Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy: A Novel Treatment for Longevity, Brain Health, and Chronic Disease

Introduction: Coming up on this episode of the Doctor’s Farmacy,

Dr. Scott Sherr You can change your expression of genes to help you with healing, with optimization, with the various ways of rebuilding the scaffolding, as I like to say, of the tissue itself.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Welcome to the Doctor’s Farmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman, that’s farmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And today we’re going to talk about technology that’s been around for a long time, and it’s being used in new and interesting ways for longevity, for chronic fatigue, for Lyme disease, for a whole host of problems that are not quite approved yet, but that are very much in the conversation about how we deal with really intractable problems like aging, for example. And what I’m talking about is something called hyperbaric medicine, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT as it’s known. And you might have heard about it, you might not have heard about it, but it’s used in hospitals around the country to treat wound problems and many other things. It’s actually what scuba divers use when they get the bends and they come up too fast and get nitrogen toxicity.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So it’s been around for a long time, but now it’s being used in new and interesting ways that I think we’re going to get deep into today with one of the world’s experts, my friend and colleague, Dr. Scott Sherr, who’s a certified internal medicine doc in hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And he is also focusing on health optimization medicine, which is very similar to functional medicine. He’s the founder of integrative HBOT, a worldwide telemedicine practice where he consults, educates and educates patients in clinics using his really novel approaches to hyperbaric medicine and therapy that includes cutting edge and dynamic HPAC protocols, comprehensive lab testing, targeted supplementation, personal practices, synergistic technologies, all of the new and lots more. He’s also the co-founder of One Base Health, which is an innovative HBOT ecosystem leveraging synergistic technologies to accelerate results essentially, where you can do hyperbaric oxygen medicine at home, which was really never possible until recently. He’s the CEO of Health Optimization Medicine, a nonprofit education company, and COO of smarter not harder, which is great. And he’s also a hospitalist. He’s consulted with clinics around the world, including upgraded labs, remedy Place, LMS Wellness, Porto Neuro Chiro, and BI Formation, and many, many others. Welcome, Scott.

Dr. Scott Sherr It’s great to be here, mark. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Dr. Mark Hyman: All right. Well, I personally have benefited from hyperbaric oxygen medicine when I was really sick with mold toxicity and just couldn’t get better, and I had autoimmune issues and colitis and I started to use it and found really profound differences with it, and I think it’s something that really is underutilized in medicine. I recommended for my patients for many things, everything from autism to Alzheimer’s to chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, to just benefiting for longevity. So can you kind of tell us what is hyperbaric oxygen therapy and why is it such a powerful healing amazing technology?

Dr. Scott Sherr Well, thanks for having me again, mark, I remember you coming to the facilities in New York and getting hyperbaric therapy and having your experience, so I appreciate you mentioning that online here to tell people that we’re not just people that recommend it, we actually use it ourselves. And this is personally for me as well. I have a chamber in my house, which is a different type of chamber than you used at the facility, but there’s different indications for these kinds of things which we can get into. So hyperbaric therapy, the definition is relatively simple. It’s the increase in atmospheric pressure combined with increased inspired oxygen. So I’ll take oxygen first because most people know a little bit about oxygen. So oxygen is something we breathe in the air. It’s 21% at sea level. That’s how much oxygen’s in the air. The rest of it’s mostly nitrogen at 5,000 feet above sea level where I live here outside of Boulder, Colorado, or about 16% oxygen. So what happens is oxygen comes into the body. That’s okay. We have

Dr. Mark Hyman: Reason motorized trouble climbing the mountains out there.

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, I know. That’s why, right? So you get this, and this actually comes to why it’s so important. So we carry oxygen pathy on red blood cells, red blood cells carry this molecule on it called hemoglobin, and hemoglobin binds to oxygen, and then oxygen gets to our tissues, and then it goes all the way through our cells, and then at the end of that whole process, it helps you make a TP or your cellular energy currency. So oxygen’s really important. Without it, we don’t live for very long. Now we have a certain amount of oxygen carrying capacity, and that oxygen carrying capacity is relegated to how many red blood cells we have in circulation typically. So you have a certain amount of oxygen that could be carried. You have a certain amount of oxygen that can get into your tissues. Now, there’s a couple ways to increase the amount of oxygen carrying capacity that you have. You can increase the amount of red blood cells you have in circulation. You can do that by altitude training. So when you go to altitude, for example, come to Colorado, what happens is that your body stimulates a hormone out of your kidneys called epogen or EPO for short and epo. What that does is it increases the number of red blood cells you have in circulation. Now, you can short circuit this by taking the drug itself. This is like cyclists like Lance Armstrong and others would do this

Dr. Mark Hyman: Doping. The doping.

Dr. Scott Sherr Exactly. Or what you can do is actually you can auto transfuse yourself. So some of these guys will do this. They’ll actually take blood out maybe 90 days. It takes about 90 days to make new red blood cells 90 days or even more time than that, like 180 days before a race. And then transfuse yourself a unit of blood before you do a race, and you’re going to have extra red blood cells in circulation so that you have increased oxygen carrying capacity. So that’s typically what’s done in the doping world, right? You have epo, you have auto transfusion, so you’re just transfusion yourself, your own blood. But there’s another way to increase oxygen carrying capacity, and that’s by increasing pressure. So we talked about hyperbaric therapy was increasing atmospheric oxygen. We can increase that up to a hundred percent, but if you’re looking at a pulse oximeter, most oximeters for most people are going to read between 96 and a hundred percent, which means that your bound amount of oxygen on your red blood cells is about 96 to a hundred percent once they leave the lungs. So there’s not a lot amount left for you actually to bind any more oxygen there. So if you put a face mask of oxygen on your face and you breathe a hundred percent oxygen, there’s not going to be a whole lot more oxygen you can carry because there’s only about 4% more of those sites maybe that could be bound and the

Dr. Mark Hyman: Trucks are already loaded, right? Yes,

Dr. Scott Sherr Exactly. So the pulse ox is something you guys can check. Everybody knows about it, a pulse ox now from covid, et cetera. So if you add pressure though, if you increase atmospheric pressure, which means that you simulate the pressure you feel under a certain amount of seawater, that pressure changes your physiology and allows oxygen to drive into the plasma or the liquid of your bloodstream. The physics law that’s surrounded is something called Henry’s law for people who like physics, the only physics law I’m going to talk about today is Henry’s law. So the more pressure you put on a gas, the more of that gas is going to go into liquid form. And as a result of that, you get more oxygen into circulation and drive it into the plasma of the liquid of the bloodstream itself, getting up to 1200% more oxygen in as a result of that liquid O2 combined with that pressure with oxygen together. So that’s how hyperbaric therapy works.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Incredible. So what are the benefits, because sounds like a great idea. Okay, more oxygen, oxygen’s good, or maybe not always right? You mentioned oxygen toxicity, so too much is not always good, but what are the benefits that we’re seeing both from the perspective of diseases that we can treat with hyperbaric medicine as well as health optimization, longevity research? And I think there’s been a number of studies out there, and I think we’re still learning, but I’d love you to sort of unpack how is this used in traditional medicine and how is it used outside of traditional medicine?

Dr. Scott Sherr Sure. I first learned about it in a trauma center in medical school, and they were using it for really bad wounds. They were using it for carbon monoxide poisoning. They were using it for acute infections like necrotizing fasciitis, which is also known as flesh eating bacteria. Nasty. That’s a nasty one. That’s a nasty one. Yeah. So the way I like to think about how hyperbaric therapy works is that you have all this oxygen circulation and then something happens acutely or many things happen acutely or all of a sudden as soon as you have all that oxygen in circulation, then you have what I call more the long-term benefits of a hyperbaric protocol. And that’s related more to what’s called epigenetics, which I’m sure you’ve spoken about many times in the podcast. The idea that you can change your expression of genes to help you with healing, with optimization, with the various ways of rebuilding the scaffolding, as I like to say, of the tissue itself.

Dr. Scott Sherr So when you get into a hyperbaric chamber, you acutely infuse 1200% more oxygen. What’s that going to do? That’s going to reverse low oxygen states. So if you have tissue that’s at risk of dying, if you can get more oxygen to that tissue faster, it may not die. And this has been studied in strokes. It’s been studied in traumatic brain injury. It’s been studied in acute heart attacks, acute spinal cord injuries. If these people get hyperbaric therapy very quickly, they’re going to save tissue because you’re getting more oxygen infused into the body, so you have more liquid O2 in, it’s going to diffuse out more into the tissue. You’re going to prevent it from potentially dying as a result of getting all that oxygen in.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Just a quick anecdote on that, and then they can continue on the disease thing. My partner fell off a golf cart and had a concussion, smashed her head and had real bad post-concussive syndrome. So I contacted a local hospital that had a hyperbaric, and I convinced them to off off-label, we call it off-label, give her hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And it was a game changer. She literal came out of there and her brain woke up. It was really quite stunning to see in person as opposed to in a scientific article that I read.

