation for three to five hours. Afterwards, you're going to feel better. And the last thing to say about cancer is that there's no indication

that hyperbaric therapy makes cancer grow. This is something that some conventional oncologists still think, but there's no evidence in any reviews that have ever been done that hyperbaric therapy can make cancer grow. And that's something just for people to be aware of as well. Well, that's good. Yeah. So basically as an adjunct to improve efficacy of therapy and also recovery from the treatments itself. So that's great. I guess I could have said that too. Yeah.

An incredible conversation. I, you know, it just makes me want to go get in my chamber if I had one, which I don't and stay there for the next week. Only 60 to 90 minutes a day. Remember, not a minute a day. Okay. All right. All right. So where can people find hyperbaric medicine in their community? Is there a website where they can find the centers that do this off-label? Where can they learn more about you? And I know

you have onebasehealth.com. By the way, if people want to learn more, if they send an email to onebasehealth.com, they can get a 10% discount if they want to learn more, if they send an email to onebasehealth.com, they can get a 10% discount if they want to get a chamber. But I have no other affiliation or relationship with Scotta than just as a friend and a colleague and advisor on hyperbaric medicine. So tell us more. No, it's been wonderful to work with you over the last many years, Mark. And I think we've helped a lot of people.

And I'm glad we're able to do this on a bigger platform to help, you know, hopefully many more, many more. So my company is called One Base Health, and that's where you can learn more about the chambers and about education, about our phone application on our education. So we have a free app available as well for download. You can get a good sense of what we do and get a feel of how the, the whole, the protocols work, the education works. And we're really excited about some new smart technology that'll be coming out at the end of the year. I do consulting as well. I consult with people all over the world, clinics that are interested in integrating hyperbaric therapy with other types of modalities. So you can go to drscottshure.com, my name, Dr. S-C-O-T-T-S-H-E-R-R.com. You can learn more about that. You can contact me directly there. I think that also just a couple more links.

So for hyperbaric facilities around the United States that I really like and I trust, there's Hyperbaric Medical Solutions, hyperbaricmedicalsolutions.com. They are in the New York metropolitan area. This is where Mark went in New York City a couple of years ago. And they have locations in New York, in Boston, and in Florida. There's also facilities in the Bay Area. There's a facility in Oakland that's called Holistic Hyperbarics. There's Advanced Hyperbarics in Marin. There's a number in LA. I mean, if you contact my team or with one of those websites that I just mentioned, we can also help you. Hyperbaric Medical Solutions also has lots of partners and they can help also find other locations if you're not in the New York metropolitan or the Fort Lauderdale area. So

those are the main things. And then I do have my nonprofit organization called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, which is a nonprofit organization training docs and practitioners on how to optimize health. It's very similar, but slightly different than functional medicine. And I think a good adjunct for people that are looking for additional training. And that's at homehope.org. So I think that's about it. And then I guess I'm at Dr. Scott Scherr if people like that. Thank you so much, Scott. You know, it's really a pleasure to work with you and a pleasure to learn all about this. I think this is an important topic for just people to understand because it's one of those therapies in medicine that has so much potential to deal

with things that we don't really have other good therapy for, right? You bang your head and they go, well, just go home and hope you don't fall asleep and never wake up again. And you know, it'll get better, I hope, maybe, and maybe take some fish oil. But actually there are so many problems that we have in medicine for which this is a beautiful, very safe, very effective therapy. And I think personally, I've used it. I recommend it to a lot of my patients. Scott's my go-to guy for this and I encourage you to check out his work. Go to onebasehealth.com and follow him on Instagram and just soak it up because it's so great. Thank you, Scott. For those of you who love this podcast, I encourage you to share it with a friend.

I know somebody's going to benefit from this. Leave a comment. Have you used hyperbaric oxygen? Has it helped you? Make sure you subscribe for every year podcast. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman.

Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the

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