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Transcript
- 03:44 About Dr. Scott Sherr
- 05:50 What is Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?
- 11:41 Benefits of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
- 17:51 Health conditions helped by hyperbaric oxygen therapy
- 26:26 Contraindications
- 31:09 HBOT and Stem Cell Therapy
- 32:59 Cost of HBOT
- 34:54 Session duration
- 36:50 Hard and soft (portable) chambers
- 40:31 Anti-aging
- 45:13 The most pressing health issue in the world today
- 49:16 HBOT and RSD
- 51:12 Contact Dr. Scott Sherr
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and you can find me on myersdetox.com. You can find this video podcast, a recording of the video of our talk today on my YouTube channel, wendyLiveto110 and on the blog post on myersdetox.com.
Today, we are interviewing Dr. Scott Sherr. I met him at the Bulletproof Biohackers Conference. He is a doctor that specializes in hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy. We’re going to be talking about the many benefits of this therapy and how you can incorporate it into your health regime even just for achieving optimum health and for anti-aging purposes. That’s what I’m going to be using it for.
So first, we have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature, so please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest today on this show.
I had a very lively conversation with Dr. Scott Sherr when we were at the Bulletproof Biohackers Conference. I was lucky enough to be able to try HBOT therapy. There’s actually another stall, another company that was demonstrating HBOT. And so everyone at the conference is able to try out a 10 or 15-minute session of hyperbaric oxygen therapy and it was interesting. I think I had an ear infection at the time because I felt a lot of pressure in my right ear.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Interesting.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, but I was happy it cleared it up. It cleared up the infection. My daughter was sick that weekend, so I think I was starting to get it and it cleared it up I believe.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Cool!
Wendy Myers: So Dr. Sherr is a board certified internal medicine physician with additional certification in hyperbaric medicine. He graduated suma cum laude from UCLA and as an undergraduate…
Dr.Scott Sherr: [inaudible 00:02:10]
Wendy Myers: …and he also graduated back to cum laude from the University of…
Dr.Scott Sherr: They’re not doing that great.
Wendy Myers: No. Actually, I don’t follow football, so I have no idea. That was an autoresponder.
Dr.Scott Sherr: That’s right.
Wendy Myers: He also graduated magna cum laude from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Sherr is a member of the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, as well as the Society of Hospital Medicine. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in San Francisco. So Dr. Sherr, thanks for coming on the show.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Wendy, thanks so much for having me today. I’m really excited to be here. And yeah, the Bulletproof Conference was great. I really enjoyed having that group next to me because patients could actually – or everybody. Nobody’s a patient. Well, everybody is a patient I guess, right?
But you guys could check it out. You could see what being in a – at least one type of hyperbaric chamber was all about. I got to meet a lot of great people including yourself and Dave Asprey who’s the Bulletproof Guy and a bunch of other great people, great speakers and some people that I’ve spoken to over many years, I finally got to meet in person, which was great.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, me too. I was so happy to meet him in person. He’s been on my podcast and I’ve gone on his, which I think just recently came out. It was just an amazing group of people all converging to try to improve their health. I loved it.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Great time!
Wendy Myers: It’s right up my alley.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell us your story? How did you get so involved in hyperbaric oxygen therapy?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Yeah, sure. It started off I think really in medical school. I trained in Baltimore as you mentioned. And in Baltimore, there’s a really big trauma center. And down in the basement of the trauma centers was this gigantic chamber. I had no idea what it first was when I saw it. It looks like sort of 1984-ish or something crazy. It’s like this gigantic chamber. But then I realized this was a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.
They were putting people in these chambers for any number of conditions from the trauma perspective including leg amputation, carbon monoxide poisoning and necrotizing fasciitis or an infection that’s also called flesh-eating bacteria. These guys are getting so much better. I was just amazed that all they’re really getting was oxygen under pressure.
One of my goals always going to medical school is to try to figure out a way where I can meld the allopathic view of medicine, which is western medicine with – there’s so many terms for it, but integrative, alternative, all those types of medicines together. What I realized when I was watching these guys go through hyperbaric, I’m like, “Well, why aren’t we using oxygen for other conditions?”
I did my research and I was like, “Wow! All over the world, they’re using it for so many other different types of conditions more so than we’re even using it in this country.” That’s how I got interested in it. That’s how my practice started really. I got certified in hyperbaric therapy when I was actually still in medical school. And when I came out to California where I live now, I found a place that was looking for a medical director and I jumped right at it.
The way I practiced hyperbaric therapy is I used hyperbaric therapy in an integrated way. It’s not just about the chamber. It’s not just about the oxygen and the pressure. It’s also about treating the person, treating them as an integrated human being both alternatively, as well as from the allopathic or western medical perspective as well depending on what the condition is.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners exactly what HBOT is?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Sure. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, the definition if you’re going to look it up is it’s the “intermittent administration of 100% oxygen at greater than atmospheric pressure.” So let me break that down for you a little bit. I’m sure some of your listeners are probably divers. So hyperbaric oxygen therapy really comes from divine medicine. It used to be called ‘just divine medicine’ for a long time actually. It sort of got its start when people in the 1880s, early 1900s were building bridges actually. What they had to do was they were sinking these guys deep underneath the water to build these bridges. Compressed air or hyperbaric air has actually been around since the 1660s. What they used to do is they compressed the air, put them in these chambers and these guys would sink down to the bottom of the ocean and dig out these bedrock to get these bridges to be stable. The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the most famous examples.