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, no, it’s always nice. I appreciate the anecdote. I mean, it happened to me. I gave myself an acute concussion maybe four or five years ago, and I did my whole protocol, got into the hyperbaric chamber, and I felt like a million bucks after three days. And what’s going on when you have an acute injury like that is you have acute inflammation, you could have some swelling, you have some tissue that’s at risk of dying depending on the severity of the injury. And you have hyperbaric therapy that’s coming in here now, reversing low oxygen states, decreasing inflammation, immediately decreasing swelling, starting the release of stem cells, which are the baby cells in our body that can make new tissue and help mature the tissue in the various areas so that you can make new cells in the area. So you always have these sort of backup cells and all the tissues that you have in your body that are kind of waiting in case they’re needed.

Dr. Scott Sherr And hyperbaric therapy can help stimulate the maturation of those so you can start getting them to start healing that area at the same time. And so you have all these things happening along with, you have all the immune system cells starting to start getting involved very quickly too, so your immune system starts revving up as well. And you have the immune system cells like your neutrophils and your macrophages, which are really important when you’re starting to clean up tissue to help be able to do this. So from an acuity perspective, you have an acute issue. What hyperbaric therapy really does is just rev up the whole healing process to make it work better.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, actually, I also had another patient who had a stroke and it was a hemiplegic stroke, meaning paralyzed on half and couldn’t move that side of his body. And we did a lot of things, a lot of nutritional things. We gave him IV and AD and other things, but I was pushing him to do really aggressive hyperbaric treatment, and he did, and he fully recovered. It was really quite shocking because you just don’t see people recover from a stroke like that.

Dr. Scott Sherr You don’t. No, you don’t. I mean, that’s what I always say. I mean, obviously if you have an acute issue, go to the hospital. Don’t try to find your local hyperbaric facility if you’re having a heart attack or a stroke or

Dr. Mark Hyman: First and your ABCs, we call ’em.

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, exactly. But as soon as possible, but truly as soon as possible, if it’s possible for you to get into a hyperbaric chamber. Now, the data is still controversial, let’s call it that. These are off-label indications. We have certain on-label indications for hyperbaric therapy, which are covered by insurance, that will be covered by Medicare and all your private insurances, but the things that we’re talking about.

Dr. Mark Hyman: But you’re very limited by the way. Very, which are very limited indications like wound care,

Dr. Scott Sherr Diabetic foot ulcers,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Diabetic foot ulcers,

Dr. Scott Sherr Radiation injury from cancer treatment. This is delayed radiation injury. So if you have an injury from radiation six months or later after your radiation exposure, you can get hyperbaric therapy covered by your insurance companies. There is sudden hearing loss, sudden sensory renewal, hearing loss. This is when you lose hearing. It’s could be pretty devastating for people. Hyperbaric therapy is covered for that. Chronic bone infections, something called osteomyelitis. If wound care hasn’t been helpful, then hyperbaric therapy may be something that you can use. And then at risk flaps and grafts, this is in plastic surgery, so if you get plastic surgery, then you can potentially get hypobaric therapy covered for that reason as well. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman: But it’s very limited. Very limited. And compared to actually what it does, it’s such a powerful medicine and it’s only approved for nosebleeds, but nothing else.

Dr. Scott Sherr I know, I know. And so when it comes to it, it’s all the baseline physiology stuff that we’re talking about here, like decreasing inflammation, reversing low oxygen states, stem cell release. It’s an anti-infective. If you have an infection that does not like high oxygen environments like your Lyme infections, like your clostridial infections, like your staph infections, these do not like high oxygen environments. They don’t do well. The infections don’t do well in these environments too. So you have that as another piece. So I always go back to the physiology of it and how we’re thinking about hyperbaric therapy in that more global context as opposed to just for a specific indication usually.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So you mentioned the approved indications, which for most insurance companies in Medicare, Medicaid will reimburse. What about all the non-approved indications that there’s evidence science for? Kind of give us the landscape of what are the kinds of things people are treating? And I have many obviously anecdotes myself, but you’ve been in this medicine a long time and I think it’s really quite striking how powerful this medicine is when it’s applied for certain conditions. So can you kind of take us through the off-label indications and where it’s most effective?

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, sure. So when hyperbaric therapy is typically used, is in more chronic indications. And these are things that have been going on for long periods of time. And when we’re not looking at just that acute infusion of hyperbaric therapy of oxygen to really help, but also the long-term benefit of what I would call an oxygen infusion protocol, where we’re shifting on the epigenetic side expression of various genes, at least 8,000 different genes that are responsible for growth, for healing, for decreasing inflammation and preventing cell death. And so there’s been a lot of research that’s been done in multiple different conditions out there. Looking at it from this perspective, and we mentioned a couple of them as we’ve been discussing in the podcast so far, but one of the major ones is stroke, for example. So people with strokes do very, very well if they can get into hyperbaric therapy immediately or very close to it.

Dr. Scott Sherr But also there’s a study that was done three months to three years post-stroke, people getting significantly better even three years after a stroke, which is just unheard of. You just don’t see that happening. We also have traumatic brain injury. So we talked about concussion here with your partner Mark, but also with people that have post-concussive syndrome, which is this is people three months or longer after a concussive episode. We see people with reversal of symptoms a year later, which is not possible. If you’ve had a concussion, it’s three months after your concussion, the chances that you’re going to get completely better if you’re not better at that point are very, very low. We know that this is the case. We see it in hyperbaric facilities all over the country, all over the world than the words that, excuse me, the places that I work with and the clients that I work with as well.

Dr. Scott Sherr So you have stroke, you have concussion, you have the dementia. So we’re talking about vascular Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s associated dementia. There is some evidence that hyperbaric therapy can be effective in these patients as well. Now, especially when used in a functional context. Of course, we’re not, and that’s a big thing with a lot of these indications. It’s not just about getting into a hyperbaric chamber. It’s about what are you doing before, during, and after your hyperbaric environment much before, right before. What are you doing during hyperbaric therapy? What are you doing right afterwards? I know that’s a big thing for you too, mark. I mean, it’s not just one single therapy, but especially with all these indications, it’s much more of a broad swath of integration that we’re looking to.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, I mean, you can’t be eating an inflammatory diet and then not taking care of yourself and then just expect it to fix you, but it’s really powerful. So stroke is really clear. Traumatic brain injury is really clear. And these are big problems. Obviously. These are also being used for athletes. A lot of this is for recovery, and we’ll get into the performance thing in a minute, but what other health disease indications do you see this being most effective for?

Dr. Scott Sherr So we’re using it a lot in Lyme disease, and I think it’s something that can be very, very effective, but it’s something that has to be done in the context of working with a Lyme expert as well, like a Lyme litter, a doc or a functional doc that has expertise in Lyme. Because what I found with Lyme disease especially is that for most people, I need to get them about, they need to be about 60 to 80% better already before them to significantly benefit from hyperbaric therapy and have long-term benefit after hyperbaric therapy is completed. That’s been my experience there. But that’s why the ground game, the foundational stuff is so important and working with a provider that has expertise. So Lyme is one of them. Another one would be complex residual pain syndrome, so also known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy. It’s a very difficult to control difficult pain syndrome that’s unfortunately not uncommon and very difficult to treat.

Dr. Scott Sherr Hyperbaric therapy can be fantastically effective at recalibrating the whole tissue bed that was injured. Typically, it’s an injury that causes this to happen, and then there’s a dysregulation or the area, the tissue itself becomes dysregulated. The nerves get all confused, and the blood vessels and everything else, they constrict when they don’t constrict. And what we think hyperbaric therapy can do is actually help with what’s called blood autoregulation. Basically helping re-regulate how the flow of blood is getting into tissue. Because we talked about that pressure. It’s that squeeze that’s happening on the microcirculation, on the very small blood vessels that the pressure itself from a hyperbaric chamber is helping exercise those blood vessels and helping recalibrate them. It helps. It happens in the brain, it happens in the heart, it happens in the genitals. We know that there’s anti-aging studies for all those places, including your natural Viagra, maybe hyperbaric therapy, and if it’s a vascular issue at least. So we know that hyperbaric therapy has this anti-inflammatory capacity. It actually downregulates or decreases some of these major inflammatory markers that you see in autoimmune disease as well, like some of the interleukins, for example, or TNF alpha, which are some of these cytokines is what they’re called. So hyperbaric therapy, downregulates or decreases those. So that’s another type of condition or group is the autoimmune conditions as well. We know hyperbaric therapy can be very helpful in those on its own, maybe not as much as being in more of a holistic perspective.

Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s amazing. Yeah. Well, I think people are going to want to buy one now that it fixes erectile dysfunction.

Dr. Scott Sherr That’s how the Israelis got everybody to sign up. Actually, it’s kind of funny you mentioned,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Because

Dr. Scott Sherr They show all the guys pictures of, it’s actually one of my favorite things to show as a lecture slide when I lecture is a functional MRI of the penis before and after hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Nobody knows what it’s, that’s fun. Okay. I love that.

Dr. Scott Sherr Nobody knows what it is. It looks like a tube and there’s colors on it, and then there’s more colors on the other one. But I just like to tell everybody, it’s a penis that I’m putting up on my lecture slides talking about how hyperbaric therapy regenerates blood vessels. That’s one thing that we haven’t talked about is that what hyperbaric therapy does immediately is reverse low oxygen states by getting more oxygen into tissue, but over the long term, it’s actually rebuilding and regenerating blood vessels, something called angiogenesis. So if you have more blood vessels, you’re going to get more oxygen to the tissue over the long term, and that’s important. And then we can see functional MRIs of the brain, of the heart of the genitals here, and you can see how you can rebuild this tissue. And that’s where it comes into sort of the anti-aging reverse aging world.

Dr. Scott Sherr But yeah, these Israelis would have been the main people that have done a lot of this research on the reverse aging side. So they did studies on the brain, the heart, the genitals, and showing that you could see new vascularization, new blood vessels growing in the brain, in the heart. And so when in the heart it gives you more exercise tolerance and in the groin it gives you more sexual tolerance, I guess, or sexual possibilities. And then they’ve also done studies looking at senescent cells and telomere length, which are fancy words for things that get bad as we get old, basically.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, zombie cells, we call ’em. There are cells that don’t die that sp out inflammation. And your telomeres are the little things at the end of your chromosomes that tend to shorten as we age. And so actually in those studies, it seemed to lengthen telomeres more than any other treatment and actually kill zombie cells more than any other treatment, which is important. Those are part of the hallmarks of aging we talk about. Right?

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, the zombie cells are a big one too. I mean, I think of all the research that came out, the senescent sellers of the zombie cell decreased population by about 30% after 30 treatments was pretty impressive. There’s no other treatment out there that we’re aware of that can do something like that. But you mentioned chambers at the house, mark and I probably should mention a little bit about the different types of chambers out there because I think people get confused about

Dr. Mark Hyman: Before we’re getting into what chambers we’re going to, into how to use ’em, how long to be in it, what atmospheres we’re going to get into all that. Get ahead myself. Getting yourself. I want to just linger a little bit more on the treatment side, please, on the things that actually it can help. And a colleague of mine in functional medicine, doctor, I’m sure David Perlmutter, who’s a neurologist, was in the hyperbaric medicine 30 years ago and had a whole series of hyperbaric chambers at his clinic, and he found it worked for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Can you talk about its role in neurodegenerative disease? Is there any evidence? What do we know? Does it work? Is it helpful? Should I be thinking about this for that?

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah. David is one of the pioneers of using hyperbaric therapy for a neurologic injury. There’s a couple other clinics that were in Florida doing very similar things, is this guy, Dr. Neubauer, one of the oldest, one of the older guys that kind of took hyperbaric therapy from the wound care world and started using it for the brain. And it’s always like the happenstance kind of thing. You have somebody go into a hyperbaric chamber for the bends, but their stroke symptoms get better, or their diabetic neuropathy improves, or their traumatic brain injury that they’ve had for a year suddenly improves, or their nightmares from PTSD from Vietnam suddenly disappear and don’t come back. And these are the things that happened in the early 1990s. And so the pioneers of this world were a guy named Dr. Neubauer and Dr. Paul Hart. Paul still practicing in Louisiana and has been doing this for a while.

Dr. Scott Sherr And along with Dr. Perlmutter, they were all looking at how specifically the brain worked under hyperbaric pressure and how hyperbaric therapy could potentially be a modality to help in the ways that we’ve discussed decreasing inflammation, improving blood vascularization. And we know that this can happen. We know that brains can start lighting up again, even if they’ve been degenerating because of cognitive impairment. I mean, you and I both know Mark that after about the age of 50 or so, if you put somebody under MRI scanner and you look at their brain, even with just a regular MRI, it’s going to have something called microvascular ischemic changes of the brain, which just basically means that blood vessels themself, the vasculature is starting to deteriorate. And so we know that if we can get somebody into hyperbaric chamber and start rebuilding those blood vessels, they’re going to have more tissue that’s not going to die, right?

Dr. Scott Sherr Because as the brain gets older, it shrinks because the blood vasculature starts to shrink around it and degenerate. So we think that hyperbaric therapy works in these contexts for cognitive impairment, for Alzheimer’s, potentially, especially in the early stages, by decreasing inflammation, by increasing the vascularization of the brain by actually helping more stem cells populate that area, and then also helping with flow. The one thing that we forget in hyperbaric therapy, actually most of my colleagues forget, is that pressure is actually the main thing that’s happening. Of course, oxygen’s important, but it’s pressure that’s driving everything and pressure itself is driving flow and it’s driving vascular and lymphatic flow. So it’s the pressure itself that’s helping with the brain’s actually detoxification systems and helping you actually get some of that cerebral spinal fluid to flow out and help rebuild and regenerate after getting all that garbage out too. So I think it’s a garbage collecting capacity as well that’s happening in the chamber.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So if you just scuba dived at 60 feet or for an hour a day, would that do the same thing?

Dr. Scott Sherr It’s a lot of work to go scuba dive every day, because I mean, that goes into protocols. We’re not usually just talking about just going once. But there’s actually a funny story about that Mark, because they published a study on these veterans that had traumatic brain injury and PTSD, and they took ’em diving for five days, something like 60 feet a day, and they all said that their TBI symptoms were dramatically better. Their concussion symptoms, their PTSD, all PTSD, all were better, and they attributed to going diving and looking at the fish. How about the pressure guys? How about the oxygen? But they said, no, no, it wasn’t that. It was just because they got to look at fish.

Dr. Mark Hyman: A couple other things on the other end of the age spectrum, I’ve seen people use it for autism. What are your thoughts on that? Cerebral palsy?

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah. Yeah. So my father who’s a chiropractor, his name’s Alan, he runs a facility in New York called the Northport Wellness Center, and he’s actually the guy that got me into hyperbaric therapy in the early two thousands because he was looking at how you could use hyperbaric therapy in the context of autistic spectrum within the functional context, that you’re very much in the sense that could you optimize blood flow to the brain and help with blood flow, what I would call regulation in the sense of oftentimes an autistic patients, the way that blood flow is regulated, the way it goes to various areas of the brain is abnormal. And if hyperbaric therapy could help regulate that, would it help with actually helping the brain work better? And the answer is that it seems like it does. And there’s been some small studies in Canada, in India, in other countries, and even in the US looking at how it does seem to help autistic kids, but it’s not a treatment of itself without doing all the other work that really

Dr. Mark Hyman: Is required. The 360 yeah, approach, but it is an adjunct treat. Amazing. Okay. In terms of the mechanisms of action to recap, it increases blood flow, it stimulates angiogenesis residual blood cell formation. It increases stem cell production, it increases telomere length, the kill zombie cells. It helps with wound healing. It helps reduce inflammation. It’s an anti-infective kills bugs. Did I miss anything?

Dr. Scott Sherr No, you did. Well. That was a good lift of everything.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Wait, maybe I don’t have too many microvascular changes yet. I’m going to be 64 this year. Maybe my brain is still working.

