Synopsis
It can help reverse the effects of strokes and head injuries. It can help heal damaged tissues. It can fight infections and diseases. It can save limbs. The treatment is here, now, and is being successfully used to benefit thousands of patients throughout the country. This treatment is hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). Safe and painless, HBOT uses pressurized oxygen administered in special chambers. It has been used for years to treat divers with the bends, a serious illness caused by overly rapid ascensions. As time has gone on, however, doctors have discovered other applications for this remarkable treatment. In Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, Dr. Richard Neubauer and Dr. Morton Walker explain how this treatment overcomes hypoxia, or oxygen starvation in the tissues, by flooding the body's fluids with life-giving oxygen. In this way, HBOT can help people with strokes, head and spinal cord inquiries, and multiple sclerosis regain speech and mobility. When used to treat accident and fire victims. HBOT can promote the faster, cleaner healing of wounds and burns, and can aid those overcome with smoke inhalation. It can be used to treat other types of injuries, including damage caused by radiation treatment and skin surgery, and fractures that won't heal. HBOT can also help people overcome a variety of serious infections, ranging from AIDS to Lyme disease. And, as Dr. Neubauer and Dr. Walker point out, it can do all of this by working hand in hand with other treatments, including surgery, without creating additional side effects and complications.
Reviews
Europeans have done more research than Americans have on hyperbaric oxygen therapy--HBOT--and Europe has more and better facilities for it than the U.S. has. Italy, Belgium, and Russia are the HBOT pioneers; meanwhile, in the U.S., most doctors did not learn about HBOT in medical school, there is a shortage of proper (often costly) facilities, and more research is needed. Neubauer and Walker seek to foster public awareness of HBOT, so that patients will ask their doctors about it and thereby spur increased U.S. medical awareness. HBOT works primarily by forcing oxygen into blood plasma rather than blood cells. Neubauer and Walker describe several conditions for which HBOT has proven useful and safe, including healing serious wounds, preventing gas gangrene and related amputations, and treating brain and spinal cord injuries. They strain a bit, though, when they say HBOT can treat AIDS; what it really does is help heal Kaposi's sarcoma. Most of their references are, creditably enough, to articles in top-drawer medical journals. William Beatty
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
