Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a treatment in which a patient is placed in a sealed chamber and exposed to oxygen at several times the normal atmospheric pressure. Long used for the treatment of humans, the equine industry has been relatively slow to pick up on the therapy. There is evidence suggesting clinical human use dating back to a French surgeon in 1879; though its popularity caught on in the 1930s when it was tested and developed to be used in the treatment of decompression sickness for deep sea divers. Clinical trials later confirmed other benefits of exposure to the hyperbaric oxygen chamber to treat sports-related injuries. Professional athletes in the NHL, NFL, NBA, and MLS have long since used the treatment for a variety of applications. Human application of hyperbaric oxygen therapy includes the treatment of carbon monoxide poisoning, soft-tissue injuries, burns and deep infections.

Concerned that human results were being used as the basis of establishing most equine guidelines, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Calgary, Dr. Renaud Léguillette, undertook the task of researching the effects of equine hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy. “Hyperbaric oxygen treatment has been successfully utilized as an adjunctive treatment of many pathologies in equine medicine for almost a decade, producing good results in a variety of applications,” said Dr. Léguillette, who became involved in the research of hyperbaric oxygen therapy in 2009, concerned that the evolving therapy was being hailed as a “cure-all,” with little scientific evidence to back-up the claims.

Despite the popularity of the treatment and almost a decade on the market, there are to date only three peer-reviewed medical papers in North America concerning the subject, a staggeringly low number for a therapy with such potentially far-reaching benefits. “Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is still evolving in equine medicine,” Dr. Léguillette explained. “It is relatively new and what was striking to me was the amount of people who were using it without much evidence of efficacy or very few studies illustrating what exactly it does to the horses. I realized that limited research had been done, perhaps due to the fact when you consider the price of the equipment and price of the treatment, the usage has been sluggish.”

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