Dr. Scott Sherr Well, you’ve done some hyperbaric therapy. You do a couple other things.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Keep not enough. I’m desperate to get one. Honestly, I just waited until I’ve been stationary enough long enough to get one. Well, once

Dr. Scott Sherr You get stationary, I can help you. Yeah, I mean, I think you did a good job with the overview or just the rundown there, mark. I think the key for people to know, and it’s something that I am very emphatic about, is that I don’t think that hyperbaric therapy is right for everybody right now. But I do think that at some point in your life, hyperbaric therapy will very likely be helpful for you. So it’s not an if thing, but it’s a when thing, when thing is important. Because what happens a lot in my field is that if you own a hyperbaric facility, everything looks like you need to go into a hyperbaric chamber right now. Yeah, that’s

Dr. Mark Hyman: All I have is a hammer. Everything looks like a nail.

Dr. Scott Sherr Right, exactly. So I got disinvited from a lecture because I said, please, my lecture title was, please do not put them in the chamber. And it’s a provocative, right? But the idea here is that it’s not if, but when ladies and gentlemen, right, don’t

Dr. Mark Hyman: Take this pill.

Dr. Scott Sherr Yes, exactly. So what I often find, if you have a chronic issue, mark, I need them to see you first. I need them to get optimized first. I need ’em to start working on their vitamins, their mineral nutrients, their gut health now. But if you have an acute issue, then do not pass. Go. Do not collect your $200, find a local hyperbaric facility and start getting treated if it’s safe to do so, because it’s going to help the whole process. But if you have Lyme disease, if you have a chronic concussion, even if you have a chronic stroke or dementia or chronic pain, these things screw up your cellular metabolism and they need to be addressed. If I put something in the hyperbaric chamber, I flood their body with oxygen, that’s awesome, except if their body cannot tolerate all that oxygen. And what does that mean? Because if you have a lot of oxygen circulation, you’re also causing something called oxidative stress. This is the buildup of free radicals and reactive oxygen species. That’s okay. That’s what exercise does. That’s what heat does at high

Dr. Mark Hyman: Levels temporarily.

Dr. Scott Sherr Temporarily. But if you’re going into hyperbaric chamber every day, you’re not going to be able to potentially neutralize that oxidative stress, and that could be a problem. So it’s not like it’s a cure all for everybody right now. I think I just want to emphasize that too.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. Great. Thanks Scott. So we covered the diseases and the pathology that maybe benefited from hyperbaric. Let’s talk about the flip side, which is health optimization, recovery from sports longevity. That’s kind of a whole new field. So it’s not just like if I’m sick, I’m going to go there if I bang my head or if I’ve got a big diabetic foot ulcer, but I want to live a long time, I want to feel good, I want to recover from my workouts. Tell us about the research around recovery, health optimization, longevity, and what are the benefits and what are we seeing?

Dr. Scott Sherr So some of the stuff we’ve been talking about so far, I’m almost all of it to some degree, what is aging? But wounds that kind of build up over time that we need to address. But I mean, what it comes down to is that the Israeli group run by a guy named Dr. Haidi. They published a number of studies on a healthy population greater than 65 years of age. And looking at all these markers that we’ve been discussing, senescent cells, telomere length, they looked at blood vascularization in the brain, in the heart, in the genitals. So this is in a normal population. So this is making a normal population a normal for a 65-year-old, healthier. So IE reversing their age by giving them these markers that give them signs of having a lower age, better cardiac output or heart capacity, better brain function, better genital function, et cetera.

Dr. Scott Sherr So we know that from a reverse aging perspective and anti-aging perspective, that’s how hyperbaric therapy is working. There’s no doubt about it. And we’re getting more and more people that are interested in these kinds of protocols doing diagnostics before, doing cellular testing, before than doing diagnostics afterwards. Maybe it’s brain imaging maybe. Maybe it’s it’s neuropsychological testing, maybe it’s additional types of blood work, things like that, looking at before and after inflammatory markers. There’s lots of different ways to go about it. And I do various things in my practice depending on the patient and the clinic and things like that. When it comes to the athlete, there are some really interesting studies that have been done in the regenerative world. So looking at PRP plus hyperbaric oxygen therapy for recovery, which has been pretty effective. There’s also some studies looking at stem cells and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Now we make stem cells mobilize more in a hyperbaric chamber, but using them exogenously or getting injections or putting them in various locations, there may be a benefit from doing that as well. And there’s interest in exosomes and V cells and all these other fancy different types of regenerative technologies, although we don’t have a lot of data for those quite yet.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So through the same mechanisms of reducing inflammation of increasing stem cells and repair of helping new blood vessel formation, it seems to really be something that is promising for not only just health optimization and actually recovery from injury or exercise, but actually for longevity itself.

Dr. Scott Sherr And then when it comes down to the recovery piece of it, it’s everything that we’ve discussed before. And so for my athletes that use hyperbaric chambers, we talk about it using pre-treatment. So pre-workout as a way to kind of boost your hyperbaric therapy. You can actually, so interesting thing about after you get out of a chamber, you have about 30 minutes to an hour where you have more oxygen in circulation. So you’re going to have more oxygen carrying capacity for that 30 minutes to 60 minutes after you get out of the chamber. And so that you can actually leverage that to do some additional work or increase your oxygen carrying capacity in the sense of what kind of work are you going to do when you get out of the chamber? You’re going to try to do some more exercise that you wouldn’t typically do. And I’ve had lots of patients that tell me that they can run for 30 minutes longer after their hyperbaric treatment that day, as opposed to when they didn’t do it that day, for example.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Amazing. Amazing.

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, you can use it on the recovery side. So after you do your hard workout, after you do your exercising, you can use hyperbaric therapy on the other end of it for helping with the recovery. So it’s going to help with decreasing inflammation and increasing blood flow and helping with lymphatic and detoxification. But I mean, you want the hormetic stress, you want the stress of the exercise. So you don’t want to typically do it right after exercise. You want to wait maybe three to four hours afterwards. But the same things apply. And I work with athletes, I work with people with stage four cancer. I mean everyone in between because we know hyperbaric therapy from its base mechanisms, what it’s doing. And then it really just depends on how much you need, what kind of pressure you need, what kind of chamber you need, how often those kinds of metrics and variables that we play with. And then also, not only those, but what are your integrations? What are you doing before hyperbaric therapy? What are you doing during, if it’s the type of chamber, you can bring something in there, what are you doing afterwards? So these are all the things that are very much involved in sort of the ecosystem that I’ve developed with my company, one base and everything. But it, it’s something that I’ve been using in clinical practice for a decade now.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, amazing. So now let’s get into sort of the nitty gritty, because I’m sure by this point people are like, I want one, I want to get in one, I need it. It’s not like, oh, I can get a cold plunge and just bump bu, or get a little sauna it’ss a substantial piece of equipment. And for those listening, there are different kinds of chambers. There’s ones that are medical grade chambers that are used in a hospital where you require a technician. There’s soft chambers, which are things that have been sold for a while at home, which have much lower pressure. So we’ll get to talk about what is an atmosphere, what are the atmosphere ratings and what is the difference of them and how do they apply to our health? But the soft chambers, and then there’s hard chambers, and then there’s now home hard chambers. So there’s a whole new era of people actually learning about this, wanting to do this at home. It’s not cheap, but the benefits are pretty substantial. So I would encourage you to help us walk through the difference between hardened soft chambers. Take us through the science of the protocols, different things. For example, how many atmospheres should we be using? How long do you stay in the chamber?

Dr. Mark Hyman: What do you use for different problems? And take us through a little bit, and we’ll go deep in this because I think it’s an important conversation about how is this applied.

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, thanks, mark. That was a great overview. So the best way to think about it is that, let’s forget about the type of chamber for a minute. Let’s just talk about pressure. So for the most part, what we’re talking about is we have two different types of pressures that we typically use in the chamber. We have what we kind of call neurologic pressures, and we have systemic pressures. Now there’s of course there’s going to be crossover, but in general, neurologic pressures are an atmosphere of between 1.3 and 2.0. So that means about 15 feet of sea water to about 33 feet of sea water. So that if you can imagine if you’re 33 feet below the sea, you’re looking up all that water is extremely heavy. You pick up a bucket of water, it’s extremely heavy. So we’re actually simulating that pressure you feel in the chamber.

Dr. Scott Sherr So neurologic pressures tend to be about 1.3 atmospheres to about 2.0, and the systemic pressures tend to be about 1.8, 1.7 to about 2.4. Now, we can go deeper than that, especially if there’s an acute injury, if there is an acute lack of blood flow to a limb or if there’s carbon monoxide poisoning or if there’s the bends. But in general, our therapeutic pressure ranges between 1.3 and 2.4. And so home chambers are soft. So let’s talk about soft chambers now. So soft chambers in general typically go between 1.3 and 1.5 atmospheres. These are chambers that can be used at home very easily and very safely. It’s a bit of a wild west when it comes to finding chambers out there, which we can talk about. But when it comes down to it, the mild units, the soft sided units typically go between 1.3 and 1.5, and then you’ll have different varieties of soft chambers that can do that.

