Dr. Al Johnson on the Benefits of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
Dr. Hotze and expert guest, Dr. Alfred Johnson, a world leader on hyperbaric oxygen therapy and owner of the Hyperbaric Centers of Texas, discuss the benefits of hyperbaric oxygen therapy and the numerous conditions it can treat successfully.
*For more information about Dr. Alfred Johnson, go to: www.johnsonmedicalassociates.com or hyperbariccentersoftexas.com.
Podcast Transcription:
Stacey Bandfield: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I’m Stacey Bandfield, here with Dr. Steven Hotze, founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. Thank you so much for joining us today. We just want you to know we are passionate, passionate, very passionate about natural approaches to health. You can always go to hotzepodcast.com, that’s H-O-T-Z-E podcast.com to download our latest and greatest podcast.
Now, today we have Dr. Al Johnson, and he is an expert in hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which is a topic that’s always fascinated me, so I am personally interested to hear more about it. Aren’t you Dr. Hotze?
Dr. Hotze: I sure am, and I want to thank each one of you for joining us today on Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. Yes, we’re leading a Wellness Revolution around this country. Trying to help individuals like yourself to get on a path of health and wellness, naturally, so as you mature, you have energy, vitality, and enthusiasm for life without using pharmaceutical drugs, which are toxins and poison you.
We have today on our program again a returning guest, a Dr. Al Johnson. Dr. Johnson has the Johnson Medical Associates Center in Richardson, which is a suburb of Dallas, Texas. He also is the owner of the Hyperbaric Centers of Texas, which is the largest hyperbaric oxygen chamber center in the state of Texas. He has five premier units there, and is an expert in the use of hyperbaric oxygen for the treatment of a multitude of various medical conditions. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Johnson.
Stacey Bandfield: Welcome.
Dr. Al Johnson: Thank you. I’m privileged to be here.
Dr. Hotze: Well listen, let’s talk about hyperbaric oxygen. I’m sure many people in our audience have heard about that and we think about it usually in the terms of divers in the sea. When they get the bends, they take them out and they put them in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber to keep them from, or to resolve their problems with the bends. But I know it’s used in a, you use it in a multitude of medical conditions, so tell us what is hyperbaric oxygen. Describe that to our listening audience.
Dr. Al Johnson: Well hyperbaric oxygen treatment is when a person is placed in a chamber, breathing a hundred percent oxygen that’s pressurized. The pressure then saturates the whole blood vessel so that the whole blood vessel carries oxygen, just not hemoglobin, to the tissues.
Dr. Hotze: When you say the whole blood vessel, does it saturate the white cells and plasma cells and red blood cells, all of them?
Dr. Al Johnson: Yeah. It saturates the liquid plus the cells.
Dr. Hotze: Right.
Dr. Al Johnson: In the blood vessels. So you get a delivery of 10 times the…15 times normal to the tissues. Tissues need two things to heal: 1) They need oxygen and 2) they need glucose. So tissues that have been damaged, from whatever reason, hyperbaric oxygen can help the healing process…you’re talking about the bends. What happens there, the body traps nitrogen and causes bubbles in the joints and in your brain and so forth and can cause damage. Oxygen washes out the nitrogen, and that’s how it works for the bends. For other disease processes, whether it’s been sports injuries where you get tissue injuries and swelling, or whether it’s head trauma like concussions or stroke, or degeneration of tissues from neurological diseases, oxygen helps the healing in those disease processes and helps with recovery.
Conditions Treated by Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
Dr. Hotze: Yeah. Let me go down this list of what you treat, what you use your hyperbaric oxygen chamber. For autistic children, for burns, cerebral palsy, chronic fatigue syndrome, head injuries, concussion, dementia, fibromyalgia, posttraumatic stress disorders, migraines, multiple sclerosis, near drownings, Parkinson’s syndromes, osteomyelitis, sports injuries, strokes and encephalopathy are just some of the conditions. Besides, you also use it in the treatment of mold toxicity. I know that. And in infections, and people, for instance, people that have diabetes often times will get infections on their distal extremities that become gangrenous and it’s also used to help treat that. So you use it for a multitude of medical conditions.
You’ve had the hyperbaric oxygen treatment center there at your medical center for how many years?
Dr. Al Johnson: 15 years.
Dr. Hotze: Okay. What was it that led you to develop an interest in the treatment of diseases using hyperbaric oxygen?
Dr. Al Johnson: Well, initially being an environmental physician I was seeing people with toxic exposures to like solvent, benzene, toluene, pesticides. They were getting neurological symptoms from them and there’s no medicine out there to treat people with. So I started looking at the literature and found hyperbaric. I knew about hyperbaric in the bends and hyperbaric and wound healing. Then I started seeing from the world literature, they’re using it around the world for a whole host of other types of problems where cells were damaged either from toxic exposures, from strokes, and like you mentioned, and got two chambers to start with. Started treating these people that were having neurological problems and they started to recover and respond well. And so that’s how I really got started trying to figure out how to treat these people that were given no hope for recovery after their toxic exposure.
Dr. Hotze: Well, tell us now at your center on an average, you’re open six days a week, Monday through Saturday, how many treatments will you normally perform in a day’s work there?
Dr. Al Johnson: I don’t know, say 40, we do 40, 50 hours of hyperbaric treatments. That’s 40 people or 30 people. Depends on whether they do 60 or 90 minute treatments.
Dr. Hotze: Right. And that’s per week or per day, or that’s per day?
