Preface: Off Label, On Message

Please eavesdrop on our recent correspondences with O2.0 readers who feel that words like "investigational" and "off-label" might create the impression hyperbaric oxygen is strictly experimental or completely untested for indications not covered by insurance. The continuing conversation has informed both our diction and our outlook, as we prepare to expand our Conditions list well beyond the 13 UHMS-approved indications.

To one reader we wrote:

Besides safety, the FDA and insurers and HyperbaricLink visitors demand to know about efficacy, and proven efficacy is the only sure road to approval and reimbursement and wider practice. Of course what outcomes we can gather from the clinic and from growing bodies of lesser evidence matter, too. So while opinions and beliefs vary widely, and political and economic battles rage on, we'll be applying some hyperbaric pressure on the medical community to conduct bigger trials and publish more compelling evidence in bigger journals. Along the way, we're also here to connect healthcare consumers to clinicians who can treat them now, on or off label, as doctor and patient see fit.

We'll work extra hard going forward to be accurate and complete on this score. As the poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, "The accuracy of accurate letters is an accuracy with respect to the structure of reality." Quick, someone, go tweet that!