Dr. Scott Sherr But that’s more for neurologic pressures in general. So for neurocognitive optimization, I call them sort of your overall day-to-day optimization chambers. They’re safe to use at the house, they’re easy to use at the house. You can stack them or have protocols where you can find different integrations. This is what my team has been really emphatic about, is how you can make these mild chambers more therapeutic by enhancing blood flow before you go in, for example, doing various types of therapeutics while you’re in the chamber itself and even afterwards. But in general, the mild units are for neurocognitive optimization day-to-Day wellness and recovery. Okay. Now, the hard chamber units, as you were alluding to Mark, there are medical grade units that you can go to a facility for that. These are single occupancy chambers, sometimes multiple occupancy chambers as well called mono place or multiplay. And all of the medical indications for hyperbaric therapy at this point right now are either at 2.0 or greater. So if you’re going to go to a medical facility, typically that’s the pressure they’re going to treat you at. Although there are some hyperbaric facilities do both on-label and off-label hyperbaric therapy that will allow you to have more of a range of pressures that you can do. There are facilities that do both insurance work and non-insurance work, so you can get hard chambers for your house as well, although that’s a newer area and it’s not as easy. Logistically, the chambers are much heavier.

Dr. Scott Sherr They just take more work to operate in general. And there’s more of a safety component to it. I mean, they’re very safe, but at the same time, you have to make sure you’re getting it from a good manufacturer, from a company that’s going to give you good safety, just kind of overall is kind of work with you in a very specific way. I mean, the challenge that you have with hyperbaric chamber companies in general in the US is that it’s kind of just sell you a chamber and then no longer talk to you. You’re on your own deal. And actually, that’s why I got involved in the business side of this. I was just tired of talking to people after they got a chamber, had a bad experience or didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t know how to use it, didn’t know what kind of protocol.

Dr. Scott Sherr But in general, the way I see the soft chambers, at least going mark, is kind of like the way of the peloton over time is that you’re going to have your Peloton, you’re going to have your sauna for people that can afford it. I know these are not inexpensive things, but that you’re also going to have a hyperbaric chamber because it’s going to be your recovery tool as it is with your cold plunge. I mean, one of my favorite protocols is 30 minutes in a hyperbaric chamber and then get into your cold plunge afterwards. And it’s called our optimal performance, our cognitive performance protocol on our app, for example, that we use. So I mean, there’s lots of fun ways you can go. Yeah,

Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s amazing. So the higher pressure chambers, the hard chambers seem to be more effective maybe for longevity for some things. You’re talking about the stem cells, the recruitment, the inflammation issues, the telomere length, the zombie cell killing, effectiveness of them effectiveness. Is that fair to say?

Dr. Scott Sherr So right now, that’s the data. Yeah. If anybody tells you that the soft chamber they’re trying to sell you does the same thing as what they’ve shown in these studies, the answer is that they have no clue and they’re not being truthful. We just don’t know. There is some indication though, that we do know actually that stem cells do get released in these mild units even without oxygen, interestingly. So typically what we’re doing is that you have a hyperbaric chamber and you’re getting oxygen that’s usually being piped in it via either an oxygen concentrator or if it’s a deeper chamber. It may be through oxygen tanks or liquid oxygen, even at deeper pressures. But we do know that even at 1.3 atmospheres, which is a mild unit hyperbaric protocol or hyperbaric chamber, you’re getting about two times or 200% more stem cells than circulation. So this is not a small amount even without any oxygen added.

Dr. Scott Sherr This is just hyperbaric air. So all that means is that you’re pressurizing the ear and the environment around you. And when you do that, you’re getting more stem cells released. And another argument that I get a lot from the hard chamber people in hyperbaric therapy, and again, I’m not a purist. I use hard chambers, I use soft chambers, I use them both that one of the arguments that you get from the soft chamber, the people that do not like soft chambers, is that they don’t think you can get a huge amount more oxygen in circulation at that level. And if it’s from a pure oxygen perspective, it’s not a huge amount more, but it’s the pressure as well that people forget about because the pressure itself increases energy production directly even without oxygen being around. So we do know that absolutely. The data shows that stem cells, the deeper you go, the more stem cells you’re going to release, the 2.0 pressure is what’s been studied for senescent cells, for telomere length, for angiogenesis, for the brain, for the heart, and the genitals, what we were talking about before.

Dr. Mark Hyman: But 2.0 is the way to go.

Dr. Scott Sherr But I can say mark, clinically, clinically using the soft chambers for a long period of time, if you have the ability to optimize before you go in, so you’re doing functional medicine, you’re doing some sort of foundational testing, and then optimizing vascular flow using various types of technologies, maybe lights, maybe cold therapy, maybe even things like supplements to help with vascular flow, which I’ll use. This is something that I’ve developed for many years, and you’re looking at this cadence of how you do things to enhance vascular vascular flow. You can potentially, I think, simulate for some indications, not all in the mild unit by doing this integrative kind of approach, but simply going into a hyperbaric chamber at mild pressure is not going to do the same thing ever as going into 2.0. It’s just not possible. Yeah,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. So yeah, I think obviously imagine the costs will come down for these units over time. I think it used to be 150,000 to get a hard chamber. Now you get one for 25,000 for 50,000 for less. It’s still a lot of money, but it’s kind of a long-term piece of equipment that I think it has profound benefits for health, if you can get it.

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah. One of the things I think about is sort of like my hub and spoke model for this, which is I have a soft chamber in my house that I use regularly, and I have a clinic close by that has a hard chamber that I can use in case I need it. So I think from a day-to-day wellness perspective overall, if you don’t have a severe condition, some of the things that we talked about before, then I think having a mild unit could be very, very helpful. But having an access to a hard chamber so that you can use it periodically, I think is very, very helpful for the reasons that we mentioned as well. So I think from an affordability perspective, it’s significantly less cost to get a mild unit for the house than it is to get a hard chamber for the house, that’s for sure and logistically.

Dr. Scott Sherr But then if you have somebody close by, you have a facility close by that you can trust. And I work with many facilities, and a lot of them are great. Some of them you have to be careful, but most of them are great. And then you have a great place close by to get hard chamber hyperbaric therapy when you need it. And I think about these longevity protocols, how do you use a hyperbaric chamber over the long term? And I think having the ability to go to 2.0 for a protocol once every year or is likely awesome if you can do it,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Or you can buy one with 10 friends and you’re going to

Dr. Scott Sherr Cross on your chamber. I like it. Yeah,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, exactly. So let’s talk about the protocols. I mean, these longevity protocols were like 60 sessions over three months. So it’s basically Monday to Friday and skip the weekends. And can you talk about what do we know about the frequency, the dose duration? In other words, should you be 60 minutes, 90 minutes, how many days a week? How many times a year? Is it something you can do every day? For example, if you have your chamber, would you go in a hard chamber every day for 365 days or is there a danger to doing that? So talk us

Dr. Scott Sherr Through, please don’t do that.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, talk us through what is, because the thing is you buy a chamber if you used it for 60 days, and what happens the other 305 days of the year, right? So let’s talk about, unless you have a big family,

Dr. Scott Sherr You’ve gotten a hyperbaric share. It’s like your timeshare or something. Yeah,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Like a timeshare. Exactly. I think that’s the way,

Dr. Scott Sherr That’s a new business idea. I like that. Yeah, you have your condo, you have your hyperbaric chamber. I dig it. So yeah, protocols are important. So oftentimes the way to delineate this is that a couple of different ways. So if you have an acute indication, meaning you just got an injury, you just had a trauma, you have an infection, typically you don’t need that many hyperbaric sessions to see a massive benefit. Maybe one, maybe three, maybe five, maybe up to 10. But in general, for an acute indication, this actually includes surgical indication. So if you just had a surgery, you’re going to heal faster if you get into a hyperbaric environment. And in the studies we’re talking about anywhere between 30 to 70% faster. So I mean, on average about 50% faster overall. So that’s a big deal. If you’re an athlete, that’s a huge deal.

