Danielle's Foundation is giving away a
FREE Nintendo Wii to a child with
cerebral palsy or brain injury!
Therapists have recently been using the
Wii as a therapy tool to help children
with special needs improve their motor
skills. Call 1-800-511-2283 to receive
an application to enter the Wii Giveaway
Contest! Visit the Facebook page for
more details: www.facebook.com/pages/
Danielles-Foundation/109808883408?
sk=app_190322544333196
Please be sure to copy entire link!
Balance Health Today Article 2009
Susan Rodriguez, a certified hyperbaric specialist from San Bernardino, California, believes that to understand how HBOT works for CRPS, you need to understand the disease itself. “CRPS is neurological in nature and yet it manifests itself in physical symptoms,” she says. “What that means is that the disease needs to be treated with two approaches. One goal is to restore circulation, reduce inflammation or edema, and remove the swelling in affected limbs so the limbs can live. The other goal—if you want to eliminate the disease—is to work on the brain.”
If you were to stub your toe, for example, the central nervous system would tell your brain that your toe hurts. This pain is rooted in a physical injury. But sometimes trauma and inflammation mysteriously trigger a reaction from the sympathetic nervous system, which is a different part of the brain. With CRPS, pain is read through sensors in the sympathetic nervous system. (The sympathetic nervous system is what is activated in phantom leg pain, for example.) “Hyperbaric Oxygenation Therapy, however, can make the switch in the brain back to the central nervous system,” Rodriguez says. Under a doctor’s direction, she treats both the affected limb and the brain by different atmospheric pressures when the patient is inside the chamber.
“Different undersea depths work on different parts of the body,” she explains. “Deeper depths (up to 33 to 45 feet undersea) work more on tissue and bone, while milder hyperbarics (such as 18 to 24 feet undersea) work on the brain. Since we are working on both things, I take patients to all those levels. Almost always, the first symptom to come is the last to go. And then the symptoms are gone!”
Rodriguez learned about the effectiveness of HBOT therapy in treating CRPS first hand, when her husband Patrick was diagnosed in the mid-1990s following surgery. Because she had already been working in this field, they decided to try Hyperbaric Oxygenation Therapy to treat his CRPS. Not only is Patrick working today, but he has become a certified hyperbaric technician. The couple opened Rapid Recover Hyperbarics in 1998, with Donald Underwood, DO, MD, JD, serving as medical director.
A physician should review all aspects of a patient’s medical history before starting therapy. There are a few medical conditions that may prevent an individual from receiving HBOT — either permanently (certain lung and heart disorders) or temporarily (sinus infections, fevers).
“I have seen some very dramatic improvements,” says Rodriguez. “In some cases we have seen improvements to the point of a remission.” she says. “Nothing works for everyone, but I’ve seen this work for many people if they stick with it.”
Astonishment at the reaction of doctors to the words 'hyperbaric', 'oxygen' and 'therapy' is frequently expressed on the lists. The public find most doctors dismissive and some openly hostile. This attempts an explanation.
The primary reason is that the teaching about oxygen in our medical schools is inadequate, especially in these areas.
Educationally, Epictatus (3 BC) understood the problem; "It is impossible to learn something that we think we already know".
Regardless of the intellectual aspects, to admit ignorance about an issue of such central importance is very emotionally challenging. It is to admit that we are failing to use enough oxygen and that patients are suffering and dying unnecessarily from our failure to use a simple method of treatment, but we are truly in the dark ages.
Best wishes
Philip James MD
Wolfson Hyperbaric Medicine Unit
University of Dundee
Ninewells Hospital and Medical School
Dundee DD1 9SY
Based in the United Kingdom, Graham Rix has been writing on the arts, antiquing and other enthusiasms since 1987. He has been published in “The Observer” and “Cosmopolitan.” Rix holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Magdalen College, Oxford.
Stiff-person or stiff-man syndrome is a rare neurological disorder that causes rigidity, primarily in the back and legs. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy may be of benefit in some cases in tackling the causes of the syndrome, but the symptoms need to be treated with various medications. A rare disorder which is thought to affect as few as one in 1 million people, the exact causes of stiff-person syndrome are not known, but they are associated with malfunctions in the body's autoimmune system. Sufferers experience intervals of rigidity in their torso and extremities. Stressful situations and sudden noises such as car horns can trigger painful muscle spasms. The disorder puts sufferers at risk from further injury from falls and accidents. In hyperbaric oxygen therapy, a patient breathes pure oxygen inside a chamber where the air pressure is compressed to about 2.5 times normal atmospheric pressure. The increased pressure drives oxygen into the patient's tissues, increasing blood flow and triggering healing. HBOT is widely used in the treatment of ulcers, wounds and skin grafts. Some evidence suggests that HBOT can be beneficial in treating stroke, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis and disorders such as SPS. The delivery of pure oxygen under increased atmospheric pressure is thought to have a rebalancing effect on the brain, startling it into running more smoothly. If you suffer from SPS, you might want to discuss HBOT with your health-care provider as a complement to standard drug therapy. Although there is currently no cure for SPS, its symptoms generally respond well to drug therapy. These can include anti-anxiety medications, muscle relaxants, anti-convulsants and intravenous immunoglobulin treatment to lower sensitivity to negative stimuli. But note, once started upon a course of drugs, you shouldn't break off suddenly because doing so can result in severe spasms.Stiff-person Syndrome
HBOT and SPS
Drug Therapy
Barbara McCullough and her daughter Alyssa Tate. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy and fast intervention by doctors and staff of the Christiana Care Wound Care & Hyperbaric Medicine Center helped Alyssa Tait retain some vision in her right eye, after the sudden onset of a rare medical condition similar to a stroke inside the eye.
