HBOT USA’s Dr. Jason Sonners came on the Kristina Borjesson Show to talk about hyperbaric oxygen therapy. On the second part of our blog on Dr. Jason’s guesting, he talks about how hyperbaric oxygen therapy relates to COVID-19 and cancer.
Could this (HBOT) treat COVID-19?
The short story is yes. There was a lot of interest in early COVID Because a lot of patients were breathing okay but they just were losing oxygen saturation. I’’m in the New York area. We had so many people on ventilators and the whole bit, but it wasn’t a breathing issue. It was an oxygenation issue. And when you really get down to the mechanics of ventilation versus something like hyperbaric oxygenation, ventilation helps you breathe. And the thought is that there’s some amount of pressure change that should help with oxygenation. Hyperbaric has no effect on your ability to breathe. It doesn’t make it easier to breathe and doesn’t make it harder. But because the air that you’re breathing or the oxygen that you’re breathing is pressurized, it does massively improve the gradient of getting oxygen passed along into your circulation. So early COVID, there were enormous conversations going on worldwide. I was part of people trying to figure out how to get large amounts of people exposed to hyperbaric to help them through their acute phase of the illness. Right now there are probably nine clinical studies going on for acute COVID. There are also about 10 or 11 that I know of that are also going on for post acute or long haul COVID. And all of them seem to be very favorable for hyperbaric.
Let’s talk about cancer. I’m very interested in that because even though I’m healed and I have no evidence of tumor, I have some fear of it all coming back or something. I’m sure there are people who do have tumors and who do have cancer who want to know – what can hyperbaric do for cancer patients?
Sure. When I got into this about 15 years ago, you were specifically not allowed to use hyperbaric for cancer. The reason for that was really a misunderstanding of the connection between the two mechanisms. With cancer, there’s a thing called angiogenesis, which means your body grows a lot more blood vessels. With hyperbaric, angiogenesis is also one of the phenomenons. The concern was that if cancer is angiogenic and hyperbaric is angiogenic, hyperbaric might help feed the cancer cells and help the cancer grow more. I’d say over the last 15 years, and especially in the last three to five, it’s gone from a contraindication to an indication, whereas yes, they’re both angiogenic so they both increase blood vessels, but they do it for completely different reasons, and in completely different ways. Ultimately, what we’re finding out is that majority of cancer cells are anaerobic, they don’t use oxygen. Their mitochondria that we were talking about earlier, they’re broken. They have a completely different mechanism for producing energy and they do it without oxygen. There are three ways that hyperbaric is being studied for cancer right now. The first is a lot of patients. Let’s say you go a traditional route with radiation or chemo. What they’re finding is that patients have a hard time with things like radiation or even just getting through the treatment protocols because of how damaging the radiation is. One of the ways they’re looking at this is if you’re doing hyperbaric while you’re doing radiation, can you actually tolerate the radiation better and have less side effects? That’s one direction which has also been shown to be pretty effective. Another one is, and we’re not doing this in the US yet, but it seems like there is a synergy between hyperbaric and certain chemos. Whereas if you’re doing hyperbaric, and chemotherapy simultaneously, it may turn out that you need less chemo and you’ll get a very similar or the same effect with less damage, because of the synergy between hyperbaric and chemo. That obviously would be very favorable. There’s some pretty good evidence in the last few years looking at that. The third is that it appears that the majority of cancer cells, especially solid tumors, they don’t utilize oxygen. In fact, In many cases, they don’t utilize oxygen at all for energy production. It appears that when you flood the system with all this extra oxygen, what you’re doing is firstly, you’re making all the healthy cells that happen to love oxygen perform really well. You’re really nourishing all the healthy cells, all the healthy tissues surrounding the cancer. But you’re also creating an environment that’s non-conducive for the cancer cells, in which case, you’re up-regulating that oxygen and that helps to put a lot of stress on those cancer cells. This could help minimize their growth if not potentially kill the cancer cells. Lastly, when you increase the hyperbaric oxygen, you increase the oxygen levels, and you’re increasing the immune system’s ability to identify those sick and dysfunctional cells. The body uses a type of oxygen called reactive oxygen species, but it uses a type of oxygen to help kill those dysfunctional cells. As we upregulate the immune system through the use of hybridoma, we can make the immune system more efficient and help to clear out the cancer cells themselves, which is a very normal process. I mean, that happens within your body and my body every day. What we’re doing this way is just making that system stronger and more efficient.
You know, I’m thinking that for people with cancer, based on some of my observations as as a cancer patient and also having several other people in my family, who had cancer and did not survive, it might actually be better to have your tumor removed wherever it is. And then instead of going into chemo and radiation, go directly into hyperbaric and just clean it up that way because radiation and chemo are so destructive to the immune system.
Right now in the US, we’re really not doing those studies because chemo or radiation is considered the standard of care. It would be considered basically malpractice if you did a study where you didn’t give them chemo or radiation. You put that patient at risk as a result of that and you’d get in some trouble. They are doing studies like that outside the country.
Does it make sense to you to do the surgery and then hyperbaric?
Well, you know, I’d even go so far to say that depending on how aggressive it is, where the story is, you might even start with some hyperbaric and start creating an improved immune system response. You start reducing inflammation, you start putting some stress on the cancer cells themselves even before the surgery. Then you do the surgery and backfill that again with more oxygen. As you said earlier, when we’re talking, you know, we have a whole functional medicine approach to things so it’s not like we utilize hyperbaric alone. Just recognize there would be other pieces involved.
Yeah. Talk about the other things that you use in relation with that.
The metabolic approach to cancer is to say that cancer cells are developing because of a metabolism within the cell that’s dysfunctional. That’s creating a change in its behavior. Those cells are starting to replicate and build tumors and other things. If we do it in certain ways, we can put a lot of tension and a lot of stress on these cancer cells. While we’re putting stress on these cancer cells and helping to at least slow the growth if not reverse it or kill them off, at the same time, we’re actually improving the health of all of the surrounding tissue. Healthy cells love the change of oxygen. Healthy cells love the change of metabolism. Healthy cells love to try to adapt to a changing environment. Cancer cells are not very adaptable. And so they’re trying to control the environment in a certain way. When we stress them through changing metabolism, changing oxygen, reducing inflammation, and all those pieces, we can really shift that person’s body away from illness.
You mentioned that Degas Dino said, suggested that combining hyperbaric oxygen therapy with a ketosis diet is an effective non-toxic therapy for the treatment of metastatic cancer.
So basically, cells can make energy with oxygen and without oxygen, and then cells can make energy from glucose or fat. The idea here is that cancer cells predominantly use glucose, so cancer cells use sugar, and they make oxygen or they make energy without oxygen. Other healthier cells would use either sugar or fat, and then they would use oxygen because you can make a lot more energy when you’re using oxygen than when you’re not using. Ketosis is all about removing sugar. So much so that the body literally does not have enough sugar for any of the cells to function. What happens is your fat metabolism, your ability to burn fat with oxygen skyrockets. What it appears is that it’s not just flooding the system with oxygen that worked. It’s depriving the body of sugar and then improving the body’s ability to burn fat and mixing that fat with oxygen for fuel. That makes it almost impossible for cancer cells to survive. They’ve gotten quite a few studies showing pretty severe metastatic disease, pretty severe glioblastoma, very aggressive brain cancers, and having enormous changes in life expectancy as a result of this metabolism change in themselves. That seems to be something that is obviously different than what the standard of care is, but it seems to not only extend life expectancy, but also quality of life and, and do it in a pretty non-toxic way.
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