Use of mHBOT in Autism

[Guest guest]

I read a lot on the various lists about how the mild chambers are not

effective as the hard. Outside of autism you may be correct, but

within autism I think you might be in error.

Now I am not making this post to say anything about a hard or soft

chamber being better or the mild can be used better for things outside

of autism as we do not have experience there. I am posting because

there seems to be a general attitude that parents are not getting the

same quality of treatment using a mild chamber and from our studies

this is not what we see clinically. Also I am just posting what we

observed as we do use bot hard and mild chambers for treatment.

Our clinic has both a hard chamber and also does the soft chambers.

Originally we set up so that patients would come for 40 hours and

depending on which they could afford they could do the hard or the

soft for about 1/2 the price. When we did this, the hard chamber was

hands down the better choice. The doctor would recommend the hard for

the majority of the patients.

But we had patients that were not close to any facility and thus we

started a rental program as what we saw clinically using the soft for

40 hours children would progress even though it was not at the same

rate as we saw in the hard chamber at 1.5 ATA. It was very surprising

for the doctor to see that those using the rentals were progressing

better than our clinical for soft and in many cases the hard. The

doctor then started to explore the reasons and triy various protocols

using the mild chamber. What he found out was that for autism, consistency and

time under pressure made a bigger impact than the

amount of pressure. With the lower pressure, the patient can spend

more time with oxygen under pressure safely than you can in a hard

chamber. We now get in almost all cases better response to the mild

when done using the time under pressure protocol than we get with the

hard. The downside of this protocol is that it would be nearly

impossible to do in a clinical setting as the patient needs to come 6-

7 days a week twice a day. The rentals will fit this protocol very

well.

At this time, the doctor refers almost 100% of his patients to use the

mild treatment and our hard chamber is nearly empty. (We only treat

autism and mild CP so this limits who comes to our clinic). The

protocol we now use for the mild chamber produces the largest effect

that we observe for our practice. We have monitored over 40,000 hours

of treatment on autism alone and have refined the protocol using qeeg

data to see which makes the largest difference in the brain mapping.

Between the parents response and the qeeg data, for autism, 1.3 using

our protocol will provide the most changes in focus, attention,

receptive & expressive language (unless apraxia) and socialization.

We still find the hard makes a bigger difference in apraxia and

hypotonia, fine and gross motor skills and thus for many of our

patients they will do 5 days a week soft and 2 days hard to address

all issues.

As to regression, it can happen in both a hard or soft chamber. Most

commonly it is because the patient is not on enough anti-oxidants or

do not have a good yeast protocol in place. These reactions are rare

but they do exist. And by adjusting the amount of O2 or time of

exposure and correcting the anti-oxidants or yeast issues, the

regressions have all been reversible.

Rick Neubrander