These guys would have to be down there for long periods of time. And then they would come up these tubes sort of life elevator shafts. If they came up too quickly, they’d get these severe symptoms. They would get neurologic symptoms like seizures, strokes even, paralysis, death. It was actually described back in the 1880s as ‘decompression’. At that time, it was called the ‘bends’. People would bend over a little bit and they had just severe muscle pains and things like that.
So that’s when the word hyperbaric oxygen therapy really came into play because they navy started diving. The navy back in the 1900s started having the technology to dive and they’re looking for ways to prevent ‘decompression illness’. That’s what they were starting to be called.
Wendy Myers: They were developing the Navy Seal program.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Exactly! They were actually developing the Navy Seal program back in the 1920s and ‘30s because actually, that’s the time when they actually figured out a way to compress oxygen as well, not just air. That really was the huge leap of technology that allowed hyperbaric oxygen therapy to come into play for decompression illness because you have these guys coming up too fast, getting these really bad symptoms. You put them back in a hyperbaric chamber with 100% oxygen and their symptoms went away.
Divers know about this as well. I mean, usually in a lot of big dive areas around the world, the Channel Islands and in Southern California, there are hyperbaric chambers right there just in case people do have these symptoms.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I learned that. I got certified when I was 12 or 13 years old – you know, 30 years ago. I learned all about hyperbaric oxygen therapy and thought it was really interesting. It’s nice to see it being used more often now as a medical treatment.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Oh, absolutely. And so let me go back to the definition because I always get sidetracked talking about history. I was actually a history major in college. I love history – history and psychobiology, by the way. So I have some science background too.
But anyway, so when we’re diving at sea level, that’s called the ‘1 atmospheric pressure’ or basically no pressure. We call it 1 ATA. That’s just the terminology. So if you’re 33 feet below the sea, you’re actually at 2 ATA. That’s 33 feet of seawater on top of you. So all that water is exerting on your lungs. You don’t really feel it because you’re weightless in the water, but all that water, it’s exerting a pressure.
And then we can go down as far as – some chambers go down to 6 ATA’s. You can do the math. I can’t do it off the top of my head, but it can go pretty far down. We usually don’t go that far down in hyperbaric chambers unless actually in decompression illness depending how far people have dove down.
But regardless, what we’re doing in the chambers is really just simulating that pressure. You don’t feel like you’re underwater by any means. All you really feel is that pressure sensation in your ears when you’re going down underneath the surface like you were going to go down under with a train or in a plane. You feel that sort of popping sensation. You need to be able to pop your ears. That’s probably why you felt a little bit of pressure in your ear when you were diving at the conference, Wendy. As long as you can do that, as long as you can pressurize your ears, that’s the only thing that you feel.
So now, we’re underneath water or under pressure – and the other thing we’re doing is giving 100% oxygen. Now, that oxygen is not only saturating our red blood cells, but it’s also saturating what’s called the ‘plasma’ or the liquid of our blood. So normal people like you and me that don’t have any lung disease, our oxygen that we breathe in the air is actually sufficing in our red blood cells, enough to circulate. And you had a pulse site on your finger (which is what we use a lot of times to measure patient’s oxygen saturation), usually it’s about 96% to 100%.
So I get this question a lot. “Why, Doc, couldn’t I just use like a nasal cannula and get myself oxygen that way?” The reason for that is that you only have maybe about 4% of those oxygen binding sites on the red blood cells or you can actually carry oxygen any more than you already are (maybe enough for a normal person). But if you use pressure, by using pressure, it’s basically putting pressure on the oxygen gas and by putting pressure on the oxygen gas, you’re actually increasing the amount, you’re actually putting it into the liquid of our blood; not the red blood cells. We can get so much oxygen into the plasma or the liquid of our blood. We actually don’t even need the red blood cells if we get down to below 3 atmospheres of pressure.
Now, I don’t recommend that. But one of the indications for hyperbaric therapy is actually severe anemia or severe blood loss because you could put somebody down on this low pressure where they don’t actually need the red blood cells to be circulating to get oxygen into their tissues. So it’s pretty phenomenal how much oxygen we can get into saturation. That’s where all the catalytic reactions occur. It’s really at oxygen saturation in the plasma.
Wendy Myers: And so does that cause kind of like an antioxidant? It starts destroying free radicals in your body et cetera. Can you explain that a little bit, the benefits of doing that?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Sure. The mechanism of hyperbaric oxygen therapy is sort of what you’re leading to here, right? So when we’re getting all that oxygen in our body, what are they doing? Really, what it’s doing is it’s modulating our DNA. It’s changing gene expression and it’s increasing genes or sort of promoting genes that are responsible for growth and repair and decreasing inflammation and down-regulating or decreasing genes that are responsible for inflammation and responsible for programmed cell death.
Not only is it doing that, it’s also the direct effect of oxygen in tissues. So for instant, if you have acutely hypoxic tissue or the lack of blood flow to an area, if you have hyperbaric conditions there, you’re preventing this cascade of reaction that happens to that tissue. You break down swelling, inflammation because there’s oxygen deprivation. So oxygen has a direct effect on that tissue and the acute hypoxic event as well.
And we’ve seen that in studies now in patients with acute heart attacks actually and some indications of acute strokes too. If you get them into a chamber right away, you can prevent all these muscle or tissue death in the brain, which is pretty impressive stuff. So the downstream of all these gene expression changes include a lot of things. One of them is angiogenesis, which is the increasing of the blood vessel formation. That’s the increasing of the blood vessel formation. That’s extremely important in areas that have a lack of blood flow. There’s so many others.
