Bariatric Weight Loss Surgery and Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment, or HBOT, can speed the recovery time from surgery for many patients. It can lessen the time for recovery from Bariatric Surgery, just as it can for other surgeries. HBOT can speed the healing of body tissues and can enable medications to be processed more efficiently in the body. This means that less medication might be required. There is even some evidence that HBOT can treat obesity without surgery.

If you are a good candidate for HBOT, your doctor, nurses, and HBOT technicians can educate you about the process and answer questions about it.

Your treatment team may begin giving you sessions of HBOT before your surgery occurs, in order to add additional oxygen to your body, and thus increasing its healing potentials beforehand. This builds the body's healing functions with oxygen provided to the deep tissues. Oxygen enables man functions of the body to operate more fully and efficiently.

Ask your doctor if HBOT would be beneficial as a treatment if used in conjunction wiht your Bariatric Surgery.

HBOT has produced the following positive health outcomes for many patients in any of 13 approved medical areas of use:

1. Stopping or eliminating harmful bacteria and microbial actions,
2. Forming and Building new blood vessels,
3. Increasing oxygen to the body tissues,
4. Constricting dilated blood vessels,
5. Reversing a type of inury known as reperfusion [blood flow is cut off and restored, as in some surgery], and
6. Reducing gas bubbles in the blood stream or tissues [bubbles may happen with certain medical procedures].

New applications for HBOT are being discovered and practitioners of HBOT are kept aware of them.

These are the current 13 Medically-accepted uses for Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT). These are officially approved by the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS).

1. Enhancement of Healing in Problem Wounds

2. Exceptional-Blood-Loss Anemia (anemia from blood loss)

3. Air or Gas Embolism
4. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning and Cyanide Poisoning
5. Gas Gangrene
6. Crush Injuries
7. Decompression Sickness
8. Intracranial (inside the skull) Abscess
9. Necrotizing Soft Tissue Infections
10. Osteomyelitis (bone-related infections)
11. Ionizing Radiation
12. Skin Grafts
13. Thermal Burns

Here are some of the benefits of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy"

Improved quality of life.

Promotes healing of problem wounds and can be the difference between disability, loss of limb, and healing.

Improved care.

Delivering HBOT (high oxygen under pressure), hypoxic tissue (not enough oxygen) can be restored and healing can proceed.

Lower costs.

By accelerating healing and the reduction of additional medical care, HBOT assists in cost reductions that insurance providers demand.

New blood vessels.

Increasing oxygen promotes tiny new blood vessels to grow .

Decreased swelling (edema)

This is especailly useful in radiation and wound sites. Decreasing the swelling allows the blood to flow more freely, bringing more oxygen.

Infection control.

High oxygen levels increase the ability of white blood cells to kill bacteria and can itself kill bacteria itself.