How Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Accelerates Wound Healing

When you think of your organs, you might not think about your skin, but it’s your body’s largest organ and, arguably, one of the most important ones. Your skin acts as a shield and protects you from the world around you, keeping all of your other tissues and organs safe and sound inside you.

When you have a wound, this protection is compromised, and your body does everything in its power to repair and heal the damage before harmful bacteria can invade. Speed is of the essence. 

At Clover Oxygen Hyperbarics and Wound Center in Aledo, Texas, Dr. Leon Tio and our team provide hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) for a wide range of issues, especially those that involve slow-healing wounds. With HBOT, we can keep wound healing on track to save you from much larger problems down the road. Here’s how.

All about wound healing

Any wound, no matter how small or how large, should follow a built-in wound healing cascade that all humans have. This involves four stages:

1. Hemostasis

Your body’s first priority is to stop the bleeding, so it sends platelets to the wound site to form blood clots that should stem the flow of blood out of your body.

2. Inflammation

Next, your body creates inflammation to close the wound, remove bacteria, and encourage new cells.

3. Proliferation

During this stage, new cells flood the scene to repair your tissues and blood vessels.

4. Maturation and remodeling

In this last stage of wound healing, your body puts the finishing touches on the wound healing and strengthens the new tissues.

When wound healing stalls

Millions of Americans have conditions that can stall the wound healing cascade, such as diabetes, which affects more than 38 million adults, and peripheral artery disease. What these conditions have in common is that blood flow is compromised and not enough oxygen and other healing resources are getting to the wound.

When this happens, the wound gets stuck in the first two stages of healing, which provides ample opportunity for harmful bacteria to get inside and wreak havoc.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy to get wound healing on track

One of the most effective ways to get wound healing back on track is to make sure that your body has access to the most valuable healing resource — oxygen.

With hyperbaric oxygen therapy, we deliver this oxygen in much greater amounts than you would find otherwise — the air you breathe contains about 21% oxygen, and we deliver 100% oxygen with HBOT.

Not only do we deliver a sizable boost of oxygen through HBOT, we do so in a pressurized environment. We measure this pressure in terms of atmospheres (ATA) — at sea level, the pressure is 1 ATA. With hyperbaric oxygen therapy, we increase this to 3 ATA to make sure the oxygen gets into all of the cells in your body.

If you have a wound that’s not healing in a timely manner due to a lack of access to oxygenated blood, we can make up the difference, and more, with HBOT. And the best part? All you need to do is lie back in our hyperbaric chamber and let the oxygen flow in.

We invite you to sit down with a member of our team to review how hyperbaric oxygen therapy can get your wound healing back on track. To get that ball rolling, please contact us today to schedule an appointment.