Dr. Scott Sherr If you’re somebody that just had plastic surgery and you don’t want to have raccoon eyes for two weeks and you want to have ’em for 10 days, that’s also nice too. Right? So also, these are shorter protocols typically, as you were mentioning, mark, Monday through Friday. And the reason for that is not so much for the shorter term protocols, although it’s important, but for the long-term protocols, where we’re talking about 20, 40, 60 hyperbaric sessions is the cumulative exposure of the oxygen in your cells. That creates this shift in your epigenetics, which we were discussing about before. It’s that change in expression of helping you heal, helping mature those stem cells, helping decrease inflammation. All that stuff takes time. It doesn’t happen, it starts happening pretty quickly, but it doesn’t really start solidifying itself up until about treatment 20 or so. So if you have more of a long-term goal or a chronic indication, like for example, Lyme or dementia or a chronic pain syndrome, you don’t necessarily want to stop before at least 20 hyperbaric sessions, but that’s your minimum typically.

Dr. Scott Sherr So the hyperbaric protocol you were discussing before with the Israelis, the reverse aging protocol, that was 66 0 hyperbaric sessions over three months. But in general, I find, and if you look at their study itself, their max benefit was around treatment 30 to 40. That was when senescent cells dropped the most. That’s when telomere length increased the most. That’s when angiogenesis, the rebuilding of blood vessels was happening. So in general, what I say is for an anti-aging protocol, and for most of the long-term benefit for chronic indications, we’re talking about at least type 30 hyperbaric sessions, sometimes 40 and sometimes more than that. It just depends on how people are doing. And you have to also think about the pressure. So we were talking about the various types of pressures. So for neurologic conditions, we may not start at 2.0, we may start at 1.3 or 1.5 because the brain is more sensitive to oxygen.

Dr. Scott Sherr And as a result of the brain being more sensitive to oxygen, you have more stress on the brain if you go to deeper pressures. So you have to be aware of that. So there’s some interesting studies that were done where if you looked at a deeper pressure versus a milder pressure, the milder pressure does better and that the deeper pressure actually made people worse initially because the brain was under too much stress. So you want to be thinking about the pressure, the amount of pressure, the number of sessions, and you talked about the time. Typically, we have people going into the hyperbaric chamber between 60 and 90 minutes at a time. The milder pressures, the ones that we’re going from neurologic pressures, those are usually 60 minutes in length, although sometimes we’ll do 90 minutes, but definitely the 2.0 pressure is we do 90 minutes, and this goes into something called air breaks.

Dr. Scott Sherr So when you’re in a hyperbaric environment and you’re getting oxygen usually through a mask or sometimes in the chamber itself, you are every 20 minutes for five minutes, we ask people to breathe just the air in the chamber itself. And what this does is it does two things. The first thing is that it simulates the body of being at altitude, which would be think kind of funny, right? Because you’re in this hyperbaric chamber, you’re deep underneath the sea equivalent and pressure. But what we do is we, by changing the amount of oxygen, the body sees that as that your body’s all of a sudden at altitude, and then that stimulates all these things in your body to be released that happen at altitude. So new blood vessels, new stem cells, decreasing inflammation, all these things happen. Something called hypoxic inducible factor or HIF one alpha for people who care.

Dr. Scott Sherr That’s the name of, I wrote about it in my book, young Forever. Yeah, it’s really important. So HIF one alpha gets released, and so that’s really important for the therapeutic nature, we think of hyperbaric therapy, but also this is the reason why you don’t want to go into the chamber. 365 24 7 is that hyperbaric therapy is creating oxidative stress in the system. It’s increasing the amount of reactive oxygen species. And so your body has the natural ability to balance that out with antioxidants if you have that capacity. That’s why it’s important not just to go into the chamber without maybe thinking about these things and working with a clinician that can help you. But what these air breaks help do is help decrease the risk of oxygen toxicity because there’s less oxygen every 20 minutes for that five minutes. So it prevents potential, the toxic buildup of these oxygen radicals.

Dr. Scott Sherr So it’s rare to have a problem with oxygen toxicity, but it does happen. And these are people that the most rare side effect that can happen in a hyperbaric chamber is a seizure. This doesn’t typically happen unless you’re at very deep pressure for long periods of time without air breaks, and also have a preexisting reason to have a seizure like you’ve had a seizure disorder before, you’ve had a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, you have a cancer in the brain. It’s something like that. Now we can mitigate this with things like isogenous ketones, and I have lots of integrative oncologists that I work with that do deeper pressure protocols using hyperbaric therapy. We didn’t talk about cancer. That’s one of the other ones that we use hyperbaric therapy for. So you can mitigate oxygen toxicity that way by using these air brakes as well. But in general, the treatment time in the chamber is going to be between 60 and 90 minutes, sometimes as long as 120 minutes. Sometimes it’s short as 30 minutes depending on the protocol.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Interesting. So there is a danger, and you mentioned a word before that I talked about before on the podcast called hormesis, which is this idea of a stress that doesn’t kill you but makes you stronger. And that’s really what hyperbaric oxygen therapy is. It’s a stress in your body, but it stimulates your body’s own regenerative repair renewal systems that you’re built in to help you deal with problems. It’s already a built in. You’ve got a built-in autocorrect system, but most of us trample over it, don’t facilitate it and help it. And this is a method that actually allows you to activate these ancient built-in repair regenerative renewal systems. And it’s a beautiful technology because it’s not like a drug that has all these side effects. It actually, when used properly with the right protocol, with probably medical supervision to some degree at the beginning, that it can be a really beautiful adjunct to a health and wellness protocol, longevity protocol.

Dr. Mark Hyman: It’s something that people don’t realize is out there and it has the potential to help people who are struggling with many, many issues. I’m curious about the effect on the brain and what you’ve seen in terms of depression. You mentioned P-T-S-D-A little bit. I know when I went in it, my brain just was like, bro, wide awake, clear, sharp. I mean, I didn’t even know I had brain fog and I came out of that thing. So it’s kind of fascinating to see how it changes your cognitive function in real time. Not over many treatments, but even just after one session.

Dr. Scott Sherr So can you talk about that? That’s the acute infusion of oxygen and peace. And there are some people that are pretty, what I call the quick responders, the massive responders, the people that go in initially after their first couple of sessions, they’re like, holy, this is amazing. My brain hadn’t felt this good in forever. And that’s usually a good sign that if they do a full protocol that they will maintain at a higher level before they started. Now, that usually means that the body or the brain in this case is not getting enough oxygen chronically. And this can happen for a number of different reasons. It can happen from mitochondrial distress, it can happen from vascular degeneration, it can happen from inflammation. And once you get more oxygen in there, your mitochondria, which are the part of your cell that make energy, you’re like, holy crap, this is awesome.

Dr. Scott Sherr We’re making more energy. This is great. But then after about three to five sessions in is when that starts to trail off for most people. And then the brain starts doing the hard work of actually regenerating itself. And that’s all that epigenetic stuff we were talking about before. And so I have people that go in there, they go in there for tests and they go in there. They actually did an interesting study in China where they put Chinese students in for five days before they did major exams, and they did amazingly better, and they did MRIs of their brain and their ability to take short-term memories or take long-term memories and bring them to short-term was massively increased and their executive function increased as well. So that’s a short-term benefit. And there are utilization ways that I use, I use that in clinical practice. I use that for myself when I know I’m going to have a big week at work or lots of podcasts with people like Dr. Hyman here. And so you want to have, you’re

Dr. Mark Hyman: Cheating. I don’t have one.

Dr. Scott Sherr Not yet. Not yet. But the key with it always is that when I work with clients, and I know you do the same thing, mark, it’s about the holistic perspective here wasn’t, and wasn’t available until I started doing this with my team, was creating a full educational platform, an application for people to actually see how they can use hyperbaric therapy in real time and how they can get educated on it and how they can integrate it with their other technologies that they might or might have, might not have but maybe want to have in their homes. I mean, the problem with hyperbaric therapy I found, and I’ve been doing this now for a decade, is that I thought that it was the wild West like three years ago, and then covid happened, and now we know from a post covid world too, hyperbaric therapy can be extremely effective in helping decreases information in the brain, helping with regeneration of blood vessels, everything we’ve talked about. It works in post covid syndrome fantastically well, exactly. And so many. And even during the acute covid part of things, we were using hyperbaric therapy to keep people out of the hospital. I mean, this is not using mean even hospitals. Were trying it in the beginning, but using other protocols and using other compounds. And I’ve had a lot of success with other kinds of things too. But for a post-infectious inflammation, hyperbaric therapy is fantastic as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So if you have an acute thing, we mentioned this shorter timeframe, if you want to do it for longevity, it’s 30 to 60 sessions and then you just do it once a year. Is that the idea as it kind of reset or,

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah. Thank you for mentioning that. I meant to mention it before, so nobody really knows. Okay. I’ve developed protocols over the years working with people from all walks of life in very different professional backgrounds. But what it seems to work best from what I can tell, because if you ask the Israelis, so you do this hyperbaric protocol, you do 60 hyperbaric sessions and you’ve got all these amazing changes to the brain, all these amazing changes to your lab work. And then I go, what happens six months later? And they go, we don’t know. Nobody knows. How long does it last? Nobody knows how long it lasts. And that’s why such a big part of this is like you just can’t go into a chamber and expect that it’s going to fix your diet and your supplements and your mitochondrial stress. It might help a little bit, but in six months to a year you might start going back to the way you were.