A couple of others that are prominent, it increases oxygen tension into the tissue itself. So it actually can diffuse further into tissue, which is just about four times as far. We’re talking at a cellular level here. That’s a pretty huge distance. I’m also talking about vasoconstriction. That’s really important. So we’re talking about vessels getting small. And that’s really important especially if a vessel has been injured because if the vessel has been injured, all the liquid, all the blood sort of starts pouring out of it and it causes swelling. And if you can imagine, if that swelling is in your brain, that can be bad, right?
So hyperbaric oxygen therapy, what it’s doing is decreasing the swelling, decreasing all that stuff getting out of the vessel. And even though it’s doing that, even though it’s decreasing the size of the vessel, the net is actually that you’re increasing the amount of oxygen that’s getting to tissue because you’ve supersaturated that plasma with oxygen, right? It also causes a decrease in inflammation by itself. It’s actually as powerful as steroids are (at least in some studies). Steroids in western medicine are sort of the cure-all for inflammation. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is as effective as steroids at least in studies. So it’s pretty powerful stuff.
Wendy Myers: And what people don’t realize is that if they inject steroids, they’re destroying the bones surrounding the injection site.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Oh, totally. Right. So steroids, there’s lots of side effects for steroids. I mean, they do work in some settings when you need them. But long-term, definitely if you can do it in a natural way, that’s what we should be trying to do. So there’s some other things that hyperbaric oxygen therapy does. You spoke about bone. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy sort of improves wound healing in every sort of capacity. I think the most important capacity is that it proliferate, it stimulates the proliferation of cells that are responsible for healing – fibroblasts (which are connective tissue cells), chondroblasts (which are collagen-stimulating cells), osteoblasts (which are the bone stimulating cells).
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I need some more chondrocytes.
Dr.Scott Sherr: We all do!
Wendy Myers: Everyone wants some more of those.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Once we get to be about 30 years old, we all need more chondrocytes. Osteoblasts are important too especially with women. Osteoporosis is a big deal. The idea is that what hyperbaric oxygen therapy is doing is really promoting the healing process by allowing these cells to proliferate. And it’s doing that also by actually increasing stem cell production too and making those stem cells go to the areas of injury, which is really, really cool stuff. So other things that we’re doing here include – what else do we have? Also, mitochondrial enhancements.
Wendy Myers: Oh, yes.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is huge because what we’re doing is we’re increasing oxygen delivery to cells. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is delivering oxygen to cells, mitochondria are taking these oxygen and making ATP, which is energy. This is the energy that makes us alive. It makes our cells alive. This is so important. We’re seeing this more and more. And actually, imaging studies that we’re doing with hyperbaric patients to see like especially in stroke patients that have had brain injuries or had tissue death, you can see around that area of injury is also this area that’s sort of hibernating, not working to the maximum capacity. As a result of that, that tissue is not working.
We think a lot of the neurologic injury is because that tissue is not working at max capacity. You give it hyperbaric oxygen therapy, you give that tissue oxygen, you rev up the mitochondria, those cells can regenerate themselves. We can see that on imaging, which is really, really cool.
Wendy Myers: Isn’t it difficult to get oxygen into the mitochondria? I mean, I know to solve that problem for me, I’ve been sleeping on a magnetic sleeping pad because that oxygen mitochondria kind of work by magnetism and that will suck the oxygen into the mitochondria. But that’s now what the HBOT is doing. I guess you’re forcing it into the mitochondria.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Right! The way we’re doing that is really because we’re just massively enhancing blood flow to the area. So it’s the blood flow that’s sort of diffusing oxygen at the tissues and so that’s really what we’re doing here. But yeah, those are different ways. There’s lots of different ways to enhance mitochondrial function. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy just seems to be one of the most powerful because really, it’s about blood flow. The more blood flow you can get to an area, the more oxygen can diffuse out of that blood into the tissue and the further it can diffuse into the tissue and cells.
Wendy Myers: Okay. Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So why don’t we talk a little bit about the health conditions that can be treated and improved with HBOT?
Dr.Scott Sherr: I like to kind of break this down into two main categories. We have those things tat hyperbaric oxygen therapy has been approved for in the sense that it’s covered by insurance. And then there’s a large proportion of things that what we call are ‘investigational’ or sort of off-label that there’s a lot of data behind. Some of them are coming down the pipe are going to be covered soon. A lot of this has to do with politics unfortunately. But there’s a significant amount of improvement in a lot of other conditions.So the insurance-covered indications are the FDA approved indications for hyperbarics, there’s a lot of them. But the ones that we treat most commonly are diabetic foot wounds and diabetic foot ulcers. So patients that have these wounds and they’re diabetics, they’re just not healing, right?
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is extremely, extremely effective in improving the circulation in the blood as I’ve mentioned. So what we can do is we can heal these wounds. We can prevent patients from getting their feet, their toes, their legs chopped off all the time. It’s pretty impressive. We’re becoming more and more utilized and I think that’s great.
When patients come and see me, a lot of times, they’ve already gotten one or two toes cut off unfortunately. I save that third toe and they’re like, “Why didn’t I know about this before?” I think we need to get that out there. Get the education out there not only for patients themselves, but for podiatrists and for vascular surgeons.
