Hyperbaric oxygen, more is better right? — Wrong, lower pressure shown to provide stronger effect!

People still believe that hyperbaric oxygen therapy only works at higher pressures. Most of them are only practicing with higher pressure protocols and have not taken the time to go through the steady influx of all the recent data and research making its way into current medical journals and publications. If they did, they would very quickly be able to see that lower pressures can provide very powerful effects, and sometimes even more powerful than those observed with higher pressures; the latter was just the case in a landmark study released in 2013.

This study was published in the UHMS journal (a mainstream, peer reviewed, hyperbaric medical journal) and looked at the difference between 2.4 ATA (higher pressure HBOT) and 1.5 ATA (lower pressure HBOT). The results were stunning in virtually all areas observed. Researchers observed 92 inflammatory genes and this is what they quoted:

“Interestingly, oxygen at 1.5 atm abs affected many genes much more strongly than oxygen at 2.4. The reasons for this effect are unknown, but it does raise questions about the most appropriate treatment pressures for inflammatory conditions”

It was landmark study for lower pressure protocols, because it clearly demonstrated that the lower pressure protocols (1.5 ATA) had much stronger effects in the inflammatory genes observed than the higher pressures (2.4 ATA). <view study>

Hopefully this study will put an end to those that think more is better, and that higher pressures are the only effective means of delivering hyperbaric oxygenation therapy.