12 → 1.9: A Client Win Worth Celebrating

We recently received an update from one of our clients that made our entire team celebrate. His inflammation marker went from 12 to 1.9! That’s a pretty incredible change.

But before we talk about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, there’s something important we want to say. He worked for this.

This client has made meaningful change to his diet, stayed consistent with exercise, prioritized his health, and completed 40+ sessions in our hyperbaric chamber.

Health is rarely the result of doing one single thing. For him, hyperbaric oxygen therapy became another important piece of his wellness journey, supporting the work he was already doing through nutrition, movement and lifestyle changes.

Sometimes it isn’t about finding the one thing. It’s about finding the missing piece that helps support everything else you’re already doing. For this client, we’re incredibly stoked that hyperbaric oxygen therapy became part of that picture.

So, what does oxygen have to do with inflammation? Inflammation isn’t always the enemy. It’s actually a normal and necessary part of healing. When something in the body is injured, stressed, or damaged, an inflammatory response helps protect the area and begin the repair process. Ideally, that response does its job and then settles back down. The problem is when inflammation sticks around. Chronic inflammation can persist for months or even years and is increasingly part of the conversation around long term health.

You may have even heard of the term CIRS or Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, circulating in the wellness world lately. CIRS is a more specific and evolving area of research involving a prolonged inflammatory response, often discussed in connection with exposure to water damaged buldings and certain biotoxins. It isn’t the same thing as having chronic inflammation, but the growing conversation around both points to an important question: what happens when the body has a hard time moving out of an inflammatory state and into repair?

There isn’t one simple answer. Our bodies need adequate nutrition, circulation, sleep, movement, stress regulation, and countless other systems working together. But one of the most fundamental pieces of the healing process is oxygen. Repairing tissues takes energy. Building new cells takes energy. Maintaining healthy cellular function takes energy. And our cells rely on oxygen to help produce that energy.

Here’s where things can get complicated: the tissues that need the most support may also be places where oxygen is having the hardest time getting in. Injury and inflammation can cause swelling and changes in circulation. As pressure builds within swollen tissue and blood flow is disrupted, oxygen delivery to that area can become more difficult. Meanwhile, those same tissues are asking the body for the resources needed to repair.

In other words, the body may need more oxygen at the exact time it’s also having a harder time delivering it. And that’s where hyperbaric oxygen offers something unique.

HBOT doesn’t just target one area of inflammation. One of the things we love about hyperbaric oxygen therapy is that it is a systemic therapy. If your knee hurts, the oxygen doesn’t only reach your knee. If you’re recovering from surgery, we aren’t treating only the incision. Your entire body gets the benefits of hyperbaric therapy.

During the session, you breathe oxygen while the chamber is pressurized above normal atmospheric pressure. That combination dramatically increases the amount of oxygen that can dissolve directly into your blood plasma. Your bloodstream then carries that increased oxygen availability throughout the body.

At the same time, HBOT has been studied for its effects on the body’s inflammatory response. Research has found that hyperbaric oxygen can influence inflammatory signaling pathways and has been associated with reductions in several pro-inflammatory mediators. It can also reduce the adhesion of certain inflammatory white blood cells to blood vessel walls and help decrease edema, or swelling.

In other words, HBOT isn’t simply delivering oxygen to one sore spot. It creates a whole body physiological response. That’s what we mean when we talk about supporting inflammation systemically. Instead of chasing inflammation in one individual area, we’re exposing the entire body to an environment that can increase tissue oxygenation while influencing several biological pathways involved in inflammation, swelling, circulation, and repair.

So how does hyperbaric oxygen actually change oxygen delivery? Think of your red blood cells as your body’s normal oxygen delivery trucks. They travel through your blood vessels carrying oxygen throughout your body, and under normal circumstances they’re very good at their job. Hyperbaric therapy gives the body an additional way to transport oxygen. Under pressure, significantly more oxygen dissolves directly into the plasma, the liquid portion of your blood that surrounds those red blood cells.

So instead of oxygen only riding along the delivery trucks, you now have much more oxygen dissolved into the fluid they’re traveling through too. That oxygen rich plasma circulates throughout the body and increases the amount of oxygen available to tissues, including areas where normal oxygen delivery may be challenged by injury, swelling, or compromised circulation.

HBOT isn’t simply about “getting more oxygen.” The temporary increase in oxygen also creates biological signals within the body. Research has explored how those signals can affect inflammatory pathways and other processes involved in healing. We’re creating an environment that can better support the body in doing what it already knows how to do.

This is why we love what we do!! 12 → 1.9.

Yes, we’re excited about the number, but we’re even more excited about what it represents. It represents someone who decided to invest in his health. Someone who changed his diet, exercised, stayed consistent, and kept showing up. And along the way, he found another piece to his wellness journey; hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

We get to see people walk through our doors at all different stages of their health. Some have tried everything. Some are recovering from an injury or surgery. Some are dealing with something they can’t quite see to get ahead of. Others simply want to be proactive about how they care for their bodies.

Our job isn’t to promise a magic fix. It’s to listen, educate, and help people understand the tools that may be available to support what they’re already doing. Because sometimes it isn’t about finding a magic answer. Sometimes It’s about giving the body another piece of what it needs to do its job.

If you’ve been curious about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, we’d love to have you come see it for yourself. Tour our chambers, ask us questions, tell us what’s going on, and learn more about what oxygen under pressure can do.

You never know what might be the missing piece in your wellness journey.