Ozone Therapy: What It Is And How Doctors Use It
If you’ve been to either of our centers, I’m sure you’ve seen the large leather recliner chairs, often containing a patient, busy on their smartphone, tablet or reading a book and on the receiving end of an intravenous drip.
Over the next few Health Tips, I’ll be talking about what these infusions are used for and why it (correctly) seems you’re seeing more of these occupied chairs with every visit.Although there are only a handful of medical centers in the Chicago area currently offering ozone therapy, their number is on the increase.
Physicians of all stripes (M.D.’s, D.O.’s, D.C.’s, dentists, nurse practitioners, and even veterinarians) are signing up for courses on ozone therapy, joining the American Academy of Ozonetherapy and adding ozone modalities to their practices.
What is Ozone?
In case you were dozing that day in high school chemistry class, ozone is a form of oxygen made up of three oxygen atoms instead of our more familiar two atom oxygen. It’s O3 rather than O2. High above the Earth, the fabled, but thinning, ‘ozone layer’ protects us from excessive ultraviolet radiation from the sun. A thinner ozone layer means more skin cancer and more climate change. Here on Earth itself, ozone levels correspond to the amount of air pollution, although the real villains in smog are hydrocarbons and nitrates.
“Oxygen” as therapy has really been around a long time. Once scientists learned how to generate oxygen and store it in tanks, oxygen became another tool in medicine, along with pharmaceuticals and surgical suites. If you’ve ever been a hospital patient, you’ve likely felt the plastic prongs in your nostrils from oxygen tubing.
However, pure inhaled ozone is definitely not therapy. Breathing in pure ozone is very irritating to your lungs and not good for you at all.
But the confusion about ozone therapy, as well as the hostility toward it from conventional physicians, comes from a failure of perspective. We need ‘water’ for survival. If we drank five gallons of the stuff at once, we’d get seriously ill and quite possibly die. Most prescription medicines are micro-dosed in ‘milligrams’ which is one thousandth of a gram. The tablet you swallowed was mainly filler and binder. A ‘milligram’ is too small to be seen by the naked eye. Even smaller, birth control pills are dosed in micrograms, a millionth of a gram. You don’t take a pound of BCP, just a microgram. With ozone, like medicines, smaller is better. Or maybe like the famous quote from architect Mies van der Rohe, “less is more”.
How to Doctors use Ozone Therapy