That’s one of the things that I work on, trying to get that education out there. So that’s diabetes and diabetic foot ulcers. There’s also a main category, probably the main category other than diabetes is radiation injury. And when I talk about radiation injury, I’m talking about patients that have gotten radiation therapy for cancer mostly. These patients unfortunately get significant radiation injuries related to the cancer therapy. They may have no more cancer hopefully, but they also can have significant radiation injury that can cause lifelong disability.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, my grandmother, case in point, she had radiation in her breast and they completely burned her muscle to the point where they had to remove her chest muscle.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Oh, my goodness.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So unfortunately, I think that’s not an uncommon scenario.
Dr.Scott Sherr: They’ve gone a lot better, radiation therapy probably since your grandmother got radiated. But still, there’s still a pretty significant complication rate. It depends on who you ask. The complication rate is somewhere between 5% and about 20% depending on where we’re talking about.
Probably one of the most sensitive areas that you can imagine to radiation would be your brain. So that’s where we see a lot of patients come in in my clinic, radiation necrosis of the brain, which is pretty scary stuff. But hyperbaric oxygen therapy is probably the most important, it’s the most potent therapy for radiation injury. We can cure patients with radiation injury. And I don’t say that lightly. Our usual rate of improvement is about somewhere between 80% to 85% in patients with radiation injury whether it’s in their brain, whether it’s in their jaw. One of the most common areas that we see in patients that got radiation therapy is their jaw, something called osteoradionecrosis of the jaw, which is pretty severe stuff. The bone starts eating away itself. It’s unfortunate. But hyperbaric oxygen therapy combined with some other modalities is actually very, very effective. Breast cancer, breast radiation, patients that have non-healing wounds related to that, we have significant improvements there. Patients with prostate cancer and radiation injury, gyn cancers. It just runs the gamut. We have so much success treating these patients. It’s really quite dramatic.
Some other types of hyperbaric oxygen therapy FDA approved indications include flaps and grafts especially in radiated areas for those who aren’t healing well. You can get hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It’s very effective. Chronic infections that may not be going away. Usually, we have some bone infection as well related to it. Very bad stuff. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is very, very effective. Actually, combined with antibiotics becomes even more potent actually in those particular circumstances.
Now, to kind of go over to the things that aren’t covered by insurance, but are also very effective, the top two I would say would be traumatic brain injury and stroke. TBI, we see in this country (and around the world), it’s the no. 1 cause of long-term disability in people less than 45 years old. So it’s a pretty huge burden of disease. And hyperbaric oxygen therapy is so effective in these patients.
Now, those studies are being done and I’m hoping that soon, that it really is covered by insurance. The studies are coming, they’re out there and patients are improving in my clinic and around the country. Stroke, same thing. It’s being used in rehabilitation settings all over the country – all over the world, excuse me, but not in this country. These patients get significantly better with hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
I was going to list a whole bunch of other things. These are so many – reflux, sympathetic dystrophy (or otherwise known as ‘complex regional pain syndrome), cerebral palsy (a couple of new studies have just been published on the improvements in motor functions in these unfortunate patients.
Also, different types of headaches (cluster and migraine-type headaches), Lyme disease, other chronic infections, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s. There’s a recent study just published on Alzheimer’s over at St. John’s Wort about hyperbaric increasing cognitive improvements in patients with Alzheimer’s.
MS, really interesting stuff going on with MS. Rheumatoid arthritis (decreasing inflammation mostly), ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease (which are types of inflammatory bowel disease). There’s some really interesting stuff going on in that field, which I think is really great. What other things?
Wendy Myers: What about burns?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Yes. Thermal burns, I didn’t mention those. I forgot to mention the FDA improved indications that are just covered in hospitals basically because if you come in with a third degree burn, you need to be in a hospital. So I don’t want you coming into my office with third degree burns please.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Right! So I should just mention briefly some of the things that we’re treating in the hospital with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Thermal burns, carbon monoxide poisoning, necrotizing fasciitis or flesh-eating bacteria, gangrene of the foot, acute lack of blood flow to a limb, you can get hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Those are conditions that are usually only treated as I’ve said in the hospital. They’re very effectively treated as I’ve mentioned. That was my initial experience with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It was just amazing to see the difference after just a couple of therapy session in those respects.
Wendy Myers: Do they have HBOT in most hospitals?
Dr.Scott Sherr: The answer is I would say about 20% hospitals have hyperbaric oxygen therapy. In San Francisco, there’s two major hospitals in sort of like the – I don’t know what you call it. I grew up in New York, it was called the ‘metro area’. In San Francisco, I don’t know. It’s sort of like the overlying area around San Francisco. There’s one in downtown San Francisco, there’s one about an hour.
And even in New York City for instance, there’s I think two chambers at NYU and that’s it for 13 million. It’s kind of crazy, right? So I think it’s super underutilized. And I think that the tide is changing and people are taking charge of their health and realizing that sometimes doctors like me just don’t know everything. I don’t think like me should say that we do. I think that’s becoming more prominent. People are realizing, “I need to do my own research.” I love it when patients come to me and say, “Hey, doc, what about this or what about that?” Well, maybe I do know about it or maybe I don’t. And then I learn more. I think that’s really important.
So anyway, there’s so many things that we can treat, we can help with. And a lot of that, as I’ve said, is sort of investigational. But we’re seeing such extreme recoveries in these patients. It’s really, really amazing stuff.
Wendy Myers: Are there any contraindications with cancer? I know you mentioned that some clients that have cancer have some concerns about using it?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Right! That’s really important. I get that question a lot about cancer. There’s two ways that hyperbaric oxygen therapy with cancer. The first question is, “Does hyperbaric oxygen therapy put you at higher risk for cancer or does it cause cancer?” The answer is empathically no.
