Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
Overview
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a medical intervention that involves breathing pure oxygen at a higher-than-normal atmospheric pressure. HBOT is FDA-cleared for approximately a dozen conditions, including decompression sickness, carbon monoxide poisoning, and certain types of wound healing. Typically, medical-grade HBOT chambers are set to roughly two to three times the pressure of sea level. HBOT's high-pressure environment enables elevated levels of oxygen to dissolve in the blood, which can promote healing, and shrinks gas bubbles in the body, which is key to treating decompression sickness.
In recent years, there's also been increased interest in using it for non-FDA-approved purposes without strong scientific evidence to support them, including autism, anti-aging, and long COVID. Those offerings are sometimes listed at spas and marketed as "mild" or "soft" HBOT (mild chambers often run at 1.3 atmospheres).
Aspects of HBOT date back hundreds of years: A British physician in 1662 first proposed treating acute illnesses in a sealed chamber of pressurized air, using organ bellows. But interest in modern HBOT with oxygen grew from US Navy research on divers and decompression sickness in the 1930s and ’40s, and spread into hospital medicine in the 1950s and ’60s.
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