Dr. Scott Sherr But even in somebody that’s pretty well optimized, that’s just doing the natural aging of life, I think that re-upping on these kinds of protocols is going to be necessary. Now, how often? I don’t know. So what I typically say is if you’re over about 60 years or 65 years of age, depending on how old you are, if you have a hyperbaric chamber available to you, going to do a deep pressure protocol every year to every two years would be probably optimal. Now, would it have to be as long every single year? I don’t know. The way I typically work it is that the people that I work with in their own homes with the chambers that we have and the protocols that we use, is that I think about it in this way, and I think about you’re doing a protocol every six months, but one’s for systemic optimization, one’s for brain optimization, or you’re doing one protocol every year and alternating.

Dr. Scott Sherr And then in between you’re using pretty much just mild hyperbaric chamber pressures just for day-to-day recovery optimization. Not using it every day, maybe using it on average maybe two or three times a week, using it more when you’re getting off an airplane because you were hypoxic or you were low oxygen on a plane or using it more when you have a mild injury or if you have family members that are going to use it. Of course, everybody that goes into a hyperbaric chamber should make sure that they’re okay to go into a hyperbaric chamber. It’s a medical technology, it’s not a wellness technology, so you have to make sure you’re screened by a physician and all those kinds of things. But in general, it’s important to, the way I think about, it’s sort of in two different types of tranches, whether you’re doing everyday protocol or you’re doing it sort of intermittently for maintenance and then alternating those things over time.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, I mean it’s like if you’re working out all the time, you want to use it all the time, but you’re saying that’s a bad idea to actually get that much hyperbaric treatment,

Dr. Scott Sherr You definitely want to take breaks because of the stress of being under high oxygen environments. And I see this people with traumatic brain injury, for example, and they’re getting better, maybe their treatment 40 in and they’re like, oh, we should continue because they’re continuing to improve. And then in treatment 42, some of their symptoms start coming back. Their brain injury symptoms start reverting and they start having difficulty sleeping and their sleeping gotten better. And then that could be a sign that it’s too much oxygen. You need to take a break. So it’s not just more is better. And it’s not the American way in a hyperbaric chamber,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Unfortunately. Yeah, it’s really important to people to hear. It’s really, it’s a medical therapy. You don’t take it all the time. It’s very much customized to what your particular needs are, and you can overdo it. So it’s actually this whole field of the decentralization of healthcare, the democratization of healthcare is happening across the board, whether it’s with home hyperbaric oxygen therapy or whether it’s with things like access to lab testing like I’m doing with function health where giving people access to over a hundred different biomarkers that they can order outside the healthcare system and directly get their results and have a optimized plan. You also are, I see the bridge, are the bridge between the traditional hyperbaric medicine world and hospitals and sort of the consumer interest in this space and making it safe, effective training people. So tell us a little bit more about how you have developed tools and programs and services to help support doctors and also patient patients or even health hackers or whatever you want to call ’em, biohackers who want to do this on their own.

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, I mean, I started off conventionally trained, but I grew up the son of a chiropractor, so I was kind of crazy from the beginning. So working in the middle of these two things has been fun for me. And dovetailing, I mean, most of the time that I spend these days is in the alternative optimization recovery, the things that are off-label when it comes to hyperbaric therapy. And I have a lot of great colleagues that work on the conventional side that I can leverage that also do some of the off-label stuff too. But I think that for me, when I was looking at this world four or five years ago now, I realized that there was really an opportunity to make hyperbaric therapy better, faster, and safer in so many ways, especially because people were getting chambers in their homes. They didn’t know what to do with them.

Dr. Scott Sherr They had all these other technologies at their house, they didn’t know what to do along with hyperbaric therapy. And I’ve been creating protocols and working with patients and clients all over the world for the last decade. I have a remote consulting practice that I consult with people all over the world and help them create their hyperbaric protocols, help liaison with their local facilities. I know many at this point around the US and around the world. I also work with clinics, facilities that hyperbaric therapy as a part of how they integrate their other modalities, whether it be like a biohacking lab or it might be a neurologic chiropractor, for example, and everything in between. So with all this in mind, I created a company called One Base Health, which is really the idea behind that was to create an educational platform and a way to access hyperbaric therapy in a more holistic way.

Dr. Scott Sherr So you have access to protocols, you have access to education, you have access to some new smart technology that’s really going to make the chamber faster, better, and safer. And then looking at those integrations in a way that how can you leverage this technology? That’s my thing. I mean, I’m obviously biased because I’m a hyperbaric guy, but how can I leverage this chamber to work better? So how can I increase vascular flow before you go in? What supplements can I give you? What technology can I use? And then how can I help you detox afterwards? Or how can we help you boost with the oxygen after you’ve gotten out to truly leverage the technology and go in a coal plunge? And we have your optimal focus protocol for that. So it’s been fun for me to actually operationalize and actually put down on paper things that I’ve been doing for a decade with patients and then also provide the service as well in the sense that I don’t want to sell or give somebody something that they don’t need.

Dr. Scott Sherr And I’ve been very clear with my team from the beginning, and it was hard because everybody just wants to sell whatever they have and any team and books, supplements, it doesn’t matter. And I understand that part, but you and I are first and foremost clinicians. And so that’s why my focus has always been what are we doing right for the person that’s on the other side of the phone or that we can help here? And so the protocols are all based on my understanding of those things, but at the same time, always keeping in mind, making sure it’s really appropriate for the person to be really accessing our ecosystem right now or if it’s something that they need to access later as well. So big time on service. That was the other piece in the hyperbaric world that I saw was missing is that there was really not a great amount of service and long-term ambulatory care actually working with people over a long period of time and seeing how they do and work with them. And that’s the ecosystem that we’re creating and I’m really excited about it.

Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s amazing. And I think your website, one base health.com has many, many articles, the chambers that you actually have helped develop that are safe and easy to use, and they’re for home use that are both soft and hard chambers. I think it’s a really wonderful resource and it fills a huge gap in the marketplace that I’ve seen. I have access to you, I just call you when I need you. Most people don’t and they can’t, oh, I got this person who needs this. What do you think? So I think this is a huge, huge help in the marketplace and I think it’s really important, I think. Can you talk maybe a little bit about some of the challenges? Some of the machines out there are not FDA approved. They come from other countries. Some are FDA-approved America, some use pumping oxygen, some have mass. So can you talk about the safety and efficacy of these different ones and what you’ve learned?

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, thanks for mentioning that. So there are certain types of chambers that are called FDA cleared. These are chambers that have certain sort of FDA moniker that’s similar to FDA approval, but different. And those are the chambers that I really do think are important for people to use in a clinic setting most likely because if you’re seeing patients and you’re getting people in there, it just has a little bit of regulatory support that may be beneficial. We don’t know really at this point, but there’s a lot of other chambers that are coming from other countries and other developers and other companies, my company included that don’t quite have that FDA certification yet, but are very safe to use. I think that the challenge is to navigate this field and find people that you trust in it to work with you no matter what chamber you decide to get is what it comes down to.

Dr. Scott Sherr And all the soft chambers, you shouldn’t be getting a chamber that has oxygen around you in the chamber itself. That’s not the safe thing for you to do at the house. The only kind of chamber at the house you should get is one that has a mask on that you can breathe in. Either that’s getting an oxygen concentrator or if it’s a hard chamber, maybe something more like bottled oxygen or liquid O2 if you’re at a medical facility. But waiting, this is not easy because the safety of the chamber is, whether it’s not FDA or F FDA A, it’s unclear. There’s really any major difference. I have one of my chambers of the house, it’s a non DA chamber, it’s a one based health chamber and it works well and there’s no problems with it. It’s got a long track record outside the United States, so it’s difficult to wade through this information.