There’s been several reviews that have been done over the years (the last one in 2012), hyperbaric oxygen therapy has no cancer-promoting effects. Most people think, “Well, if you give oxygen to cancer, it’s going to make it grow more.” The answer is absolutely not actually because most cancer doesn’t like oxygen. Cancer itself is sort of a hypoxic sort of thing. You give it oxygen, there’s some indication (at least in some types of cancers especially one called glioblastoma in the brain) that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can actually be a hindrance to its growth. And that sort of leads me to where hyperbaric oxygen therapy can be helpful in cancer management. There’s a couple of different ways.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a radio-sensitizer, so it makes radiation therapy more effective. So it’s being used in some studies right now in the middle of the country and also on the east coast using hyperbaric oxygen therapy plus radiation to treat types of brain cancer. This specific one is called glioblastoma. It’s also a chemo-sensitizer too meaning that it also improves chemotherapeutic modalities because you’re increasing blood flow. It’s all about blood flow. You’re increasing blood flow to a cancer or to a tissue that has cancer in it, you’re going to improve the amount of therapeutic effect of whatever the modality is.
There are some alternative regiments that are happening right now. In fact, one of the guys that presented at the Bulletproof Conference, his name is Dominic D’Agostino, he did a recent study on hyperbaric oxygen therapy plus what’s called the ketogenic diet (I think probably some of your listeners are familiar with that or just so you know, it’s sort of like a high fat, moderate protein, very low carbohydrate diet) plus hyperbaric oxygen therapy in mice, these mice had metastatic cancer, their cancer burden I think decreased by 85% when treated both with hyperbaric oxygen therapy and the ketogenic diet. It’s a very powerful stuff.
So it’s all coming down the pipeline, but hyperbaric oxygen therapy and cancer, they go together well. There’s no worry about you having any sort of cancer-promoting effect. I want to be very clear about that.
Wendy Myers: Okay, great.
Dr.Scott Sherr: So the other thing, you mentioned about side effects. I should point out a couple of other things. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is very, very safe. It’s been around a long time. It’s one of the safest medical modalities out there. The only major side effect we have to worry about in patients is their ears. Like a diver, if you go down too quickly or come up too quickly, what’s going to happen? What happens to your ears?
Wendy Myers: Oh, yeah. They will start popping. They can burst.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Yes! That’s it. That’s what happens in the chamber, same thing. You can rupture your ear drums if you’re not careful. But in the chambers, we have much more control than even diving about how quickly you go down, how quickly you come up and it’s very easy for us to prevent those things from happening.
So really, if you’re an experienced place for doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy, it shouldn’t happen. I recommend that most patients – actually, all patients that are getting hyperbaric oxygen therapy whether it’s in a hard chamber and a soft chamber (which we’ll talk about the difference), they get a consultation with their physician first. It’s very important you talk to somebody that’s going to guide their care. I think that’s very important – what your goals are, what your risks are.
There are some other things we worry about with hyperbaric oxygen therapy as far as side effects, but the ears is the biggest one. It does increase insulin sensitivity. So if you’re prone to low blood sugars or if you’re a diabetic, you need to eat before you go in the chambers. If you have cataracts, it could make them worse. We just have to know about those before. But it’s not going to magically make you cataracts; only if you had those before that they’re going to happen.
There’s some sort of lower, very much, much more rare side effects that can happen – oxygen seizures or lung toxicity. But these don’t happen in somebody. Especially if it’s sort of the more shallow pressures, that’s where you’re need to have a doctor just assess you and make sure that you don’t have any reasons as to why those would be a higher risk.
Wendy Myers: Okay, okay.
Wendy Myers: You’ve mentioned stem cells. How exactly does the HBOT increase stem cells because that’s obviously going to be very important for tissue regeneration and healing of wounds, et cetera?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Right! Stem cells are where it’s at. We all know that stem cells regenerate tissue. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, what it does is it uses a mechanism called nitric oxide synthase (NO for short). A lot of people heard of nitric oxide. Laughing gas I think is sort of like one of their relations of it. So we’re not talking about laughing gas here. We’re talking about a chemical in our blood stream, in our blood cells’ endothelium or the tissue lining of our cells. That produces nitric oxide synthase, which then produces stem cells.
The stem cells come from our bone marrow. They actually also are in our fat cells. These cells migrate the tissue where there’s injury and hyperbaric oxygen therapy makes these migration and the proliferation or even the production of these cells more efficient.
So very powerful especially combined with a lot of other types of modalities that are coming out there. You talked about some magnetic stuff, some light therapy. There’s some really interesting research coming out on light therapy, red light specifically being helpful for stem cell migration and tissue growing too. Pretty cool stuff.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, that’s what I offer people with the near infrared saunas.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Oh, there you go!
Wendy Myers: They get red light therapy with that as well. That’s another benefit of them.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Right! So stem cells are key. There’s some research being done. I’m actually working on an IRB or a study I designed with a couple of colleagues about working on stem cells plus hyperbaric oxygen therapy for traumatic brain injury, which is pretty cool. So we’re hoping to get that started at some point.
Wendy Myers: So what are the costs to doing a hyperbaric oxygen therapy session?
Dr.Scott Sherr: It depends on what kind of therapy session we’re talking about. There’s soft chambers and there’s hard chambers. And my office is in San Francisco (and I’m an affiliate with an office in New York), we’re mostly using hard chambers. These types can be a little bit more expensive because they go to deeper pressures. So for the hard chambers, we’re talking about anywhere between $100 to about $380 per session.
