I heard from a friend that this may help me with my TN pain. Anyone try this before?
thanks!
I've talked with people about hyperbaric oxygen, but I haven't heard from anyone who has had consistently positive results. There may be papers at PubMed on the subject. I'll take a look.
Regards, Red
I ran the target "hyperbaric oxygen therapy Trigeminal" at Pub Med and came up with five hits. Only one appeared to apply directly to neuropathic pain. The following is the abstract:
Eur J Pain. 2012 Sep;16(8):1094-105.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy attenuates neuropathic hyperalgesia in rats and idiopathic trigeminal neuralgia in patients.
Gu N1, Niu JY, Liu WT, Sun YY, Liu S, Lv Y, Dong HL, Song XJ, Xiong LZ.
Author information
Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Neuropathic pain after nerve injury is severe and intractable, and current drug and non-drug therapies offer very limited pain relief. Hyperbaric oxygen (HBO 2) has been clinically used for protection of the nervous system after acute injury. We investigated whether HBO 2 treatment could prevent and/or attenuate neuropathic pain in animals and in patients.
METHODS:
Mechanical allodynia and thermal hyperalgesia and neurochemical alterations of neuropathic pain were analysed in male, adult, Sprague-Dawley rats with sciatic nerve injury. Clinical trials were conducted in patients with idiopathic trigeminal neuralgia.
RESULTS:
Repetitive HBO 2 treatment [a combination of pressure at 3 atmosphere absolute (ATA) and pure oxygen] greatly inhibited behavioural signs of neuropathic pain manifested as thermal hyperalgesia and mechanical allodynia. Such an HBO 2 treatment also inhibited nerve injury-induced induction of c-Fos and activation of astrocytes and increased phosphorylation of NR2B receptor and the subsequent Ca 2+-dependent signals in rats. Neither high pressure (up to 3 ATA) nor pure oxygen alone resulted in analgesic effect. In clinical trials, one course of HBO 2 therapy (10 consecutive days) produced a rapid-onset, dose-dependent and long-lasting analgesic effects evidenced by the decreased doses of carbamazepine required for keeping patient pain at a minimum and decreased scores of visual analogue scales, which was used for patient's self-evaluation.
CONCLUSIONS:
These findings support that HBO 2 therapy is an effective approach for treating neuropathic pain in both animals and human beings and suggest that neural protection, anti-inflammation and inhibition of nerve injury-induced altered neural activity may contribute to the analgesic effect of HBO 2 therapy.
© 2012 European Federation of International Association for the Study of Pain Chapters.
A rat study certainly isn't much to go on. And HBO is extremely expensive. Probably best to wait for further studies...
I very much agree with your observations, Madere. This is not much to go on.