Rachel Lance

Great experimental endpoint.

Hyperbaric medicine is a field that has both amazing effects and amazing controversy at the same time.

It has proved to be really excellent for disease states where the issue is not enough oxygen.

If you think about it, that makes sense.

You pressurize the patients.

You give them oxygen.

You're forcing more oxygen into their bodies.

So some of the cases that it's extremely helpful for are things like diabetic wounds.

So these wounds become ulcers.

They have a difficult time healing because diabetic patients tend to have poor circulation in their limbs.

With hyperbaric treatment, they get the oxygen they need at that site to help those heal.

The same thing is really useful for cancer patients who have radiation burns.

If their immune systems are compromised by chemotherapy or simply just the trauma of the long invasive cancer treatment, the radiation burns show a lot of responsiveness to hyperbaric compression because it forces oxygen to that wound site and allows them to heal.

There's also some controversy about hyperbaric medicine because since it tends to be pretty harmless, like if you're pressurizing people under a known medical treatment table, there really aren't negative long-term side effects to be spoken of.

It sometimes then tends to get used by charlatans.

So it's been used to treat both autism and chronic traumatic brain injury, both of which have huge bodies of evidence showing that it does not help.

Yes.

That was when I was living out on Catalina Island.

And that was my first hyperbaric chamber.

Little baby Rachel.