And then there’s different types of hard chambers. There’s single chambers called monoplace chambers and there’s the communal chambers or multi-place chambers. Those are chambers you usually see in hospitals where you can treat multiple patients all at the same time. Those chambers tend to be a little less expensive. It’s sort of like you have more patients being treated at the same time, it’s less money per patient being treated.
Everything ranges. As I’ve said, sometimes this may be covered by insurance. Sometimes it’s not going to be covered. Depending on the education, if it’s not going to be covered by insurance, if it’s sort of investigational medication, the hyperbaric oxygen therapy, then that’s the price that you’re usually being charged, $100 to $350. If it’s FDA approved, it’s covered by insurance, then we’re looking at anywhere between a thousand or two thousand dollars per session at a hospital. But most of that should be hypothetically covered by your insurance company.
However, if you did get treated at an office like myself, like my office or like the office or like the office I’m affiliate with in New York or around the country, it’s going to cost you less money most likely out of pocket because you know, our insurance these days, you have these huge doctor bills you need to pay before they start covering you and everything. So it’s something to be aware of.
I would recommend if you get outpatient therapy for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, you should get it an outpatient environment because it will end up costing you less money in the long run even if it’s covered by insurance. And it’s probably nicer to get treated in a clinic, not in the hospital if you can do it.
Wendy Myers: And so how long are the sessions? Are they 10 minutes, 30 minutes?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Right! The shortest session length is usually about 60 minutes. The longest sessions, it’s usually about an hour and a half.
Wendy Myers: Okay.
Dr.Scott Sherr: It sort of depends on what we’re doing here. But the idea on hyperbaric oxygen therapy is it’s not just one treatment session. It’s usually a series of treatment sessions. And these occur over a continuous amount of time meaning that oxygen therapy, hyperbaric therapy is a cumulative process.
Taking our DNA and changing it takes time. This occurs over sessions that are done in a row. So we’re talking usually therapy sessions done sort of Monday through Friday with the weekends off. Depending on the indication, it could be anywhere between two months to more of therapy. It’s definitely a time commitment. But for some indications like for some things that are acute like acute injuries, possibly some sort of things like some new study, new investigational protocol like cognitive enhancement, you may not need as many therapy sessions in a row to get there. But you do need some.
Now, I think I forgot to mention. One of the indications for hyperbaric oxygen therapy is pre-imposed surgery. It’s in investigation now, but what we can do is improve healing after surgery. You get one therapy session before and then you get four or five afterwards. You could basically decrease your healing time by about 50% under most circumstances. They’re pretty significant healing type of improvements. We get patients on the field. We treat athletes all the time. So the protocol for these guys is usually less amount of time. So it’s not as many therapy sessions. And also, the protocols change depending on what kind of chamber we’re using, if we’re using a hard chamber or a soft chamber, right?
Dr.Scott Sherr: So I think this is a good time for me to talk if you’re okay with it about hard and soft chambers a little bit. Is that okay?
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Alright! So hard chambers – I don’t want to confuse everybody. Hard chambers are chambers that are made up of hard, acrylic glass. They can go down to as low as 6 ATA, which is pretty far down.
Soft chambers are usually chambers that – you can’t have 100% oxygen in these chambers, okay? It’s just compressed air. And they can go down to about 1.3 or 1.5 atmospheres of pressure and that’s about 15 feet of seawater at the most.
So they treat hypothetically different things. The soft chambers aren’t really approved to treat anything right now except for acute melanin sickness. So if you go up high in elevation, coming down, you get terrible symptoms like you get pulmonary edema or lung fluid. You can get headaches. You go into these chambers, these soft chambers, it goes away.
Wendy Myers: That’s why I do not climb mountains. It’s very dangerous.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, you can train yourself like anything else. But yeah, the symptoms can be severe at times depending on how fast you go up, what your conditioning is like. So those chambers, they can’t go as deep and then they can’t get 100% oxygen in them. Now, I have to say if anybody tells you that these chambers can be converted to go deeper or they can have 100% oxygen in them, please run because it’s just not safe to do if it’s not being monitored in a medical setting.
These chambers, these soft chambers can be used at home, which is nice. The hard chambers, you can’t. They have to be used in a medical setting like where I practice where you have the certified hyperbaric technician, you have me supervising. You have trained staff.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, at the Bulletproof Conference, the other guy is the booth next door to yours had the soft chambers. They too are letting people check them out and try them out. They actually rent them or you can rent them in your home for $700 to $2000 a month. It’s a little bit pricey depending on the model that you want. But I thought that was really interesting.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Right! So I think the real role for these soft chambers is probably – probably, we don’t know for sure yet because it’s still investigational – for long-term management of neurocognitive disorders, neurocognitive inflammation potentially.
What I mean by that is central nervous system processes like traumatic brain injury, stroke, MS and possibly cognitive enhancement too. We just don’t know yet. But all indications kind of point that these indications don’t need as much oxygen. So you don’t need to be in a 100% oxygen environment over the long term to give yourself some benefit.
The initial hyperbaric treatment though needs to be I think at least – and these are the chambers that are hard, acrylic glass sort of more monitored while you’re getting therapy for these acute run of hyperbaric therapy, acute session. And then after that, for long-term management, maybe these chambers in the long run.