Word of a young University of Delaware student’s rare medical condition affecting her eyesight reached Christiana Care in a roundabout way. But the emergent, unusual care she received at the Christiana Care Wound Care & Hyperbaric Medicine Center was far more direct.
According to her mother, Barbara McCullough, Alyssa Tait was at the Division of Motor Vehicles to take care of some business on a Monday morning several months ago when she stood up, got dizzy and suddenly lost most of the vision in her right eye.
“She went to a specialist in ophthalmology-surgery in Wilmington,” McCullough says. The diagnosis was a central retinal artery occlusion (CRAO), a blood clot in her eye capable of causing rapid and permanent vision loss.
“CRAO is rare, comparable to a stroke in the retina, the part of the eye that enables us to see,” explains Wound Care Center Director Adrienne Abner, RN, MSN, CSW, MBA. “Vision loss from CRAO is usually dramatic and permanent.”
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy can decrease the swelling that causes the vision loss, Abner says. “Optimally, treatment guidelines for CRAO using hyperbaric oxygen therapy should occur within several hours.”
Word about Tait’s condition came through the community’s medical grapevine to the staff at Christiana Care, who reached out to the surgeon, Paula Ko, M.D. Tait was fast-tracked for an appointment to evaluate the potential benefit of hyperbaric oxygen therapy at the Lea Boulevard location in Wilmington. Medical Director Nicholas O. Biasotto, D.O., George Zlupko, M.D., who is certified in hyperbaric medicine, and John DeCarli, D.O., believed that hyperbaric oxygen therapy could help prevent further vision loss and even help restore some vision for Tait. With the support of Diversified Clinical Services Inc., a network of wound care and hyperbaric medicine centers, the Christiana Care staff had instant access to all evidence-based protocols for treating CRAO, as well as available consults from another hyperbaric-certified physician online. But both hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers were booked for other patients on the day Tait was approved to begin therapy.
“We were able to get all the wheels in motion to have the patient start her first treatment Thursday evening instead of Friday morning as we first planned,” Abner says. “In a matter of hours we completed screening, evaluation, insurance approval and scheduling, which usually takes a week. So Alyssa began therapy in the chamber by 6 p.m. Thursday.”
This was no simple task given that the hyperbaric staff usually works weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The clinical window of opportunity to apply effective hyperbaric oxygen therapy was shrinking. Tait needed two treatments per day for 10 treatments.
“The nursing staff and doctors really scrambled to arrange for five straight days of therapy,” McCullough says. “They reshuffled personal priorities to do what they could to regain any portion of Alyssa’s vision loss.”
Tait noticed improvement in her peripheral vision the morning after her first treatment. After the sixth treatment, a repeat funduscopic exam showed a significant decrease in retinal swelling. Tait recovered a sliver of light in the middle of her field of vision.
“There is still permanent damage, but less significant than originally thought to be,” her mother says. “So far they have found no underlying medical conditions that caused the CRAO.”
As a mother, McCullough was concerned about how Alyssa would process the sudden vision loss and all the information—some of which could be hard to take.
“No one expects their 20-year old child to have a ministroke, but the Christiana Care staff was wonderful,” McCullough says. “They explained things in a simplistic and thorough way and sincerely cared enough to do whatever they could to make a difference for my daughter.”
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2011/10/marine-pure-oxygen-traumatic-brain-injuries-study-102211w/
Active-duty Marines will undergo trials at Pendleton, Lejeune naval hospitals
By Gidget Fuentes - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Oct 22, 2011 9:18:14 EDT
Marines are participating in a study to see whether treatments of pure oxygen will help heal service members with mild traumatic brain injuries, one of the most common wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Medical investigators plan for 96 Marines, sailors and other service members to participate in the initial 10-week trial involving treatments of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, with 24 participants each at Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital, Calif., and Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital, N.C. The Army Medical Research and Materiel Command oversees the study, which also includes Army hospitals at Fort Gordon, Ga., and Fort Carson, Colo.
The trial began in early October and should be completed by year’s end. If the results are positive, it may lead to a larger study involving 300 to 400 participants, said Cmdr. James Caviness, an occupational and environmental medicine physician and principal investigator for the study at Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital.
