HBOT USA’s Dr. Jason Sonners went on air with Kristina Borjesson to talk all about how he started with hyperbaric oxygen therapy and the tremendous benefits it brings. Here’s an excerpt of the interview.
I wanted to start today’s show with something kind of amazing and hopeful. And my guest today is I think just the ticket. You remember that weird photo of Michael Jackson laying down in what looked like a glass coffin. That was actually a hyperbaric chamber and he bought one for his home in 1994. And people around the world made fun of him for using it. Turns out Jackson was way ahead of his time. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, is finally starting to get recognition as a tool that could revolutionize medicine in many ways. My guest today Dr. Jason Saunders is the Clinical Director of New Jersey hyperbaric oxygen treatment or NJ HBot and HBot USA. He’s a certified hyperbaric practitioner. He is also a chiropractor with a postgraduate degree in kinesiology, kinesiology, which is the scientific study of human body. Now he supports patients with a variety of autoimmune and neurological conditions, allergies, autism, cancer, and many other ailments. He combines hyperbaric oxygen therapy, nutrition, exercise detoxification programs, and much more to help naturally support patients and guide them through their health challenges. He’s here to talk about his book, oxygen under pressure, and astonishing account of what hyperbaric oxygen treatment is. How it works, and how it’s used to treat this myriad of serious illnesses. Welcome, Dr. Saunders.
Thanks for having me on, Kristina. It’s great to be here.
So now you fell into this quite serendipitously you want to tell that story?
Sure. About 15 years ago, I herniated a disc in my back. Along with the back pain, I was also left with a drop foot on my right leg where I literally wasn’t able to use my my right leg and my right foot properly. My wife’s also a chiropractor, so she was treating me and my background is in exercise physiology. I have a lot of background in kinesiology and nutrition. So we were doing, as far as I could tell, all the right things from a natural anti-inflammatory standpoint, from rebuilding musculature and my movement patterns. My back got better relatively quickly, within a couple of weeks, but I’m still left with that neuropathy. About a year and a half later, I just happened to be at a conference where there was a large vendor hall and lots of different equipment – and they had these hyperbaric chambers. I had no idea what it was. I didn’t know what to expect. It just looked interesting to me, so I wanted to try it. They put me in for about 30 minutes, and I climbed out and didn’t think anything of it. I started walking around this vendor hall and then about 15 minutes later, I started getting pins and needles in my foot, which was literally the first time I had felt my foot in about a year and a half. So right away I said, “Gosh, am I feeling my foot because of that thing?” I went back and I spoke to them for a little while and they said that could be from HBOT. They agreed to treat me and I did about eight hours worth of care over the next four days. I had left that weekend with about 20% recovery in my foot. So I actually bought a hyperbaric chamber and treated myself for a few more weeks, and I had full recovery of my foot. At that point, I’ve been treating people with disc herniations and neuropathy. At no point in my career, had anyone ever mentioned hyperbaric oxygen. I didn’t even know what it was. And yet, this was the only thing, after all that time, that finally gave me the function back in my leg. At that moment, I really decided that it was time to dig into the research and the practice of hyperbaric medicine and start implementing it in our clinic.
Okay, so I before we get into the particulars of how this works and what it does, I want you to talk about your medical philosophy which is a functional medicine philosophy that you practice that makes hyperbaric oxygen therapy so perfect for all your patients. And it’s very different from the allopathic perspective.
My understanding of health and human physiology is that we’re designed to be healthy. We’re designed to express full potential in our health, pain free, full range of motion. At any time we’re expressing anything less than whatever the optimal health for us should be, we would tend to say, “Well, either I may have too much of something that my body’s having trouble getting rid of toxicity of some kind. Or, potentially, I’m not getting enough of something my body needs in order to function properly.” In other words, too much exercise or not enough exercise or poor posture or poor movement patterns. Those are different ways that toxicity and deficiency can show up physically. And then of course, there’s emotional toxicity and emotional deficiency where, you know, toxicity would be things like maybe emotionally like jealousy and anger, stress, right? Emotional stress, whereas, joy and love and satisfaction in our life would be more emotional sufficiency. The way I look at that health is that stress is the cause of all the things that go wrong, but also the way to help our bodies heal. It’s a very delicate balance of making sure that those stressors are generally positive, that are helping us heal, helping us recover and helping us repair our bodies and our tissues. When we’re evaluating patients, we’re always looking for those toxicities and how can we help somebody remove them, and where those deficiencies are and how we can help replenish them.
Well, I was actually talking about something more fundamental than that, because there there are several things that I found interesting in your book that differ from the allopathic model. One is that the allopathic as they look at the disease, and they treat the symptoms of the disease as opposed to the root problem that creates the symptoms. So basically, they’re not looking beyond the symptoms. They’re just treating the symptoms. And whereas in functional medicine, you guys want to know what the root problem is. What is it that is causing these symptoms, not just deal with the symptoms. The other thing that you mentioned in your book that I thought I was like, “Oh my god, I never thought of that,” because I had kidney cancer, and I no longer do, but I was told to have gene testing because it’s in your genes. And in your book, you talk about how the genes are not the cause of cancer. They read their reactors, they’re not actors. Did I read that correctly? In other words, you come in with a genetic makeup that is also baked into that genetic makeup or all the crappy things like too much drinking or whatever that your ancestors did. That’s all baked into your your genetic makeup, but your genetic makeup is not the thing that causes your cancer. It’s whatever environmental or other thing that acts upon your genes and how your genes respond to that. Is that correct?
