As the parent of a special needs child, I was always looking for something to help my child’s condition or eliminate it. Many physicians, specialists and other medical professionals were not finding the answers, so my wife and me had to find something for our child. I am sure you feel the same way and never stop looking for something that could heal your child.
Today, I would like to tell you about a therapy that helped my child and maybe it may help your child too: Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy.
I know there are positive and negative reviews of it. I want to give you some background on it and my positive review of it from a parent’s perspective.
What’s Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?
What exactly is Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment Therapy?
Put simply, it’s a process of using oxygen to heal up a injury or condition. This treatment isn’t old. It’s used to heal injuries like: decompression sickness, burns, wound healing and more.
Today, this therapy also treats things like: Autism, Cerebral Palsy, damage from Cancer treatments, Crohn’s Disease and much more. Many parents are starting to look at alternative therapies and treatments for their children. Hyperbaric Oxygen treatments are one of the alternative treatments available for special needs children and children with life altering conditions.
The therapy is a non-invasive way of using 100% oxygen under increased atmospheric pressure in a controlled chamber. Different facilities may have different setups, but this is the base setup of most therapy centers.
My Experience With Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Treatments
Now, you might be asking, “why should I even look at this? What do you know about it?” The answer is: I have first hand experience of the process and have seen the changes the therapy made.
One thing I want to say is before you decide to go this route of therapy: check it out. This is what I and wife did before we committed to using it. We asked physicians, friends, family and other special needs parents. We toured the facilities and did our own research about the procedure and how it would possibly help our child’s condition.
After all the research, we decided to try things out and see what happened. Nothing we found showed anything negative to the treatments.
The only issue we found was: pricing. The treatments are not cheap and if you have to travel to a therapy center, it could run into a major expense. I would suggest checking with your insurance company and see what could be covered and maybe finding other ways of funding the therapies like fundraisers. Luckily, we had a local center that was lower priced with the same facilities and treatments.
At first, my child was uneasy getting into a body chamber. After a few tries, she got in. Other than the initial entry, everything ran smoothly. There was a TV with DVD player for my child to watch movies. She just sat in the chamber and watched her favorite shows until it was time to get out.
After doing a certain amount of treatments, we did begin to see changes and how she was able to do things she couldn’t do before. We also took video of her before the treatments and after the treatments – the results were positive and there for all to see. The results gave us the motivation to do more treatments last year and we are looking to do them again this summer.
If you were looking for alternative treatments and therapies, I would recommend you checkout Hyperbaric Oxygen treatments for your child. Now, I am not saying it is a miracle solution and results could vary, but for my child, and me it was very positive experience.
What are your thoughts on HBOT? Have you had positive or negative experiences with it? Please post your comments below.
Photo credit: komunews
Hi there,
my fiancee has an 11-year-old daughter with cp, and I’m a Conductive Education teacher (special ed teacher for children with physical disabilities). I have a blog and I analyzed HBOT last month. http://conductiveupbringing.blogspot.com/2010/05/heartless-vol-2-tale-of-oxygen.html
My findings are not as positive as yours, but we prefer to look into evidence and there is such about HBOT–it’s flat out proven not to work for cp. On the other hand, children learn and improve all the time so that provides the explanation why your child improved–with or without HBOT it would have been the same.
There are no serious side effects either, other than some cases of middle ear barotrauma and a child with and his grandma burned to death in one of these a while ago (I believe it was an accident) as oxygen is very flammable. http://www.examiner.com/x-25472-Madison-Healthy-Living-Examiner~y2010m2d17-Four-year-old-boy-and-his-grandmother-killed-in-hyperbaric–chamber-fire?cid=exrss-Madison-Healthy-Living-Examiner
Hi Viktoria,
Thank you for your comment on the post.
I do appreciate your views and opinions on the subject, but I simply wrote this as what my experience was with the treatments. I was not trying to say this is for everyone. As I stated in the post, please do your research and I am also not promoting this as a “miracle” treatment at all, but the post is only what I have seen and experienced first hand.
I did see different cases showing improvements and others with no improvements before we decided to go forward with treatments. After looking at those and speaking with other professionals, parents and doing some serious thinking, we went ahead with the treatment.
We actually spoke to some parents who were in favor of the treatments that had children who were non-responsive and no brain activity to moving around and functioning again. Again, no evidence other then the experience of the parent.
The reason we looked at the therapy was this: after having every specialist we go to tell us, “we don’t know” and there was no other options to help, we as the parents are responsible for our child and if that means finding other possible solutions that are not “completely proven”, so be it. If your child needs help, you will do whatever you can to help them – it’s what you do as a parent.
There are many things in this world that science can’t explain or have proven don’t work, but sometimes, somehow something positive happens from that “inconclusive” solution, treatment, or thought. I do believe in all the experts and research…to a point. Having a special needs child and watching what they can and can’t do; praying everyday and night; watching helplessly while everyone else tells you there’s nothing that can be done has opened my eyes to other possibilities. I mean how can you explain other countries other centuries with no modern medicine, but can cure things in ways we, in a modern healthcare society, even accept.
Thanks again for your comment and I really do appreciate it, but I was simply pointing out that there could be other things out there and I have seen it with my own eyes as well as other members of my family and other special needs parents that now have children they can talk to compared to before – it’s only my experience with this treatment and I hope to help others if I can as you are doing as well with your research and writing.
Hi George,
thank you and I do understand everything you’re saying. We’re walking in the same shoes as you do, and we’d love if there was a treatment that took the brain injury away or caused a lot of or even a little improvement and we’d go for it if there was such straightaway, regardless of how much it would cost. What gets old after a while is just all the promises, the fake scientific descriptions and all the false hope that’s thrown at parents like us. After a while this is old and it is enough.
I guess everybody has has to walk their own journey and wade through information the way it suits them. I felt the necessity to comment on your post because there’s an other side, there’s always an other side and the truth does not always lie at the side we favor or prefer. I believe the truth lies at high-quality scientific studies which are designed to rule out biases that we all naturally have when we observe such things such as development of our children. This is why any parent’s observation counts much less for me in my decision making than a large scale, randomized, controlled trial does . I posted the link to the study on my blog.
There is no cure, but it isn’t true that there’s nothing that can be done. There is, it’s just not medicine. Everybody can learn, even people with disabilities, and teaching can always be done through normal activities, the same way typical children learn through normal activities. I know this doesn’t sound a fraction as fantastic as a miracle cure, but there’s tremendous real hope in teaching and learning.
Hi George,
My son was 7 years old when he suffered cardiac arrest and has a severe anoxic injury as a result . I joined a web site where I learned about HBOT from an expert living in the UK, where HBOT is a known treatment for brain injury. We went for the first time 3 years ago and from the beginning we saw improvements.
After the very first treatment my son slept through the night, something he hadn’t done in 18 months. After a few more sessions he began making sounds. By the time our first group of 40 sessions was complete he was also helping to get out of his chair. Since then his improvements have been slow, but improvements none-the-less. And the improvements come faster during and shortly after each group of sessions that when we are not in the process.
To date we have done 140 sessions and are planning more in a few weeks. I would encourage any parent of a brain injured child of any degree to look into this therapy. I’ve met people for whom it has and has not worked. Everyone is different and every brain injury is different.