“Hopefully this will be another tool in the arsenal” to help sufferers, said Caviness, the hospital’s occupational health department head.
Trial participants must have suffered a mild TBI while on active duty operating in the U.S. Central Command region, and they must live or be stationed near a study site.
While most people recover from concussions, or mild TBI, some later suffer what doctors call persistent post-concussive injuries. “They develop some chronic problems,” such as headaches, irritability, poor sleep, memory loss and imbalance, Caviness said. “That’s the group that we have trouble with in our current treatment program.”
Medical researchers suspect that pure oxygen might help heal those injured brain cells, and other recent studies show promising results for concussion sufferers.
“Everything in our body works on oxygen,” which acts as something like a fuel for cellular activity, Caviness said. “But no one knows” definitely if pure oxygen could help heal a bruised brain, he said. “That’s just a theory.”
For this study, some of the participants will breathe air in a hyperbaric chamber, provided and operated by a contractor, over a course of treatments and batteries of tests, while others will receive regular care for mild TBI, Caviness said. The trial is a double-blind, randomized study, so participants won’t know whether they are getting treated with pure oxygen or normal pressurized air. “They don’t know, and we don’t know,” he said.
Interested Marines — active-duty only — can contact the study coordination screening center at 877-445-3199.
Dear Susan,
Since the health care system is insurance based, until the procedure is recognized as a proper modality for a spectrum of treatments instead of the narrow set presently covered, it will only be people like you who are salvation for many otherwise untreated individuals. Thank you for helping me stay healthy!
Franck XXXX
To Whom It May Concern,
The work that Susan Rodriguez and Rapid Recovery Hyperbarics is doing is commendable. While the academic world is mired in the tedious process of controlled, randomized studies, they are in the trenches treating people in need. The use of hyperbaric oxygen in neurologic conditions is the newest frontier in medicine and Ms. Rodriguez is one of the pioneers. I am certain that someday, when the use of hyperbaric oxygen is a standard of care for many neurologic conditions, the world will look back on these individuals as bold visionaries who ran where others feared to tread.
George Mychaskiw II, DO, FAAP, FACOP
George Mychaskiw II, DO, FAAP, FACOP
Professor and Chair, Department of Anesthesiology
Drexel University College of Medicine
Clinical Service Chief, Hahnemann University Hospital
Editor of UHMS
Scan Detects Oxygen Levels in TumorsApril 23 (Health Day News) -- New research suggests that scientists are close to developing a simple way to measure oxygen levels in tumors, giving doctors a heads-up about what kind of treatment is best for individual patients.
The findings fit into an emerging trend of individualized treatment for patients with cancer instead of treating people the same way, said Dr. Mark Dewhirst, a professor of radiation oncology at Duke University Medical Center.
"If successful, [the trend] will revolutionize the way that we treat cancer," said Dewhirst, who co-wrote a commentary accompanying the new study, published April 22 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Scientists began realizing the important role of oxygen in tumors about 50 years ago, said study co-author James Mitchell, branch chief of radiation biology at the U.S. National Cancer Institute's Center for Cancer Research. The scientists discovered that tumors with higher concentrations of oxygen were more susceptible to radiation, he said.
"Radiation damages cells by causing damage to DNA, and one particular type of damage renders the DNA molecule non-reparable," Mitchell said. But less oxygen in the tumor allows tumor cells to survive more easily by making the DNA destruction process more difficult, he said.
According to Dewhirst, the same is true for chemotherapy drugs, which also don't work as well when tumors have less oxygen.
Lower levels of oxygen create other problems, Dewhirst. "One would think at first that lack of oxygen would make tumors unhealthy and easy to kill," he said. "But actually, the opposite happens -- tumor cells that lack oxygen become more aggressive and more difficult to kill."
Tumors with lower oxygen levels even spread more easily through the body, he said.
Doctors can check oxygen levels in patients by inserting a needle. But doctors can't insert needles into some patients, and. in others, it's difficult to insert the needle deep enough, Mitchell said.
In the new study, the researchers tested a scanning technique called pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance imaging and used it in tandem with magnetic resonance imaging. The study authors said they were able to successfully measure oxygen levels in tumors in mice by using the non-invasive technology.
"The imaging that is described in this study provides all of the information necessary to evaluate oxygen levels in tumors as well as to examine underlying causes for the lack of oxygen," Dewhirst said. "The fact that all of the imaging is completely non-invasive provides the ability to perform this measurement more than once, (meaning) this could be used to monitor the effectiveness of cancer therapy."
There are caveats, however. The research hasn't reached the human testing level yet, and it may not work in people. "Scaling up the method to make it suitable for use in humans will be a significant challenge, but not impossible," Dewhirst said.
For now, the plan is to launch more studies with animals to see if the technique works as a way to test cancer drugs. Perspective