Yeah. The comparison I would give would be something like your genes are the instructions. When your body is exposed to certain environments, your genes have already described how the body should express itself in that environment, but it’s still the environment that ultimately dictates the expression. In other words, if two people you know, let’s say you and I, let’s say I had a gene that predisposes me to diabetes and you didn’t, but we both ate high amounts of sugar for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the likelihood is, is that we’ll both get diabetes. I’ll just get it sooner than you because I have a genetic predisposition for that, whereas you may not at the same time, even if I had that gene. If both of us lead a very low sugar lifestyle, even though I had the gene, it doesn’t mean it’s ever going to express itself if I don’t expose myself to that environment.
So it’s the environment that acts on the gene. The gene has its weaknesses and its strength, but those aren’t activated. They’re affected unless they’re activated. In fact, it is so important to say right up front to which is a philosophy that you don’t get in the allopathic world is this point, that the basic premise was that the body heals itself.
The lifestyle triggers are what’s called epigenetics. Epigenetics are literally around or above your genes and lifestyle dictates a majority of those epigenetics. I’m in the middle of a PhD right now in molecular biology at the University of Miami. It’s a very traditional molecular biology course. We’re covering epigenetics in good detail, like this very standard of care that we’re describin. It hasn’t been applied clinically yet as much in allopathic medicine as it has, let’s say in functional medicine.
Well, we’re all waiting, trust me, because also what I like about your attitude, your medical approach, is that the body is its own best healer and your job is to find out what part, what is the root problem in the body and to support it in non toxic ways to allow it to regenerate itself. Is that correct?
Yeah. 100% what you were talking about earlier, and the answer I was giving at first when you’d ask that question. If you understood that the body was just designed to basically genetically break down over its lifespan, you should expect things to stop working properly and you should expect to have loss of mobility, increase in pain and less quality of life as you age. It would make perfect sense that we would try to put band aids on all of those symptoms, to try to make people as comfortable as they can throughout their decline in their life. The opposite is the way we look at it. If you’re seeing those things, we’re not designed to break down over time in that way. We’re actually designed to have a very long healthspan and it’s only in the last few years of our life that we should see a decline, not for 20 or 30 years like we are seeing right now with all the chronic illness. When your understanding is that the human body was designed to be healthy, and you start to see things stray from that, that’s when you step in right away. This isn’t part of the original design, we need to step in and take action and that’s kind of what I was trying to describe initially and what you were talking about in terms of the philosophy.
Okay, so let’s let’s get to hyperbaric oxygen therapy. What is it? What does it do? How does it work?
So I think the simplest example would be that hyperbaric oxygen is increasing the pressure of the air or the pressure of the oxygen that you’re breathing while you’re getting treated. If I took a step back from that, I would say this: I live at sea level, and we have an atmosphere on planet Earth and the atmosphere creates a pressure. That pressure is why you and I are absorbing oxygen even right now as we’re having this conversation. We all know that if you go to elevation, let’s say I was on the East Coast. Let’s say I went to Colorado, and I’m at 5000 to 6000 feet of elevation. We all know that it’s harder to breathe at that elevation. And the reason for that is not because there’s less oxygen percentage. The reason for that is because there’s a loss of pressure. So as you get further and further away from the Earth’s surface, you lose pressure, which means you lose the driving force that pushes oxygen into your body when you breathe. When you go below sea level, the opposite is true. When you go below sea level, you can create increased pressure gradients, which means as you descend below sea level, you can start driving more and more oxygen into the body. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is really just a way to artificially create an increased pressure environment that allows that oxygen to get driven into yourself.
You’re saying how it was just like being at below sea level and it infused with the pressure, bringing in a lot of oxygen not just into your lungs. It brings it into all your your organs too, right?
A pulse oximeter tells you how saturated your red blood cells are with oxygen, meaning when you breathe oxygen in and you have to bring it into your body in order to deliver it to your cells. We have transporters of oxygen called red blood cells. Red blood cells are basically smaller cells that absorb oxygen in your lungs, bring them to your cells and release the oxygen back to your lungs and collect more go back to your cells to release it. It just goes in that cycle. But we are limited to how much oxygen we can absorb based on how quickly or however many red blood cells we have. If you’re healthy without it, or at least don’t have any heart issues, most of us would be about 98-99% saturated already. This means there’s really not a whole lot more oxygen our bodies are capable of holding onto under normal circumstances. You could be close to 100% saturated but have an injury or chronic illness or an inflammatory issue or toxicity of some kind. If you were able to tap into some extra supply of oxygen, your body would be able to utilize that oxygen for improved healing and recovery. But again, under normal circumstances, we really don’t have any ability to create that reservoir. Ultimately, that is what hyperbaric oxygen is because of that increased pressure. Because we can drive more oxygen into your circulation, we can saturate your red blood cells to 100% That part’s pretty easy. What we can do beyond that is we can actually dissolve all of this oxygen into the liquid portion of your blood. It’s called your plasma. Normally your plasma holds very little oxygen. But under hyperbaric conditions you can really drive anywhere from 30% more oxygen all the way up to about 20 times more oxygen into the plasma. Now you’re creating a reservoir, now the body has this extra oxygen which you can finally use for improved recovery, improved heat healing, reduction in inflammation increased in stem cells. It’s done because of that extra oxygen that we’re driving into the cells through that extra pressure.
