Take a Deep Breath: How Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and the Ketogenic Diet can Heal your Body

Are there benefits to combining hyperbaric oxygen therapy with the ketogenic diet?

Jake had been diagnosed with a fatal spinal and brain tumour, the doctors said he had only one day to live.

They advised that he should rest and die in the comfort of his own home. His mother insisted on taking him to have hyperbaric oxygen therapy in one last attempt to revive him and remedy his malignant brain tumour. He was limp and fragile as he surrendered to the overpowering pure oxygen in Dr Robert Pender’s chamber – a last grasp for life.

The doctors had said he wouldn’t make it and that was two years ago.

Jake now walks, talks, plays sports and lives the full life of a thirteen year old boy. If his mother had listened to the doctors, he wouldn’t be alive today. Two years of hyperbaric oxygen therapy have brought him to life and full health– under the watchful and caring eyes of Dr Robert Pender, a world leading hyperbaric oxygen therapist.

Find out more about Jake’s miraculous recovery here.

Dr Pender has dedicated his life to developing hyperbaric oxygen therapies and is the leading HBOT (Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy) doctor in the world. We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to meet this incredibly selfless man and experience the therapy for ourselves.

We were invited by Tim Gray to experience Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy at the Chelsea Bridge Clinic. Dr Pender gleefully greeted us and explained the therapy, took our blood pressure, tested our current oxygen usage and prepared us for the full flow of the purest oxygen we have ever experienced.

Stepping into the cosiest oxygen chamber, I placed my oxygen mask on as Dr Pender slid the chamber door closed and clicked on the oxygen.

Then I was enveloped with the purest oxygen pumped in by the humming heartbeat of the pump that lulled me into a state of utter relaxation, bordering on euphoria. I surrendered to the peace as my lungs were flooded with pure oxygen that circulated into my bloodstream and through my body, replenishing and repairing each and every cell.

Utterly cocooned in a healing oxygenated womb; it would be an amazing place to meditate and achieve deep healing and rest. We had the most wonderful sleep afterwards and felt refreshed for days.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) is a simple, painless, non-invasive way of giving the body more oxygen than it is able to get from the air. It involves administering pure oxygen at twice the normal atmospheric pressure inside a private, purpose-built chamber, enabling the body to take in 10-15 times more oxygen than normal. Find out more about how HBOT can heal you here.

Oxygen is vital for life, and extra oxygen improves what our bodies can do. It is necessary for cell growth and regeneration and acts as a natural antiviral and antibiotic. In other words, oxygen powers the healing process.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy speeds up recovery times and is proven to help heal chronic inflammation and autoimmune diseases. Doctors use HBOT to help the body recover from non-healing wounds, inflammation, carbon monoxide poisoning, infection, chronic fatigue, ME, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, heart attacks, strokes, Alzheimer’s and sports injuries. HBOT is also amazing for energy production, as the mitochondria (energy factories in the cells) love it so much; the therapy successfully heals sufferers of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and ME.

Main benefits of HBOT:

• Nerve Growth and Repair
• Increasing Circulation & Oxygenation
• Decreasing Inflammation & Oxidation
• Improving Cell Signalling & Function
• Relieving Scarring & Debris

‘The use of hyperbaric oxygen mobilises stem cells in the blood and causes these stem cells to hone in on sites of injury to assist in repair and decrease inflammation’. Dr Dom D’Agostino

There is a growing body of research  that demonstrates how the Ketogenic Diet and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy work synergistically to decrease cancer deaths.

‘The Ketogenic Diet and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Prolong Survival in Mice with Systemic Metastatic Cancer’ paper by Dr D’Agostino et al, explains how cancer cell metabolism is dependent upon using glucose as fuel and the prevalence of ‘hypoxic pockets’.

The ketogenic diet elevates blood ketone levels and has been shown to slow cancer progression in animals and humans. Abnormal blood supply to tumours creates ‘hypoxic pockets’ (surrounding pockets in which there is no oxygen and a lower pH) creating the ideal environment for glucose dependent cancerous cells to grow: Cancer cells thrive in a low oxygen environment. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy saturates these abnormal cells and ‘hypoxic pockets’ with oxygen and reverses the cancer-promoting effects of these pockets.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy and the ketogenic diet synergistically exploit the overlapping metabolic weaknesses in cancer by starving the cells of glucose and simultaneously dissipating the ‘hypoxic pockets’.

Essentially, ketosis and hyperbaric oxygen therapy create an environment in which cancer cells cannot survive.

Find out more and book your consultation with Dr Robert Pender here.

Follow these Five Steps to Ketosis.