Oxygen is one of the most crucial components of the energy production process that fuels body tissues. It sustains life and enables injured tissues to heal. In recent years, a very effective procedure for helping heal many ailments has developed from the idea that for optimum healing, more oxygen than is normally contained in and surrounding our bodies can be beneficial. As usual, when human medicine makes a breakthrough, it isn't long until someone figures out how to help horses with that same type of therapy. Enter hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) for horses.

How It Works

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy involves subjecting the patient to high levels of oxygen under pressure in a special chamber. At normal atmospheric pressure, there is a limit to the amount of oxygen carried by red blood cells and only a tiny amount of oxygen is dissolved in the plasma. HBOT is discussed in terms of atmospheres absolute (ATA). Atmospheric pressure at sea level is equal to 1 ATA. Higher pressure than this on the body would be similar to what a person would experience under water; each 33 feet (10 meters) of sea water provides an equivalent increase of 1 ATA of pressure. Thus when you are 33 feet under water, you are experiencing 2 ATA (one from normal atmospheric pressure and one from the addition of 33 feet of sea water). This gives an idea of the pressure you would feel in an oxygen chamber. Treatments in a chamber are given at 1.5 to three times the pressure of one atmosphere.

Increasing the amount of air breathed cannot significantly improve oxygen delivery to the body by way of hemoglobin, even if you breathe pure oxygen. But with increased pressure, the oxygen level in blood plasma increases, with higher delivery to all body tissues. Under these conditions, oxygen is physically dissolved in the plasma, even in the veins (which ordinarily carry only blood that is depleted of oxygen). The dissolved oxygen is more readily utilized by the body than the oxygen carried by red blood cells