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Oxygen Chambers - What's it all about? Of
late I seem to have noticed no end of articles in the press
about top sportsmen going into oxygen chambers to heal
things like ankle injuries and broken metatarsals.Wayne Rooney is the one who springs to mind first of all, but there's also been Simon Jones the England Bowler, and the other night there was some boxer on TV who'd erected an oxygen tent inside his hotel room in Doncaster. Didn't do him much good though as he was soundly beaten. And who can forget Michael Jackson sleeping in one way back in the 1980's. Then again, who cares about that barmpot. The idea of an Oxygen tent is that the patient sits inside breathing pure Oxygen, normal air as we all know being 21% Oxygen and 78% Nitrogen with a trace of Argon making up the rest. The extra oxygen dissolves in the blood and spreads into the surrounding plasma and tissues, helping to reduce inflammation and speed healing. Apart from athletes, this is a common treatment for open wounds, the bends, crush injuries, skin grafts, carbon monoxide poisoning, infected wounds and even for those deluded individuals who think it will reduce the effects of ageing. In fact you can now be treated on the NHS, but if you tell them you've turned an ankle and there's an important hockey match coming up you might not get too much sympathy. So that's one use of an Oxygen chamber, but another popular use is to use it to actually breathe depleted Oxygen levels, thus mimicking the thinner air found at high altitudes. This isn't just an acclimatisation exercise for athletes planning to compete at high altitude or for people planning to climb Everest, there's a genuine scientific theory behind it. The theory is: the Oxygen depletion stresses the body into producing higher levels of Haemoglobin (red blood cells) consequently extracting more Oxygen from the blood which is then converted into extra energy. Lance Armstrong was known to have used Oxygen depletion therapy, and if the greatest cyclist the world has ever seen rated it, then who are we to argue. Just as an aside here, this is how Lance Armstrong and that other great cyclist Miguel Indurain compare physically with the average man.
So that's it. Oxygen chambers can help with various afflictions, though at the moment unless you're a top athlete or a pampered premiership wuss thenyou're just going to have to stick to ice packs until the injury heals itself. |