And also, with these chambers, these soft chambers, you can get down as far. The depth isn’t as great. The pressure isn’t as great. So wound healing, things outside of the central nervous system like a diabetic foot ulcer or arthritis-like symptoms (even though it’s sort of investigational for hyperbarics), you can’t really get down to the pressure that you need to really decrease inflammation outside of the central nervous system.
So I don’t think that these chambers are going to be very helpful for things that require you decreasing inflammation outside of your brain and spinal cord truthfully. But I think there’s definitely going to be a little. We just haven’t sort of completely figured it out yet.
Wendy Myers: No.
Wendy Myers: Say someone is trying to just do some anti-aging or improved cognitive function or increase their chondrocytes, how many sessions does one need to do to improve that?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Anti-aging, that’s such a big category. But what I usually say is that hyperbaric oxygen therapy is anti-aging. The reason why I say that is that we’re healing wounds no matter where they are. If they’re on your brain, if they’re on your toe or your finger, we’re healing, we’re helping the efficiency of that healing process.
I think as I’ve mentioned when we were talking about your brain health, as we get older, if I put somebody in an MRI scan at 50 years old, what it’s going to start showing is what’s called microvascular ischemic changes. What that really means is that your vessels start to deteriorate. And your mitochondrias are deteriorating as well because if the vessels start deteriorating, the cells around those vessels are going to deteriorate as well. So I think what we’re doing really with hyperbaric oxygen therapy is regenerating that stuff. We’re regenerating those vessels. We’re regenerating tissues that are injured, injuries that comes with age.
Now, for the people that have no issues (which is very few of us really) and just wants sort of cognitive enhancement, I do think that hyperbaric oxygen therapy is going to play a role there. Now, there are no studies right now. It’s still very investigational, but we do know in patients with stroke, with traumatic brain injury, even patients with diabetes getting hyperbaric oxygen therapy with normal pressures feel like their cognition gets better.
And we’re testing this in the TBI level and the stroke level using something called ‘neurocognitive or impact test. It’s the most common. Now, we can see how their cognitive abilities improve. If you look at their brain under a scanner, we’re looking at an area called the hippocampus and the blood flow in the area of the hippocampus is just dramatic – even in patients that don’t have injury. So the idea would be the hippocampus is getting more blood flow. Why wouldn’t you do that to regular people that don’t have injuries as well?
So what does the hippocampus do? It’s basically an area of our brain that’s extremely important in sort of making short-term memories into long-term memories. It works with our executive function as well. So I do think there’s a role. For that kind of protocol, we don’t really know yet truthfully, but I think the idea is that you need some sort of protocol, somewhere between 10 and 20 treatment sessions. And then long-term management in maybe one of these portable chambers might be helpful to maintain that.
I think that’s where when we’re talking about neurocognitive issues, we’re talking about maintenance for a lot of these things because they’re degenerative processes. You degenerate over time even if you’re not in a chamber or whatever, even if you’re doing everything you can.
So that’s where I think where we’re talking about with anti-aging. We’re healing wounds. That’s what we’re doing with hyperbarics. I think that’s the protocols that are coming out. And it’s not only just about hyperbarics. It’s about dietary interventions. It’s about all the things that you do as well, Wendy. It’s a combined effort. I think hyperbaric is just a very powerful adjunct most likely in that perspective.
Wendy Myers: So how often do you do those sessions?
Dr.Scott Sherr: I’m a busy guy. I wish I can do it more than I do, but I’ve done protocols of therapy. It’s very important for somebody like myself to have an idea of what patients are going through that they can expect. I’ve got my staff members go through some investigation protocols too for cognitive enhancement actually just to see if it works – and it seems to. It really does. I mean, this is all sort of anecdotal. I can’t recommend as a medical physician for you to do this because I just don’t know. But the idea is that there’s probably a role. I try to do it as much as I can. I don’t have a home chamber. I don’t have a portable one. Maybe I can get these guys to give me a free one because they’re expensive, right?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, they are.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Maybe there are Groupons for them, I don’t know.
Wendy Myers: There is! I was going to say my girlfriend actually brought a Groupon for a hyperbaric oxygen chambers, yeah.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Oh, no way. Maybe you guys could share them and work on them sort of like together.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’m going to go look for it again and see if it’s still available and try it out.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Yeah, I can see a way. You could rent them and then you a party or something.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yeah. HBOT party.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Yeah, yeah. Again, make sure that if you’re going to do that though, everybody needs to be evaluated by a physician before they go into a chamber even if it’s a soft chamber please.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. Well, you have to come down to the party and oversee it.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Oh, right. Well, if I’m getting invited, then maybe I can come and check, sure.
Wendy Myers: Well, I have a question I like to ask all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Well, it depends on who you ask, right? For me, I wouldn’t say Ebola although that’s on the list for a lot of physicians and especially patients. For me, it’s the things that I treat and I think two of the most potent – just the way that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can help the most are patients with traumatic brain injury and stroke. TBI… you know, veterans are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, even Vietnam vets, I see all these patients in my office. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s the no. 1 cause of long-term disability in this age group, less than 45 years old. These guys can’t go to work. They’re on all these crazy drugs to prevent them from having suicidal thoughts or drinking or alcoholics. It’s really bad. In NFL, we’re seeing domestic violence, we’re seeing these guys die early. CTE, it’s all related.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is just so effective in these patients. I haven’t seen a patient in my own personal practice that hasn’t improved. That’s not to say that everybody will, but it’s really just effective. It’s really so amazing to watch. And we document this stuff. We document them on document scores. We document on activities of daily living scores. We do all these. We document it because we want to tell people, we want to show the world that we can be helpful here. And this epidemic, not even in just adults and pro athletes, we’re talking about in kids now and young soccer players and these concussions that are happening, these are causing long-term issues. I think that hyperbaric oxygen therapy is just going to be so important in just the healing process for these patients. It already is on a small level, but just the burden of disease is just so high.
