The Roots of a RemarkabIe Therapy
The Indians (as in India) have been fascinated by oxygen as a therapy for a long time. Back in 1940, Doctors Inderjit Singh and Mangaldas Shah of Bombay, India experimented on oxygen given intravenously.1
But the concept goes back even further. O2 therapy was discussed in the Lancet for the first time in 1916.
Drs. Turnicliffe and Stebbing noted in their Lancet article2 that Nysten had used O2 successfully in dogs in France in 1811: "The animal seemed entirely unaffected by the injections" (i.e., no side effects).
They also pointed out that Doctor Demarquay, in 1886, made the observation that the oxygen given was not completely eliminated by the lungs and, therefore, went to the tissues.3 He made this simple and very astute observation by cutting the animal and noting that the blood was bright red, rather than the usual dark red of the venous blood. This observation was recently confirmed with modern, precise instruments.
With these encouraging reports from the old French literature, Turnicliffe and Stebbing in England tried pure oxygen intravenously for the first time in humans in 1916.
Their conclusions from their experiments were unequivocal: The intravenous method of oxygen administration, if carefully carried out ... is available to the clinician and will give therapeutic results.
Doctors being doctors, they became victims of the "Tomato Effect." Everyone, including "scientific authorities" in the 18th century, knew that tomatoes were poisonous. So, today, "everyone knows" that hydrogen peroxide cannot be used as a therapeutic agent. If this were not so, we would have read about it in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). A quick look at a copy of the JAMA will tell you why doctors don't know about peroxide "bio-oxidative" therapy. Drug companies, through their advertising, foot the bill for the journal. Cheap peroxide therapy would put many of them out of business.
Our Indian friend, Doctor Singh, attempted in 1932 to give oxygen under the skin and into the abdominal cavity. He found that the amount absorbed was too small to be of practical value. The first recorded use of peroxide in this country was by a Georgia doctor located, I'm proud to say, a short walk from my former office. In 1888, Dr. P.L Cortelyou of Marietta, Georgia, reported on the use of peroxide in treatment of diseases of the nose and throat.
In one case of diphtheria, often fatal in those days, he used a nasal spray of peroxide, and the patient was well in one day.
Many other attempts at oxygen therapy were made between 1811 and 1935. But researchers lost interest with the advent of the drug era in medicine, starting around 1940.
Intravenous oxygen therapy isn't the only promising line of research that was dropped with the advent of the pharmaceutical revolution. Homeopathy, herbology, electro-medicine, and a lot of other promising lines of research were thrown out. Drugs were in. That's where the research money was (and is). Drugs were going to solve all of our medical problems.
We now know that drugs are not going to solve all of our problems. Some researchers are going back to basics and taking up research that never should have been dropped, like oxygen therapy.
Going back to 1940 and Dr. Singh, the last of the early pioneers of oxygen therapy, he found that dogs could be kept alive for 16 minutes on intravenous oxygen—with– out any air going through the lungs. It's usually curtains within three to five minutes.
He next tried giving oxygen in the vein to patients dying of pneumonia. Pneumonia was another deadly disease in those days. The antibiotics deserve some credit here for saving people from death due to pneumonia. (But they get more credit than they deserve.)
Out of six cases given the intravenous oxygen, five died. One typical report: "There was distinct clinical improvement, but the patient died after seven days.”
Hmmm.
The one in six who lived wasn't as sick as the others. There was little oxygen research done for the next 20 years. I guess I would have gotten discouraged, too.
A German doctor, H.S. Regelsberger, wrote a book on the oxygenation of blood for the treatment of high blood pressure. He theorized that oxygenation would reduce the viscosity or thickness of blood and thereby reduce blood pressure. The theory proved to be correct. His book, Oxygenation, should be required reading for all medical students. (I've been trying to locate a copy—no luck.)
Dr. Edward Carl Rosenow's 450 published papers should also be required reading. But they have disappeared into the memory hole. It's the strangest thing. I looked him up in the authors index at the Emory University medical library. There were no references to any of his peroxide research. A call to the Mayo Clinic was a waste of my nickel. The girl I talked to didn't know who I was talking about.
The researchers at Baylor University had their funding cut off, although their findings were sensational. Is there a conspiracy here? Seems like it to me.
In 1920, Doctors Oliver and Cantab reported to the Lancet on the use of hydrogen peroxide in a series of pneumonia cases in India. An 80 percent mortality was being experienced among Indian troops from pneumonia.
Doctors Oliver and Cantab made a bold move against this devastating epidemic. They decided to do the unthinkable—inject hydrogen peroxide directly into the vein. Textbooks warned that gas embolism, a dreaded condition causing strokes through bubbles in the brain, would result from intravenous hydrogen peroxide administration.
The doctors felt they had little to lose. The soldiers were dropping faster than in a battle with the Gurkas. They treated only those cases that were considered hopeless. Out of these they saved about 50 percent—13 out of 25 lived. All would have died without hydrogen peroxide. There was none of the dreaded gas embolism or any other side-effects.
What was the mechanism of these remarkable recoveries from a terminal condition? You'd think that if the oxygen is stimulating the good cells, then the bugs causing the problem would also be stimulated. What apparently happens is that the toxins formed by the bacteria or virus are oxidized by the oxygen. (That's just my theory. I'm open to suggestions.)
They point out that hydrogen peroxide has always been assumed to be toxic to cells. Boy, were we wrong. It now appears H2O2 is an essential metabolite. That means it's not toxic, but essential to life's process. How's that for a switch? Doctor Rannasarma of the Indian Institute of Science says, "The generation of H2O2 in cellular processes seems to be purposeful and H2O2 cannot be dismissed as a mere undesirable by-product."
Another terrible condition that often leads to death, unless massive antibiotic therapy is combined with hyperbaric oxygen, is gas gangrene, an infection that follows severe lacerating injury or surgery.4 The bacteria involved create a gas that invades the tissues. The tissues swell to enormous size due to the gas formation, and the most unimaginable smell emanates from the infected tissue. It's literally the smell of death, the smell of the battlefield. If untreated, the victim will die within 48 hours.
Like cancer cells, the bacteria that cause gas gangrene thrive without oxygen, so the treatment of choice has been massive doses of penicillin combined with hyperbaric oxygen (HBO). But HBO is not readily available, and probably never will be.
Two Indian doctors in New Delhi, India, experimented on dogs given a gas gangrene infection. The dogs were injected with two billion gas-forming organisms into the muscle of a leg. One set of dogs received H2O2 treatment through an artery leading to the infection site. The other set of dogs got the inoculations of gas gangrene bacteria but no H2O2 .
The dogs not getting the H2O2 developed the usual stinking, rotten infection with sloughing of skin and muscle. They all eventually died of septicemia. Of the 10 dogs treated with H2O2 only two developed gas gangrene infection.
Gas gangrene is most commonly seen under wartime conditions. If medical science would only recognize the importance of this long-neglected therapy, many battlefield tragedies could be avoided at little cost.