When something happens, most of us take our ability to heal for granted. When the healing stops or something goes and you're just not getting better, there may be another treatment which may help you. We are talking today about hyperbaric medicine. Joining us, Dr. Workman from the SL Wound Care and Hypergaric Medicine and he explains what a hyperbaric chambers can do.
Dr. Workman describes it as, "Increase pressure, baric is the term for pressure, and hyper is more. so you are just increasing the pressure around the patient and then also having them breathe 100% oxygen during that treatment. Something that's been used for a very long time but especially the last hundred years, but it's really catching on just in the last few decades, the realization of what it can do."
He says, "There are about fifteen things that are approved indications, diabetic wounds, bone infections. ofourse, it was originally for diving sickness, the bends. That's what it was originally designed to treat. We discovered that it treats a lot of things."
The challenge with this sort of treatment is getting insurance companies to pay for it. Still Dr. Workman says the reseach currently being done with stroke, traumatic brain injury, near drownings, these injuries are not only devastating to the patient but to their families as well. Patients are faced with a lifestyle change. Research is showing hyperbaric chambers dissolve ten to fifty times as much oxygen into the plasma part of the blood this can diffuse to areas and wake up and they grow new capillaries and make a permanent change.
Salt Lake Wound Care is not a hospital, Dr. Workmans says, "That is one of the things that I think that sets us apart is because we are not hospital affiliated, we are able to do some of these things that are still in research and we do it a lot less expensively. It doesn't cost a thousand dollars like the hospitals charge. we are in the $150 and $200, which is still a huge commitment."
For more information please visit the
Salt Lake Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine website
