Special blog post from MAC Alliance Founder and Medical Director, Dr. Vincent Schaller
You may have seen the headlines about how actor Jeremy Renner and talk show host Jay Leno used hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) to help heal from severe injuries. Renner was in a snowplow accident early in 2023 that left him with over 30 broken bones and in need of multiple surgeries. Leno sustained severe third degree burns to his face after an an explosion while working on his classic cars late last year. These two thankfully experienced much quicker recoveries than any doctor’s had expected with daily HBOT sessions. The HBOT improved the healing of Renner’s broken bones and injured internal organs and Leno’s facial burns and skin grafts.
What is HBOT?
Helping to heal crush injuries and skin burns more quickly and completely are just two HBOT uses that are the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared. But what is hyperbaric oxygen therapy, exactly?
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a treatment that involves breathing pure oxygen within a pressurized environment. HBOT lets patients breathe oxygen in special chambers at greater than normal atmospheric pressure. This creates an environment that can help generate new capillaries around injured tissues. This can create increased blood flow to the injured tissues and facilitate better healing. HBOT achieves this by using a special chamber where air pressure is typically 1.5 to 3.0 times higher than normal. Typically, this is repeated during multiple sessions over the course of weeks or months.
HBOT is also FDA-cleared for non-healing skin grafts, surgical wounds, diabetic skin ulcers, bone infections, acute trauma injuries, brain abscesses, and bone injury from cancer radiation treatment—just to name some of the more common uses. FDA clearance means private insurers (including Medicare) will frequently pay for patients to receive the appropriate frequency and length of HBOT for these conditions.
HBOT and Sports Injuries
You may have also heard about the benefits of HBOT in sports. Going back to Philadelphia Eagles receiver Terrell Owens’s 2004 rapid recovery from an ankle fracture, daily HBOT to help him heal just weeks before Super Bowl XXXIX. In that game, Owens performed heroically.
Many other top athletes in professional sports have used HBOT to speed up recovery from injury and improve performance, including NBA star LeBron James, top ranking tennis pro Novak Djokovic, and Olympic swimming legend, Michael Phelps.
Today the use of HBOT has become quite common in the elite sports world to assist in recovery from injury. There is a large volume of growing research that proves its many benefits in elite athletes:
- A 2018 study in the journal Nature revealed that on a microscopic level HBOT not only increases mitochondrial mass, but also reduces inflammation, thus aiding in more efficient and rapid soft tissue repair.
- A 2019 study in Biomed Research International reported that by increasing the delivery of oxygen to areas of the muscles and soft tissues where oxygen is depleted by vigorous exercise and injury speeds up the recovery and increases endurance.
- A 2022 study in Sports Medicine Journal found that HBOT results in significant improvements in mitochondrial respiration and increased mitochondrial mass, thus increasing performance of middle age athletes.
HBOT for Concussions and Traumatic Brain Injuries
We at Mid-Atlantic Concussion (MAC) Alliance have spent the last few years following the growing body of research pointing to the benefits of HBOT for concussion and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). The data and research show that HBOT can help improve healing for patients with brain injuries who have experienced a plateau in their therapies as they work towards recovery. We invested in our own Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Center at our Hockessin, Delaware, location, and are very excited to see that HBOT has helped our concussion and TBI patients in acute settings, both shortly after the injury and even months or years later.
Read More About the Science Behind HBOT for Concussions & TBIs
Oxygen Boosts Concussion Recovery
Oxygen is one of the necessary components for cellular respiration or metabolism of any organ in the body, including the brain and spinal cord. If oxygen is in limited supply to the brain, then fewer nerves can fire off at once, limiting any repair going on to heal injured tissue. By giving 40 to 60 one-hour sessions of HBOT on a schedule of 2-3 times a week to a concussion patient doing vestibular, ocular and/or cognitive therapies, overall oxygen delivery increases. This extra oxygen on the red blood cells produced by HBOT helps improve metabolism, which aids cellular repair and ultimately speeds up concussion recovery even immediately after a concussion.
We have seen the success reported in medical journals replicated in our own patients. HBOT can aid in concussion and TBI recovery both in our patient athletes struggling to recover immediately after injury, and in our long-term concussion and TBI patients who have been injured in falls, motor vehicle accidents and workplace accidents. We have seen dramatic improvement in some of the most difficult cases, months and even years after injury.
MAC Alliance’s Commitment to Concussion and TBI Patients
Since the use of HBOT for concussion and TBI recovery is not yet FDA-cleared, it is often considered an out-of-pocket expense by insurance companies. Unlike most elite professional athletes, the cost of HBOT to treat concussions for the average person can be prohibitive: the cost for a one-hour HBOT session in a hospital environment can be $350 or more per hour.
To give concussion and TBI patients and their families access to HBOT, MAC Alliance has created our own in-house HBOT program. We have set a more affordable price for sessions to open up this resource to as many patients as possible. This includes athletes of all ages, as well as our fall, car accident and work injury patients.
We have created an easy-to-use HBOT payment program that:
- Allows our patients to do their first three one-hour sessions for only $25 each
- If tolerated, patients can continue their sessions at $50 each
- Is local, so that patients in our community do not have to drive long distances to hospitals with HBOT services
This self-pay price scale is designed to assist concussion and TBI patients and other patients who may benefit from HBOT. For any FDA-cleared use, we accept most insurers for HBOT treatments for these conditions, which are usually covered in full.
Please contact us to find out more about receiving HBOT treatment from our trained medical staff under the direction of our licensed physicians.
—Special blog post from Vincent Schaller, M.D., DABFM, CIC, MAC Alliance Medical Director and Founder
