Super Bowl Postscript: The Last Play of the Last Game

Hyperbaric oxygen may have played a role in what some call the biggest story of Super Bowl XLVI. Last night's game ended with a Hail Mary pass to an injured Rob Gronkowski, who set a regular-season record for tight ends with 17 touchdown catches. This wasn't one of them. Nursing a high ankle sprain, Gronkowski finished just two catches for 26 yards in the Super Bowl. A wonder he played at all. Add him, with an asterisk, to our list of NFL stars using hyperbaric oxygen chambers. Or so one orthopaedic surgeon guesses. Dr Paul Cain, head of sports medicine at Central Maine Orthopaedics, explains the severity of Gronkowski's injury and the probable use of RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevation), a walking boot to immobilize the ankle, ultrasound, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Read "Super Bowl: Auburn doc talks Gronkowski sprain" in the Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal.

[Photo: Richard Mackson, US PRESSWIRE]

Super Bowl, Super Hype, Super Violative NFL Promotion of Mild Hyperbaric Bag

We've grown accustomed to people hawking mild hyperbaric bags on the web with utter disregard for applicable laws against off-label promotion. Manufacturers, resellers, entrepreneurs, fraudsters, quacks—they fight amongst themselves for the attention of unsuspecting healthcare consumers. It's a brisk trade.

Now the National Football League has published this video testimonial by Cleveland Browns linebacker D'Qwell Jackson. It crosses a line. By posting its 28 December profile of Jackson, the League has become complicit in the violative promotion of a medical device.

The NFL has not yet responded to our repeated email and voicemail messages.

Again, we concur with the National Board of Diving and Hyperbaric Medical Technology's April 2011 position statement on Portable, Low-pressure, Fabric Hyperbaric Chambers. See our recent posts from 30 January, "Football Injury Rehab: Bad Information Sparks Silly Debate About Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy," and 22 January, "NFL Divisional Playoffs: Which Players Are Using Hyperbaric Oxygen Chambers?" Learn more about hyperbaric chamber manufacturers and hyperbaric chamber types on HyperbaricLink.com.

CAUTION: The following promotional video clearly violates FDA regulations. Portable, inflatable, fabric chambers are FDA-cleared for acute mountain sickness only. They're not safe for unattended self-treatment at home. They're certainly not safe to sleep in. And no hyperbaric chamber is approved for the treatment of Jackson's torn pectoral muscles or other such sports-related injuries.

See The Little Pufferbellies All In A Row

Last month we got our first closeup look at some inflatable/portable chambers cheerfully hissing away near our stand at the HBOT2010 7th International Symposium. There we met the most wonderful folks—patients, clinicians, and businesspeople—whose zeal impressed but whose words and ideas left us with troubling questions about the validity—science, equipment, and promotion—of mild hyperbaric oxygen therapy today.

Still we're confident there's a place in the world for mHBOT. It lies somewhere between this week's hatchet job in the Canadian Press and this local TV puff piece:



We're apt to agree when "MDs want rules for private hyperbaric clinics promoting unproven treatments." In fact there are rules Health Canada and the US Food and Drug Administration can and do enforce from time to time. But that's a totally unfair matchup of interviewees in the Canadian Press article.

We're apt to support good people offering sick children and families hope and no-cost access to therapy. But their claims are as wild as their HBOT is mild. And that's full media complicity in violative promotions by My Fox Tampa Bay.

HyperbaricLink prefers a shakeup to a crackdown. More information for healthcare consumers and referring physicians. More facility accreditation and professional credentialing. More clinical investigations and evidence-based practice. More light and less heat in our struggle to advance hyperbaric medicine, even HBOT of the mild persuasion, between consenting adults, and preferably under a doctor's supervision in a safety-inspected clinical setting that can handle any possible side-effects or medical emergencies.

Autism: Second CARD Study Finds HBOT Ineffective

A new study, supplementing last year's work by the same Center for Autism & Related Disorders (CARD) team, casts yet more doubt on the efficacy of mild hyperbaric oxygen therapy (mHBOT) for children with autism. The original paper is forthcoming in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, the leading peer-reviewed, scholarly periodical on autism spectrum disorders.

These investigations are of a lower order than the Rossignol random controlled trial, where the efficacy of mHBOT was demonstrated. But still we consider CARD's null findings and well-played refutation an even more important contribution to the medical literature today.

We're also aware of the sometimes combative passions within the autism community, even among normally dispassionate scientists, and especially surrounding the Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) movement. Rossignol excites us, too. Yet it disturbs us whenever we hear mHBOT practitioners ready to take Rossignol to the clinic, to the home, or (ahem) to the bank. We've seen him present and heard him emphasize just how much more work there is to be done.

In the final analysis, none of the studies published to date could charitably be called landmark science. We're very early in this important pursuit, and we encourage investigators to take stock and look ahead. Again we draw the reader's attention to the nicely balanced UHMS position statement on "The Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy." (See our June 16 post, HBOT For Autism: Junk Science?)

HBOT For Autism: Junk Science?