Dr. Scott Sherr I know for people as you’re thinking about it, but if you’re looking for a hard chamber for your house that’s FDA cleared, it’s going to cost $175,000. But if you get one from outside the us, it’s going to cost between 30 and $50,000. And is safety a problem? The answer is probably not, but it really depends on your relationship with the company, how you feel about it, and how you are going to access them over the long term. Most of these companies, as I said, will not do much more than just sell you a chamber and sell you the deepest chamber. They can for no particular reason other than they’re going to charge you more for,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Are the chambers that from one base health, are those FDA cleared or

Dr. Scott Sherr No, not currently yet, no, they’re not FDA cleared

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yet. But they’re manufactured in the us.

Dr. Scott Sherr No, they’re not manufactured in the US either. They’re manufactured outside the us, but that’s okay because most of the chambers in the US now that are being used are not manufactured here. Actually like

Dr. Mark Hyman: Everything

Dr. Scott Sherr Else, even the ones that say they’re manufactured in the US A are not really. They might be assembled in the United States, but all the parts are coming from other countries. So my feel here is that as a clinician, it’s important that people are very astute looking at what’s out there and doing the best that they can. I mean, I know costs can be an issue and certainly the FDA chambers are more expensive, but if you feel more comfortable with that and you feel more comfortable that that’s giving you some additional safety, then by all means go that way and get those chambers. I work with everybody. It doesn’t matter what kind of chamber that they have. I have just found as a sort of risk tolerance thing for me personally working and doing this work, knowing that there’s a lot of great manufacturers outside the United States that are doing great work that costs less, that I can get more chambers out there to more people. And so my thing is, my thing is access and safety. So safety first, access second. But the other reason why I started this company was I wanted there to be more access for people and to be more access. They needed more affordability for it.

Dr. Mark Hyman: It’s been frustrating because there are chambers everywhere in every hospital, but you can’t get them because they won’t let you use them for off-label indication. So there are other off-label centers, but they’re far and few between. And it’s really a problem for many patients who I’ve tried to refer to hyperbaric medicine. I want to loop back to something and then we’ll close out with where can people find a chamber or how do they get one and so forth. You mentioned cancer. Can you drill down on that for a sec because I think people might’ve heard it and go, what was that cancer hyperbaric for treatment recovery? How does it work? What’s happening in that field?

Dr. Scott Sherr Yeah, it’s a big topic and I’m glad you mentioned it because I was remiss for mentioning it earlier. So in cancer, hyperbaric therapy can be used in about six or seven different ways. So we know what hyperbaric therapy does. It regenerates blood vessels, it regenerates tissue, it rebuilds scaffolding. So the way it’s FDA approved, so insurance covered is with radiation injury. So radiation affects the tissue beds, it depletes of stem cells, it kills blood vasculature. Hyperbaric therapy can rebuild all that. And so it’s used as a treatment for radiation injury. These are in patients that have had radiation, and then six months to many years later, they get an injury or a wound in the radiated field, and then they have a hard time healing that. So a common one is people that have had head and neck cancer and they have a tooth that’s decaying or dying, you can do a hyperbaric protocol where you go in before the surgical excision and then afterwards to prevent the actual bone, the jaw itself from causing necrosis or dying.

Dr. Scott Sherr So it’s called the Marx protocol. So that’s been around forever. That’s the only FDA insurance covered indication. And now we have a whole bunch of others. Now there’s been studies that can potentially help in chemotherapy sensitization, so help with chemotherapy work better. So if it’s a chemo that’s not going to work as well as you’d like it to, hyperbaric therapy may help it work better if it’s radiation. So hyperbaric therapy can make radiation work better because radiation is oxygen requiring. So radiation cannot penetrate tissues where there’s no oxygen. This is why something like brain cancer or glioblastoma is so hard to treat because it’ss a low oxygen tumor and why hyperbaric therapy might be helpful. Hyperbaric therapy is also being used in combination with other oxidative therapies for cancer. This is something like IV vitamin C for example, or missile toe or other types of oxidative therapies, especially in combination with the ketogenic diet.

Dr. Scott Sherr And this is the work of Dominic Dino and Tom Siegfried and Dr. Naisha Winters. All the people that you know and I know that are using it in something called the press pulse technique where the press is ketogenic diet. The pulse is hyperbaric oxygen therapy as a way to truly start killing more cancer cells, especially deeper pressures. So hyperbaric therapy is also being used in surgical oncology to help with recovery from surgical procedures, just like we talked about with an athlete or somebody else that has any kind of injury. Hyperbaric therapy is going to help you heal faster. Same thing in a hyperbaric environment. And also if you’re anemic, if you have low oxygen, if you have low amounts of red blood cells, you have less oxygen you can carry hyperbaric therapy is going to make you feel better because you can get more oxygen circulation for three to five hours afterwards. You’re going to feel better. And the last thing to say about cancer is that there’s no indication that hyperbaric therapy cancer grow. This is something that some conventional oncologists still think, but there’s no evidence in any reviews that have ever been done that hyperbaric therapy can make cancer grow. And that’s something just for people to be aware of as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s good. Yeah, so basically as an adjunct to improve efficacy of therapy and also recovery from the treatments itself. So that’s great.

Dr. Scott Sherr I guess I could have said that too.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, an incredible conversation. It just makes me want to go get in my chamber if I had one, which I don’t. And stay there for the next week, only

Dr. Scott Sherr 60 to nine minutes a day. Remember, not

Dr. Mark Hyman: Minutes. Okay. All right. So where can people find hyperbaric medicine in their community? Is there a website where they can find the centers that do this off label? Where can they learn more about you? And I know you have one base health.com, by the way. People want to learn more. They can get it. If they send an email to one base health.com, they can get a 10% discount if they want to get a chamber. And I have no other affiliation relationship with Scotta than just as a friend and a colleague and advisor on hyperbaric medicine. So tell us more.

Dr. Scott Sherr No, it’s been wonderful to work with you over the last many years, mark. And I think we’ve helped a lot of people and I’m glad, glad we’re able to do this on a bigger platform to help hopefully many more. So my company is called One Base Health, and that’s where you can learn more about the chambers and about education, about our phone application on our education. So we have a free app available as well for download. You can get a good sense of what we do and get a feel of how the protocols work, the education works, and we’re really excited about some new smart technology that’ll be coming out at the end of the year. I do consulting as well. I consult with people all over the world clinics that are interested in integrating hyperbaric therapy with other types of modalities. So you can go to Dr. Scott scher.com, my name dot D-R-S-E-O, tt, SHER r.com.

Dr. Scott Sherr You can learn more about that. You can contact me directly there. I think that also just a couple more links for hyperbaric facilities around the United States that I really like and I trust. There is Hyperbaric Medical Solutions, hyperbaric medical solutions.com. They are in the New York metropolitan area. This is where Mark went in New York City many a couple of years ago. And they have locations in New York, in Boston, and in Florida. There’s also facilities in the Bay Area. There’s a facility in Oakland that’s called Holistic Hyperbarics. It has Advanced Hyperbarics in Marin. There’s a number in la. I mean, if you contact my team or with one of those websites that I just mentioned, we can also help you hyperbaric. Medical Solutions also has lots of partners. They can help also find other locations if you’re not in the New York Metropolitan or the Fort Lauderdale area. So those are the main things. And then I do have my nonprofit organization called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, which is a nonprofit organization, training docs and practitioners on how to optimize health. It’s very similar but slightly different than functional medicine, and I think a good adjunct for people that are looking for additional training. And that’s at home hope.org. So I think that’s about it. And then I guess on Instagram, I’m at Dr. Scott share of people like that too.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Thank you so much, Scott. It’s really a pleasure to work with you and pleasure to learn all about this. I think this is an important topic for just people to understand because it’s one of those therapies in medicine that has so much potential to deal with things that we don’t really have other good therapy for. You bang your head and they go, well, just go home and hope you don’t fall asleep and never wake up again. And it’ll get better, I hope, maybe, and maybe take some fish oil. But actually, there are so many problems that we have in medicine for which this is a beautiful, it’s very safe, very effective therapy. And I think personally, I’ve used it. I recommend it to a lot of my patients. Scott’s my go-to guy for this, and I encourage you to check out his work. Go to one base health.com and then follow him on Instagram and just soak it up. He is so great. Thank you, Scott. For those of you who love this podcast, I encourage you to share it with a friend. I know somebody’s going to benefit from this. Leave a comment. Have you used Hyperbaric oxygen? Has it helped you? Make sure you subscribe for your podcasts, and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Farmacy.

Closing: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or professional advice or services. If you’re looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It’s important you have someone in your corner who’s trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.