One of the reasons that I’m so happy that we got to talk today, Wendy is that I think everybody knows, I think almost everybody knows somebody that has had a traumatic head injury. If it’s not a TBI, they know somebody that’s had a stroke, right? Stroke is the no. 1 cause in all ages of long-term disability. The studies are being done and they’re really I think indisputable in many ways that these patients are getting better. And these are patients that have had stable symptoms for a while before they got hyperbaric oxygen therapy and all of a sudden, they’re doing things that they couldn’t do better.
Now, is it always dramatic? I think it depends. It’s in the eye of the beholder. If you couldn’t toilet yourself and now you can, is that a big deal? I think that’s a pretty big deal, right? So again, we’re not always talking about dramatic changes in sort of like the bigger sense, but in the smaller sense. If you can prevent somebody from having headaches every day, if you can get them to start moving a couple of their fingers instead of none of their fingers, I mean I think that’s a pretty big deal.
That’s really where I see hyperbaric oxygen therapy is being the wave of the future. It’s sort of like the past, it’s been around forever. But it’s really the future because I think it’s really going to be effective for these guys. I think where it’s going to start is it’s going to be a grassroots thing. It’s going to be patients demanding that they have access to this. And this is actually happening in some states. In Oklahoma, for instance, there was just recently some legislation passed just trying to get hyperbaric oxygen therapy for veterans coming back from the wars. I have to turn these people away because I can’t treat them. It’s just too much money. They don’t have enough money. I can’t treat everybody for free. I wish I could.
So I’m always out there looking for patients, but I also need people that have the funds and have the wherewithal to say, “I want to sponsor people. I want to help them” and not just TBI patients, but stroke patients, patients with RSD, patients with cerebral palsy. There’s just a huge burden out there and I know we can be helpful. It’s just a matter of just getting it treated.
Wendy Myers: So how specifically does HBOT help RSD? I have a friend that has RSD. How specifically would it help regional pain syndrome like that?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Sure, yes. What we’re seeing is that RSD is basically a neurologist injury, what happens to the nerve itself no matter where it is if it’s in the arm or the leg or whatever. These patients have sort of a disregulation of their nervous system. They have swelling. They have inflammation.
What hyperbaric oxygen therapy is doing we think is it’s decreasing the inflammation, it’s decreasing the swelling, it’s allowing that neuron to repair itself, to recover. And especially if the RSD hasn’t been present for a long period of time, there’s some pretty significant improvements that I’ve had in patients. They get dramatically better. And there’s some studies to show this is the case. They’re not gigantic studies. They’re not thousands of patients. The only place that I’ve had some trouble treating patients with RSD is if it’s a full body RSD. If it’s a localized area of injury, I have a lot of success. But if it’s a generalized RSD, which are less common, they’re much harder to treat. This kind of goes along with every indication for hyperbaric oxygen therapy truthfully. The shorter time it’s been since the time of injury, the more effect and the more complete effect that we can get on for the healing process no matter what we’re talking about.
Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Sherr, thank you so much for coming on. That was so good. I hope the listeners out there demanding their HBOT therapy…
Dr.Scott Sherr: Demand! Talk to your congressmen or just talk to me. And talk to the people around you. Google, Google is a great tool for you or whatever else.
Wendy Myers: Yeah so, why don’t you tell the listeners where they can find you and where you practice, et cetera?
Dr.Scott Sherr: Sure, yeah. The easiest way to get a hold of me is through my own personal website. It’s called integrativeHBOT.com. I have two major affiliations. I work in San Francisco (that’s where I live) at the San Francisco Institute for Hyperbaric Medicine. I also do consulting work and work on the management side of the hyperbaric oxygen facility – actually two facilities – in New York. That’s where I’m from. They’re about to open up a center in New York City, which is great too.
Obviously, as I’ve mentioned, there’s no chambers in New York City and there’s a huge need. I’m really excited about that. And so you can go to my own personal website. You also can follow me on Twitter at @drsherr or you can go to the websites directly. But just go through my website and feel free to email me any time. I’m a pretty accessible guy. I’m here to help. Even if you’re not in my areas, I can help you find people to get you treated. I know people giving this in L.A., in Colorado.
I just talked to a really interesting guy yesterday actually. I’m always talking to people. I’m especially interested in hyperbaric guys that are doing this from an integrative point of view and I can point you in those directions if needed.
Wendy Myers: Alright, great! Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so good.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Wendy, thanks so much for having me. It really was a pleasure.
Wendy Myers: And listeners, if you want to learn more about me, detoxification, how to heal your health conditions naturally, you can find me on myersdetox.com. You can download the free Live to 110 by Weighting Less e-guide. I’ve got a few free ebooks on the website if you want to sign up and get email updates. And please, please leave me a review on iTunes. That helps people find my message. It gets me higher up in those search engines so people can listen to the show.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Google search. Search that.
Wendy Myers: Yes!
Dr.Scott Sherr: You’re going to be on top of the Google search, yeah.
Wendy Myers: Yes! So listeners, thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
Dr.Scott Sherr: Bye bye. Thank you.
