If chamber uses pure oxygen, things would quickly get interesting.
I think that human flesh will burn well too.
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It’s nature’s way of redistributing wealth.
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As a rescue diver, I go out with the threat of “HBOT” looming over me every time, which will save your life if you make a diving mistake. I even have HBOT insurance just incase I have to be in there a long long time. I encourage people spending time in these devices for a variety of reasons, even for only mild therapy. I wish it weren’t so cost prohibitive as it certainly does make you feel “good” - almost like a good round of acupuncture. There are specific prescriptions for this kind of thing, but I feel like it is not totally bad for the person who tries it holistically…
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Yes yes yes. All modern hospitals should have a 3 bar operating room. a 3 bar ICU. a 5 bar cafeteria and a 10 bar starbucks to help with sterility and healing. To enter the starbucks it is a series of tubes that squeeze the air during the simulation of the long coffee line. Point being you’ll need positive pressure to maintain 40% o2
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Yep. We need something that will kill off that parasitic infection.
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doesn’t this just turn you in to a giant cancer blob?
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Possibly, but properly cultivated, the cancer will survive you for decades.
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Does such exist? Can my imaginary energy channels be unblocked with needles? [/me looks for IV]
Here’s a critical response to the paper:
Shorter version: telomere length within circulating immune cells bears no relationship to telomere length within the rest of your cells. So the study is meaningless garbage.
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I would be wary of trying to use broad thermodynamic arguments to reason about aging. It is true that our bodies are subject to entropic processes, but we’re also very good at offloading entropy into our environment – that’s pretty much what life is. When a person turns some air and a stack of cheeseburgers into a whole new living person, that involves a substantial local decrease in entropy, even though the entropy of the universe (including all the generated poop and waste heat) increases.
It’s an open question whether an adult body wears out because it can’t be regenerated, or just because it doesn’t. If some organ can renew itself ten times in ship-of-Theseus fashion, there’s no obvious thermodynamic reason why it couldn’t do so twenty times, or a thousand.
It’s like, thermodynamics governs how long a house will stand for. And an abandoned garden will succumb to entropy very quickly. But if a garden is actively maintained, then it can last in the same form indefinitely.
My guess would be that some of a person’s machinery is like the house (teeth, certainly); but most of it is more like the garden, and could go on forever, except the gardener has instructions to salt the earth after a certain amount of time.
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I have been in one of these chambers - first for a “dry dive” with my dive club to find out what it was like, and then for real after coming up faster than would be ideal (conscious decision, I’m an instructor and my novice buddy had disappeared to the surface - both of us ended up fine).
While there ( https://www.ddrc.org/ ) I did see some scientific posters they had on diabetic wounds that had healed with this treatment that hadn’t responded to anything else (next step would have been amputation). For some of my treatments there were 10 of us in the chamber, I can’t remember all the details but at least one had a broken leg. So there clearly are things it can help with.
In these cases the explanation was that by saturating the blood plasma with dissolved oxygen, you can get extra oxygen supplies to damaged tissue that wasn’t otherwise getting enough to repair itself.
They are (and have to be) very careful about fires - so you change into cotton scrubs provided by them, you can’t wear deodorant, and the main atmosphere is air - you either breath in the pure oxygen from a regulator or a hood that’s placed over your head. Their “headphones” are long air tubes with the speakers outside. (Typically you watch a film in the treatment to pass the time. I think I pissed them off bringing them in on Sunday evening, so we got bride wars then Bambi)
If you are a diver, once we get back to normal see if your local chamber will offer a “dry dive”. It was really interesting, and it meant I felt a lot less nervous when I needed to go in the chamber for real.
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Does it matter where I put the needles?
This is true. In the very long term entropy wins, but over the medium distance there are all sorts of things that life can do.
We could argue whether nature finds it worthwhile fixing us up when we get old. Is it easier to scrap, and buy new? Can our immune system go on re-training itself forever? I could have argued like that, but I didn’t like the way it personified ‘nature’ as an intelligent designer.
The body might actively run itself down at some point; the telomeres do seem to be counting down to something. But complex systems like my last car can just seem to give up on life, without any planned exit strategy. I suspect technology may be keep our shells going like the Struldbrugs in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, but with exponential costs as we progressively pack up.
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Oh man, citing the NY Post on anything related to science is a bad idea IMO. I caught them earlier this year turning a study about the solar cycle into fodder for climate denialism, something the study had nothing to do with.
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I think the diabetic wound healing thing works b/c the pathogens they are targeting are obligate anaerobes. Increasing oxygen in the infected tissues kills the bacteria.
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That’s as good an explanation as any.
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Ah yes, acupuncture. The retconned fauxstalgia medical practice that fails every single properly controlled test. It’s total bunk- a kinder gentler form of blood-letting that Mao resurrected as part of his play for global soft power by mythologizing “ancient Chinese medicine”. Also a bread & circuses move for his own people because they couldn’t afford to get real medical care to poor areas of the country at the time. Here’s some more reading if you’re interested.
I’m in the camp that things that acupuncture is a bunch of woo, but my mom has suffered for a few years with some hip pain that pain killers can’t help with unless she took something that was irresponsibly too strong. Chiropractors have helped to some extent but she has done acupuncture every now and then over the years, she says she does feel relief afterward that will last her some time, i chalk it up to a placebo effect but i’m glad that it does bring her much needed relief.
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