Yesterday "hyperbaric oxygen chambers to cure autism" made the Junk Science Week shortlist in a major Canadian newspaper. National Post financial columnist Terance Corcoran, darting about from fear to hype to hope, fails to build much of a case for such harsh judgment. And his entire tirade stems from a pretty finely balanced television story on CBC's The National.

We're on record, in this blog and on the HyperbaricLink autism page, in favor of more well-designed clinical investigations to build on last year's interesting work by Rossignol, et al, using mild HBOT. The UHMS December 2009 position statement on "The Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy" concurs:

... there is a strong case for further trials to be done in this area. Any future trials would need to be well planned, appropriately powered and include several relevant treatment arms.... These clinical efforts should be combined with efforts to elucidate the basic mechanisms by which mild hyperbaric therapy might exert a therapeutic effect.

Now does that sound like Junk Science to you? Let's be ever mindful of the canyon that lies between "unstudied" and "disproven" medical claims, especially when seeking effective treatments for such a poorly misunderstood condition as autism.

Mixed Martial Arts: From Octagon Cage To HBOT Chamber

Punches, kicks, elbows, knees—mixed martial artists take more physical punishment in one 5-minute round than most athletes endure in a lifetime, and today's top cage fighters are helping popularize hyperbaric oxygen therapy for rapid rehabilitation and superfitness training.

In Saturday night's pay-per-view bout, HBOT maven Urijah "The California Kid" Faber (photo left) was gunning to reclaim his featherweight championship title from Brazilian phenom Jose Aldo. Faber lost by unanimous decision. But by 4 a.m. the next morning he was already telling his 40,000 Twitter followers he was in the hyperbaric chamber to reduce swelling in his badly bruised left thigh. In 2009 he had overcome a fractured hand and climbed back into contention with the help of hometown physicians at the Hyperbaric Oxygen Clinic of Sacramento. Our hats off to the man.

Veteran cagefighter and broadcaster Frank "Twinkle Toes" Trigg (photo right) uses his personal chamber to enhance his training methods and is endorsed by OxyHealth Portable Hyperbarics. The leading manufacturer of mild hyperbaric (mHBOT) chambers has sold over 7,000 units in the last 10 years.

Accelerated healing. Superhealth and fitness. Elite athletics. Personal hyperbarics. Once more we find common clinical practice running at a breakneck pace ahead of the scientific evidence, and the mainstream HBOT market struggling to catch up with a whole new generation of healthcare consumers, inspired by celebrities and moving fast in social networks. It's not the blood sport for everybody. But we can't seem to look away.

Aussie Cricketer Dominates Holiday HBOT News

All through December about the only thing our usual newsfeeds wanted to know was, Will the Australian cricket skipper Ricky Ponting be healthy for the Boxing Day Test? To speed healing of a strained tendon in his elbow Ponting spent the night of his 35th birthday in a hyperbaric chamber. Seems to have worked. Yes, he played December 26, and played brilliantly, by all reliable accounts.

So we add another high-profile testimonial to a growing list of elite athletes using and promoting hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). And it's not just a fad. More and more professional athletes, trainers, and sports medicine professionals are choosing HBOT as an alternative or adjunctive treatment for sports injury rehabilitation. Even if claims of speedier healing don't find much support in the clinical literature, there's no stopping a trend this strong.

We're fascinated by the growing popularity of HBOT for sports rehabilitation. But could hyperbaric oxygen be considered a kind of performance-enhancing drug, like blood doping? Does room air at mild pressure (mHBOT) do any good? What dosages of pressure and oxygen work best for various types and severities of injury?

In time, today's active practitioners will find the answers in the clinic and spread the word among their peers. We're on the beat and on the side of healthcare consumers seeking useful information and easy connections to local clinics and physicians.

Autism: HBOT Among "Risky Alternative Therapies"?

Strong words from the recent Chicago Tribune autism treatment series. At the risk of offending some parents and physicians of children with autism, we recommend it as required reading. Not that we'd lump hyperbaric oxygen in with "risky alternative therapies," but perhaps an HBOT researcher or two can honestly be said to have "hijacked" science to suit their objectives.

Still, individual successes and powerful anecdotes do matter. Medicine invented higher education by case study, after all. O2.0 simply won't view skepticism and hope as mutually exclusive principles but, rather, as equally strong motivators for good evidence-based medicine. So let's get on with it. Once more we urge researchers to raise the pressure from mild to true HBOT and raise the stakes by organizing larger prospective trials and observational studies.

(Baltimore Sun photo by Algerina Perna of Dr Carlos Pardo at Johns Hopkins.)

Wired: How Smart Is That?

Hey, we display this magazine on our coffee tables! HBOT landed the 3 Smart Things About column in the September issue of Wired. Okay, so we're a little miffed HyperbaricLink didn't make the shortlist. But we're not at all surprised autism and sports injuries captured the editors' imagination over all the really smart things about hyperbarics. All those professional fighters and ballplayers using inflatable chambers can't be wrong, we guess they guessed. Awesome illustration, though.

What would make your list of 3 Smart Things About Hyperbaric Chambers? This blog has a comment section, you know.