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All the right moves: the need for the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating TBI/CTE/PTSD

BACKGROUND: The modern age of hyperbaric medicine began in 1937; however, today few know about hyperbaric oxygen’s effects on the body and medical conditions outside of diving medicine and wound care centers - a serious ethical issue as there are 20 US military veterans committing suicide every day...

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Autor principal: Stoller, Kenneth P.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4512112/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26207174
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13618-015-0028-0
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author Stoller, Kenneth P.
author_facet Stoller, Kenneth P.
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description BACKGROUND: The modern age of hyperbaric medicine began in 1937; however, today few know about hyperbaric oxygen’s effects on the body and medical conditions outside of diving medicine and wound care centers - a serious ethical issue as there are 20 US military veterans committing suicide every day directly related to Traumatic Brain Injury/Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The problem is not whether hyperbaric oxygen is effective for treating brain injuries, but why the interference in offering this therapy to those who need it. DISCUSSION: Up against black-boxed anti-depressants that are not efficacious, it should be a “no-brainer” to use a safe, off-label drug, but in the case of military veterans, every suicide might be seen as a tremendous cost saving to certain technocrats. The unspoken rationale is that if the military were to embrace hyperbaric oxygen as the efficacious therapy that it is then current active troops that have suffered injuries will come forward and seek treatment and benefits for their Traumatic Brain Injuries now that they know there is a viable therapy and in so doing troop strength will be decimated. So, to attempt to delay the acceptance of hyperbaric oxygen the Department of Defense has funded faux-studies claiming low pressure room air to be a placebo or sham, and then proclaiming there is no statistical difference between treatment arms and sham or placebo treatment arms. With few who understand hyperbaric medicine there is almost no one to call them on this subterfuge and prevarication. Many peer-reviewed articles have been published in the last decade that demonstrate hyperbaric oxygen is effective in repairing an injured brain even long after that injury took place. One of the most notable showed that blast-induced brain injured war veterans experienced a 15 point IQ increase (p < 0.001). SUMMARY: Hyperbaric oxygen is an efficacious, benign and humanitarian way to affect brain repair but it has not been adopted because it lacks patent protection and has no large corporate sponsors. It has also met interference because other agendas are present be they the protection of the status quo, myopic budgetary constraints, or perceived liability issues.
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spelling pubmed-45121122015-07-24 All the right moves: the need for the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating TBI/CTE/PTSD Stoller, Kenneth P. Med Gas Res Commentary BACKGROUND: The modern age of hyperbaric medicine began in 1937; however, today few know about hyperbaric oxygen’s effects on the body and medical conditions outside of diving medicine and wound care centers - a serious ethical issue as there are 20 US military veterans committing suicide every day directly related to Traumatic Brain Injury/Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The problem is not whether hyperbaric oxygen is effective for treating brain injuries, but why the interference in offering this therapy to those who need it. DISCUSSION: Up against black-boxed anti-depressants that are not efficacious, it should be a “no-brainer” to use a safe, off-label drug, but in the case of military veterans, every suicide might be seen as a tremendous cost saving to certain technocrats. The unspoken rationale is that if the military were to embrace hyperbaric oxygen as the efficacious therapy that it is then current active troops that have suffered injuries will come forward and seek treatment and benefits for their Traumatic Brain Injuries now that they know there is a viable therapy and in so doing troop strength will be decimated. So, to attempt to delay the acceptance of hyperbaric oxygen the Department of Defense has funded faux-studies claiming low pressure room air to be a placebo or sham, and then proclaiming there is no statistical difference between treatment arms and sham or placebo treatment arms. With few who understand hyperbaric medicine there is almost no one to call them on this subterfuge and prevarication. Many peer-reviewed articles have been published in the last decade that demonstrate hyperbaric oxygen is effective in repairing an injured brain even long after that injury took place. One of the most notable showed that blast-induced brain injured war veterans experienced a 15 point IQ increase (p < 0.001). SUMMARY: Hyperbaric oxygen is an efficacious, benign and humanitarian way to affect brain repair but it has not been adopted because it lacks patent protection and has no large corporate sponsors. It has also met interference because other agendas are present be they the protection of the status quo, myopic budgetary constraints, or perceived liability issues. BioMed Central 2015-05-28 /pmc/articles/PMC4512112/ /pubmed/26207174 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13618-015-0028-0 Text en © Stoller. 2015 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Commentary
Stoller, Kenneth P.
All the right moves: the need for the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating TBI/CTE/PTSD
title All the right moves: the need for the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating TBI/CTE/PTSD
title_full All the right moves: the need for the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating TBI/CTE/PTSD
title_fullStr All the right moves: the need for the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating TBI/CTE/PTSD
title_full_unstemmed All the right moves: the need for the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating TBI/CTE/PTSD
title_short All the right moves: the need for the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating TBI/CTE/PTSD
title_sort all the right moves: the need for the timely use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy for treating tbi/cte/ptsd
topic Commentary
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4512112/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26207174
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13618-015-0028-0
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