Hyperbaric oxygen therapy for diabetic foot wounds
Diabetes interrupts the body’s natural and efficient healing process. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment uses pressurised oxygen to stimulate your body’s innate healing process.
Diabetes and wound healing
What makes diabetic wounds so different from regular wounds?
The healing process without diabetes
The healing process with diabetes
Diabetes interrupts the normal or natural wound healing process. Essentially, an elevated blood sugar level stiffens the arteries and causes narrowing of the blood vessels. This reduction in blood flow lowers the amount of oxygen and nutrients that are delivered to your wounds. That’s why your wounds may worsen, and in severe cases, become gangrenous and require amputation.
Oxygen is vital for healing wounds. Enhanced wound tissue oxygenation is key to chronic wound healing.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) involves breathing in pure oxygen at a higher air pressure than normal. This extra oxygen gets diffused from your bloodstream into different parts of your body, like your tissues, cells, organs, brain cells, and bones. This can be really helpful for healing because it helps increase the amount of oxygen that reaches those areas, which can promote faster and better healing.
Vascular and circulation problems affect almost all people with diabetes. Prolonged high levels of sugar in the blood cause changes on a cellular level that affect all organs in the body including the skin. In diabetes, blood becomes thicker with a higher affinity to clot and stick deposits to the wall of blood vessels making them narrower and less flexible. Eventually, the smallest vessels, the capillaries, will close down, shutting the supply of blood and oxygen to the surrounding tissue.
Poor circulation deprives organs of needed oxygen and can cause their malfunction. Left undetected and uncontrolled this may lead to damage of nerve endings with symptoms like pain or numbness in feet or hands. Many people with diabetes have these symptoms for years before more serious conditions occur like leg ulcers and non-healing wounds.
Hyperbaric chamber diabetic foot ulcer
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy for diabetic foot wounds
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy offers a safe medical therapy for diabetic foot wounds and other conditions that don’t respond well to standard treatments. Using pure oxygen at pressures above regular atmospheric pressure, HBOT nourishes wounds with 100% oxygen.
The extra oxygen in your body supports new blood vessel formation and improves natural infection control.
The beneficial effects of hyperbaric oxygen in diabetic foot wounds are:
- Improving the wound healing process: More oxygen in the wound helps it heal better.
- Improving the growth of cells, tissue and blood vessels.
- More oxygen kills germs and makes white blood cells work better.
- Reducing inflammation: By decreasing the amount of inflammatory markers and increasing antioxidant levels; this may lead to pain relief.
Check our overview page and find out how HBOT can improve your quality of life and overall health.
Your journey starts with these 3 steps
When you have completed your hyperbaric sessions, your condition is reassessed by one of our doctors.