Yesterday there was a news report on one of the clinical trials using hyperbaric oxygen therapy to reduce the need for intubation in patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia.
There is nothing magic about a hyperbaric chamber for COVID-19 related hypoxia. It is simply a very efficient method of oxygen delivery.
Normally the body is very content with breathing only 21% oxygen (with the rest mostly being Nitrogen). That’s because when the lungs are healthy, the oxygen is delivered very efficiently to the blood. The hemoglobin in the red cells grabs the oxygen diffusing from the lung air sacs and delivers it to the body tissues. In a healthy person, the percentage of hemoglobin molecules that have oxygen attached to them is >95%. That is an “oxygen saturation” of 95% or greater. This is a very efficient system.
When a patient has pneumonia, the air sacs of the lung are inflamed and it is hard for oxygen to diffuse into the blood past this barrier. As a result, the oxygen level in the blood drops, called “hypoxia.” The solution is to breathe MORE molecules of oxygen to overcome the barrier in the lung. This means breathing more than the 21% Oxygen available in room air.
There are many ways to provide supplemental oxygen, and because too much oxygen is poisonous it is not good to give more oxygen than needed. The oxygen saturation in the blood is used to guide the way additional oxygen is provided.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is one of many ways to provide extra oxygen to the blood. I have created a very simple schematic to show this. HBOT uses the physics of gas laws to dramatically increase the oxygen in the blood. Unfortunately, folks who did not take basic science in school do not understand these concepts. Oxygen is not made by a pharmaceutical company, or there would be funding for the COVID-19 clinical stuides (and I could get better graphics than the ones I created below right before my clinic started this morning).
Read the full article here: https://carolinefifemd.com/2020/07/22/the-physics-of-hbot-in-covid-19-pneumonia-its-not-rocket-science/