Hyperbaric chambers also have a use in treating some types of infection by anaerobic bacteria and carbon monoxide poisoning. Possibly also in treating non-healing wounds due to circulation problems, where the increased oxygen helps with cell growth.
That said - there have been time when people have died even when this treatment is given by trained professionals, along with injuries and side-effects.
That said - I doubt the woo-woo crowd are using hyperbaric treatment as intended, and probably not with the same safety protocols as the professionals.
You’re right. The list of conditions woo-woos claim hyperbaric chambers help include AIDS/HIV, dementia, asthma, infertility, hepatitis, cancer, heart disease, MS, stroke, and PTSD. AND they believe it’s good for overall health. In fact, devotees can buy their own hyperbaric chambers for around $4,000. Didn’t Michael Jackson own one? (Now there’s a ringing endorsement.)
Alternative medicine, including anti-vaxx BS, includes just enough science-y sounding stuff to convince the gullible that it’s legit. One of the alt-health people I was with is a nurse practitioner, though she no longer practices. You’d think she’d know better, but no, according to her, MD’s are all money-grubbing tools getting money under the table from Big Pharma. She knows, she says, she’s seen. Her credentials make her an authority to these fools.
I’ve decided alternative medicine is a belief system–a hokey spirituality, a world view, and a conspiracy theory combined. This is why anti-vaxxers are impossible to convince with scientific facts.
Semi-amusing story about a New Jersey Senate hearing yesterday on S2175, a bill that would remove religious exemptions to childhood vaccination.
A crowd of antivaxers showed up to protest, only they wound up in the wrong room (it was where a NJ Transit hearing was scheduled) and wouldn’t leave, even when staffers and security told them it was the wrong room.
Obviously they were hip to a ploy by the Gummint-Pharma-Illuminati conspiracy to fool them into leaving. :dubious::smack:
Meantime, world events keep intruding into the lurid world of antivax alternate reality. The Samoan measles outbreak is now up to nearly 5,000 cases with 72 deaths, mostly in young children.
Anti-vaccination is now a religion, and proponents are fighting a religious war with identical fervor, battling the forces of the Devil, like in the New Jersey Senate yesterday.
I weep for humanity. I feel like we’re witnessing the failure of the enlightenment, and right at a point in history when we are most in need of reason and facts.
Maybe that’s a little hyperbolic, but the stuff that’s going on…
I was just thinking this yesterday, that we seem to be entering Dark Ages II: science is vilified, truth is whatever you want to believe, and logic is ignored.
Every time there’s a crowd of anti-vaxxers trying to influence (successfully, in some places) legislation, there should be an equally large and vociferous crowd of pro-science counter-protestors. Yet there aren’t. I wonder why not.
Too bad about the New Jersey Senate lacking the gonads to approve the bill.
A correction to an earlier post:
It turns out that antivaxers were in the correct room, only hours early, so they had to sit through the transit hearing (and quite possibly people who had an interest in the transit bill were crowded out by these numbnuts).
I was looking to see what other threads on vaccination might have existed before this one and am not surprised to learn Urban Redneck is anti-vaxx and apparently impervious to all arguments to the contrary. A sad case.
