My wife is suffering from a rare form of early-onset frontal-temporal dementia, for which conventional neurology can offer no treatment and no hope. She's undergoing daily one-hour hyperbaric oxygen treatments which seem to be helping (although it's too early to expect or to observe any significant reversal of symptoms).

If you're interested in this topic, I strongly suggest you refer to this website:

http://www.harchhyperbarics.com/

If you want a really complete explanation, you should buy Dr. Harch's book "The Oxygen Revolution" (available on his site, also Amazon, etc.) but a no-charge perusal of the website will provide the essentials of his message. I would strongly recommend that you watch the before-and-after video of a 17-year old brain-injured young man.

Twenty minutes of pure O2 under pressure is by no means toxic; Peggy has been breathing 100% oxygen under about 1-1/2 atmospheres of pressure for a full hour once a day for a couple of weeks now. It definitely makes her feel good, if nothing else, and is undoubtedly having some healing effect upon the oxygen-starved areas of her brain.

Whether or not hyperbarics will prove to do enough to bring Peggy back to her former self, I am absolutely convinced and have seen with my own eyes what it can do for some patients with severe brain problems and injuries, especially young children.

Of course, kids have more resilient tissue through all parts of their bodies than do adults. Even so, for a ten-year-old whose skull was crushed in an auto accident, and whose parents were told her only future was to live a few years in a vegetative state, to regain near-complete normalcy, even to skip the grade that she missed upon returning to school less than a year after the acccident ~ it's astounding . If it were not for the fact that her skull remains a bit misshapen, with her eyes not lining up exactly across from each other, you would never guess that anything amiss had ever happened to this kid.

Hyperbarics was first developed about 100 years ago and, as mentioned above, was first succesfully used to treat divers suffering from decompression illness, aka "the bends." It soon became apparent that highly concentrated oxygen under pressure could help many seemingly unrelated conditions, until some experiments conducted in the 1930s seemed to debunk many claims, leading to widespread dismissal of hyperbarics as "quackery." Dr. Harch points out that those experiments all used the relatively high pressures (3 atmospheres and up) used for treating divers; more recently, lower pressure settings have proven to work much better for brain injuries, stroke recovery, dementia, etc.

Medicare/Medicaid and insurance companies have gradually added to the list of conditions for which HBOT is "approved" (i.e., paid for), and the list includes many seemingly-unrelated problems. There many more applications that can and should be approved, and it's an uphill battle in which progress in just beginning to gain momentum.