Why Patients Are Turning to a New Method
Radiation therapy is one of the most common treatments for many types of cancer. While it can save the lives of those suffering from cancer, it also comes with undesirable side effects like extreme fatigue, nausea, loss of appetite, hair loss, and, in the case of head and neck radiation, bone loss of the mandible. Radiation can damage the blood vessels, which limits blood flow, oxygen, and the bone’s ability to repair itself. Over time, this increases the risk of infection and causes the mandible to become necrotic, leading to osteoradionecrosis, or ORN. ORN is difficult and expensive to treat because the only way to resolve it is to completely remove all necrotic (infected) tissue. For someone immersed in the daily struggles of cancer, this is a stressful and unwanted addition to an already complex illness. For patients facing this, can Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) speed up healing after surgery?
Understanding Radiation Injury
ORN is rare and only seen in 5-10% of radiation patients, but the effects can be debilitating, difficult to manage, and treatment is often unsuccessful. Radiation works by damaging cancer cells, but it also affects otherwise healthy tissue- particularly in the jaw, skin, and digestive organs. In this article, we’re focusing primarily on damage to the mandible bone from radiation therapy.
Traditional treatment of ORN includes antibiotics, wound care, and surgery to remove necrotic tissue. The most successfully treated cases of ORN have included the use of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT.)
What is Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy is a treatment that involves breathing pressurized oxygen through a mask. During normal circulation, oxygen attached to red blood cells then makes its way back to the heart and throughout the rest of the body to the cells in our bones, tissue, and organs. When we face illness or injury, inflammation occurs, and those cells become hypoxic or starved of oxygen. Without the appropriate amount of oxygen, cells can’t repair themselves, which keeps them stuck in a state of inflammation and delays the healing process.
With HBOT treatment, your body absorbs pressurized oxygen and delivers it to the hypoxic cells. The extra oxygen allows the cells to receive nutrients, reduces inflammation, and supports healing in damaged tissue. Because of its benefits for overall wellness, tissue repair, and antimicrobial properties, HBOT works in conjunction with traditional treatment for a variety of conditions like Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), Mold and Toxicity Illness, Lyme Disease, Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs), and chronic infections- including ORN.
High doses of radiation over long periods of time can cause tissue to become hypoxic, hypovascular (decrease in the density of blood vessels), and eventually deteriorate. When oxygen is pumped into those cells, they can revascularize, regenerate, and support immune function to fight off infection.
Preparing for Surgery with HBOT
Using HBOT to help with recovery post-surgery makes sense to a lot of health practitioners. A treatment that helps repair damaged tissue would be ideal for healing surgery incisions and speeding up the process, right?
Yes. But what about before surgery?
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy as a pre- treatment can increase the success of surgery by about 85%. An example of this is the Marx Protocol, which involves 30 HBOT treatments before surgery and 10 sessions post-surgery. In one study, patients who received the Marx Protocol had an ORN incident rate of 5%, while those who didn’t had nearly 30%. The few HBOT patients who developed ORN after the protocol did not require resections (removal of the infected root of a tooth), which suggests that even when ORN occurred, it wasn’t as severe and could be more easily treated.
Over the years, they stopped giving patients the 30 pre-treatments of HBOT and saw that the success rate of the surgery went down significantly, which tells us a lot about the potency of HBOT pre-treatment.
But why is it helpful to do HBOT before surgery?
The regenerative properties of HBOT help your body to start the healing process before surgery even begins. HBOT treatments can restore 75-85% of tissue density, making it more resilient to infections and trauma. Its regenerative properties help increase cell efficiency, support the growth of new capillaries, reduce inflammation, and mobilize stem cells- all of which help your body be as healthy as it can be before going under the knife.
Some surgeries are unexpected and you don’t always have time to prepare or schedule multiple HBOT sessions. In these cases, even a small amount of exposure to HBOT (3-6 hours) can still boost your body’s resilience and speed up the healing process post-surgery. By boosting the whole body’s healing capabilities, HBOT can even help prepare patients in cases where surgery may not have been possible otherwise.
Does HBOT really help before and after surgery?
Even if you receive HBOT treatments before surgery, that doesn’t mean it’s not useful post-surgery as well. Even in life-saving situations, surgery is a form of trauma to your body. It causes inflammation and damages tissue, both of which heal faster with increased oxygen. All of the healing mechanisms in your body require oxygen to function and more oxygen to damaged cells means shorter recovery times, reduced risk of infections and other complications so you can get back to your life more quickly
There’s no question that Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy has made a big difference in the recovery of surgery and healing from infection. If you want to learn how HBOT can help you, we’re here to answer all your questions. Schedule a consult today!
