Record-Journal – Saturday, Tuesday, January 23, 2007
By Jeffery Kurz, staff
MERIDEN - Even people who don’t deep-sea dive know that those who do have to be careful about surfacing too quickly. They know atmospheric pressure can have a dramatic effect. For years, medicine has tried to use that effect to its advantage, and today hyperbaric- oxygen therapy is an effective way of treating wounds that otherwise won’t heal.
MidState Medical Center has been offering hyperbaric treatments since the autumn of 2003, when the hospital opened its Wound and Hyperbaric Care Center.
The hospital recently received accreditation from the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, an international organization that certifies hyperbaric technicians and serves as a governing body for hyperbaric medicine. That oversight has been increasingly important because the growth of hyperbaric medicine has been dramatic since the 1970s, and because that growth has also included less-than-traditional and suspect approaches.
That makes accreditation from the society “a very big deal,” said Dr. Zeb Ali, medical director and one of five physicians on staff at the wound and hyperbaric care center.
Hyperbaric care essentially entails placing a patient in an environment of 100 percent oxygen and atmospheric pressure equal to 33 feet below sea level.
Patients recline in transparent tubes for 90-minute treatments four to five days a week and receive at least 20 sessions of treatment. There’s little that patients can do inside the tube other than watch television.
“It feels like when you go up in an airplane,” said Ali. “Some people will feel their ears popping.”
Because the environment is extremely volatile, safety precautions are of the utmost importance and are a large part of the society’s determining process when it comes to accreditation.“The safety measures are pretty intense,” said Ali.
The combination of increased pressure and oxygen helps bring oxygen to tissues it’s not reaching under normal circumstances and thus stimulates a moribund healing process. Because the body loses efficiency with age, elderly people are more susceptible to chronic wounds that won’t heal. But younger people can experience the problem, too. It can result from diabetes-related troubles, or anemia, for example. Hyperbaric treatments can also treat firefighters suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning.
“As time goes on and we accumulate data, the list of wound types” and other treatment potentials will increase, said Ali.
Ali said treatment benefits were uncovered by studies of the effects of atmospheric pressure on Air Force personnel and Navy divers during the 1970s. Those benefits included wound healing and increased blood flow.
A chronic wound is any that hasn’t healed through regular medical care or by itself in six weeks, said Ali. General practitioners are increasingly likely to recommend hyperbaric and wound-care services to their patients, he said.
“It can literally mean life and limb,” he said. “It can save amputations and save lives.”
MidState has treated about 4,300 patients since the wound and hyperbaric care center opened in 2003, said Sharon Duda, program director of the center, which is located upstairs near Pavilion D. Today the center sees about eight patients a day, with demand increasing to the point where the hospital added a third hyperbaric chamber in August last year.
“Our volume was such that we needed the increase,” said Duda, whose office is crowded with folders of information she had to prepare to apply for accreditation from the society.
There are 6 million people in the U.S. with wounds that do not heal, she said. And with the aging of the general population, demand for wound-care services is only likely to increase.
“The need is there,” said Ali.