Dr. Al Johnson: That’s per day.
Dr. Hotze: Per day, 40 or 50. That’s a lot. This is why I brought Dr. Johnson on the podcast. He is a world expert in hyperbaric oxygen therapy for numerous different problems and people come from all over the world for treatment there. Now, one treatment with an hour in the hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and when we say hyperbaric folks, that means under pressure, how many times altitude pressure would you have in a normal a hyperbaric chamber when you’re treating?
Dr. Al Johnson: Yes. We have the hard sided true hyperbaric chambers here in the clinic. Just so the listeners understand, there are high mountain rescue bags or soft sided chambers, which some health wellness type centers have where you breathe oxygen, the bags go to 1.3 atmospheres, which is about 10 feet underwater. They may be a little help, but when we’ve got true disease processes going on, we need more pressure with a true 100% oxygen delivery to get fairly rapid recovery. So when you’re talking about atmospheres, we earth are at one atmosphere. If you go to 33 feet underwater is two atmospheres. We start treatment at about 15 feet underwater, which is one and a half atmospheres. Then you go up to 2.4 or in some cases three atmospheres if you’re treating the bends.
Dr. Hotze: I have got you on that. So when we say hyperbaric, hyper means increased, baric has to do with the pressure, so it’s increased oxygen pressure. Remember, air folks has weight. When we stand at sea level there’s one atmosphere. I don’t know what it is at 5,000 feet or one mile high in Denver, I don’t know what the atmospheric pressure is it, but it’s going to be less because there’s a higher altitude. The higher you go you have the less oxygen, less air, so it has less pressure on it. Literally the air’s around us that we can’t see but we breathe, it has weight to it. It’s weight. It’s molecules. What they do with hyperbaric chambers is they increase the pressure so they drive the oxygen into the blood, all the blood, the serum, so it increases the amount of oxygen in your tissues by, I guess a 10…how high can you get the oxygen in the tissue up? 10 times or more?
Dr. Al Johnson: Yeah. It increases the tissue oxygenation about 10 times.
Dr. Hotze: And the oxygen, of course, is needed in the mitochondria, which is your power plants in your cells to enable your cells to generate electrical energy in the form of ATP, for we are electrons, which drive all the biochemical processes. If you’re toxic, or if you’ve had damage and you’re not getting enough blood flow to areas where you’ve been injured, your tissues aren’t going to heal well, but that’s why we use the hyperbaric chambers.
Now in the routine problem, let’s say somebody has had a stroke, or say somebody has a wound that isn’t healing, how many treatments is it going to take…or mold toxicity? I know it’s going to vary by various disease processes. How many treatments and how often will they have to take a treatment?
Dr. Al Johnson: It’s works like physical medicine, rehab exercise. It builds up over time, so it’s a healing process. Usually, if you have a stroke it takes like 40 hours of hyperbaric. Now you don’t do that all at once. You do an hour to hour and a half a day, maybe two hours a day, and do that for 20 days to get those tissues that have been damaged by the stroke, but are not dead, alive starting to work. It takes 20 to 30 hours to really get those cells moving, healing themselves with the hyperbaric oxygen. Typically we look at sessions of 40 hours to get healing processes done.
Now, that’s not always the case. Like in concussions, acute concussion, there are recent studies that show that using daily one hour of hyperbaric for three days, that 80% of the people that had concussion symptoms, their symptoms were resolved. When the, on the average without, with just rest, the average is 17 days recovery, and there’s 20% that have symptoms longer than 30 days. There’s a lot of benefit that can be achieved with the concussed person, with the stroke person.
In a lot of the foreign countries, they’ll treat stroke with hyperbaric first to get the cells working, and then do stroke rehab second after that so they have some good cells to actually work with. Here in the United States they try stroke rehab first, but the cells aren’t healed, and so you’re working with a faulty system, the brain. I see them a lot of times afterwards and they said, man, I’ve been trying to get my coordination or my speech or my vision better and it just not working well, it’s really slow. We put them in hyperbaric, it speeds that whole process up dramatically.
Dr. Hotze: Well, Dr. Johnson this is very fascinating and you’re doing tremendous work up there helping so many people. Very few people are really aware of it, including physicians…
Stacey Bandfield: Absolutely.
Dr. Hotze: …are unaware of the benefits of hyperbaric oxygen treatment. So tell us how anybody in the listening audience could get in touch with you if they want to be evaluated at your center there in Dallas, Richardson, which is a suburb of Dallas. How would they get in touch with you?
Dr. Al Johnson: Well, you can call my office at 972-479-0400, or you can go online and Google JohnsonMedicalAssoicates.com and there’s a place in there to respond, or Hyperbaric Centers of Texas, and it tells you all about hyperbaric, different modalities we treat, the different diseases, the different injuries, has testimonials, which is good information for someone to learn more about hyperbaric.
Dr. Hotze: Well, we want to thank you so much for joining us and introducing this very fascinating treatment modality, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, to our listening audience. We congratulate you for the success that you’ve had in developing the largest and most comprehensive hyperbaric oxygen center in the state of Texas. Thank you so much for joining us.
Stacey Bandfield: Yes thank you.
Dr. Al Johnson: Thank you. My privilege.
Stacey Bandfield: And if you all would like to know how you can get healthy and well, naturally, through the services that we offer at our center and learn more about that, then you can give us a call at 281-698-8698 that’s 281-698-8698. Thank you for joining us today here at Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.