Now how does that work? You have this whole description and I’m gonna give a seventh grade view of it because that’s how I understood it. Basically, the most important part of it is is your mitochondria which produces your cell energy. If your cells have good energy, that is what keeps inflammation and toxicity away. So basically this oxygen creates more cell energy in the mitochondria. Is that correct?
Yeah. You could look at the mitochondria as literally the engine of the cell. It’s what makes power so that the cells can run optimally. For example, your liver detoxifies so if you have a lot of power in your liver, you can detoxify well. If you get a lot of power to your brain cells, you can process and flip information or you could have have more complex thoughts or clear thoughts. If it goes to your intestines, you can absorb nutrients better if it goes to your muscles, you can be faster or stronger. Wherever those engines are, the mitochondria has a job and that job is dependent on the mitochondria’s ability to produce energy for that cell. Oxygen happens to be one of the rate limiting steps in energy production. Just like in your car, if you want to understand how engines work, one of the things we would do is we would put like a cold air intake. We would try to drive more air into the engine because we know that if we get more oxygen, we can burn a hotter, more powerful fire, which creates more power for that engine. This is like that. We’re driving more oxygen into the engine of the cell into the mitochondria. And that helps make the mitochondria even more productive in terms of how much energy it can produce. As we age or as our bodies get ill from chronic illnesses, the energy production goes down.
I think I understood this properly from your book. It also can multiply the creation of stem cells right and if you could explain what stem cells are and why that’s important and what effect it has on the body.
As we age or if we are chronically inflamed or diagnosed with a chronic illness, we have cells that are called senescent cells and those are basically old cells that don’t function as well as the younger self. They tend to produce a lot of inflammation or they create poor signaling in between other cells. One of the body’s jobs is to identify senescence cells. We do this really well when we’re young. We identify senescence cells and the body actually kills them because they’re not functioning properly. As you do that, that creates a space to allow stem cells, which are basically brand new, young, vibrant cells. Those stem cells will come in to replace wherever senescent cells are lost. Hyperbaric oxygen has this way of helping to reduce cellular senescence, in other words, helps to get rid of all of these older dysfunctional cells. And then because of that, regulating our body’s ability to release stem cells so that those stem cells can now go into all of those places where senescent cells were lost, and start turning on a younger more vibrant cell function in that area.
Man, I’m ready to jump into things right now. Okay. I want to talk about the various diseases and how you would use hyperbaric therapy to treat them and what experience that would be for for the patient. Let’s talk about auto immune illnesses because as you reported in your book, 50 million Americans suffer from autoimmune disease. The total costs associated with autoimmune diseases every year is $100 billion. So say somebody came, what’s a common one that you treat?
Quite a few. We see PAH patients with you know, MS, Ulcerative Colitis, Crohn’s.
Talk about MS.
An important distinction to make when we’re hyperbaric is approved for about 14 conditions. The FDA has determined 14 conditions that are approved for marketing treatment of that issue with hyperbaric oxygen, all 14 of that, for the most part, almost all 14 of them are basically very acute and either life or limb threatening conditions. Things like gangrene, osteonecrosis, necrotizing fasciitis, flesh eating bacteria, carbon monoxide poisoning. Hyperbaric oxygen is approved for these literally life threatening illnesses or limb threatening illnesses where if we don’t do something drastic quickly, we’re going to either obviously lose our life or potentially have something amputated. And in those cases, hyperbaric oxygen, even though it’s a last case scenario, actually still works very well. I bring that up, only to say that all the other things that we use for hyperbaric oxygen, we really specialize in what would be considered more off label use. But if you look at the mechanisms of action, the reason that hyperbaric works for those 14 issues is very similar, if not almost identical to the reasons the mechanisms that we would use hyperbaric for all of these other conditions. Technically, we’re not treating MS. We’re not treating ulcerative colitis, we’re not treating Crohn’s. What we’re doing is oxygenating people that happen to have a variety of different diagnoses. It’s through that extra oxygen that we were talking about earlier, that ultimately starts to improve the regulation of that person’s body. So things we know about hyperbaric oxygen is that it massively reduces inflammatory cytokines. So those chemicals that your body releases from inflammation, it really you know, radically reduces those cytokines but it also up regulates the anti inflammatory system that naturally exists in our body.
Learn more about hyperbaric oxygen therapy with Dr. Jason Sonners and Kristina Borjesson on our next blog.
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