About "medbed" and "hbot"
Is there a similarity between the recently promoted therapy and one where kids die?
Some Dear Readers may recall an earlier time in disabilities when some people advocated hyperbaric oxygen therapy for autism. There was a lot of interest in HBOT in the first decade of the 2000s, so I wrote about it a time or two. I’ll return to one of those posts later in this one, but first….
When I caught wind of US President Donald J. Trump posting about “medbeds,” I wanted to learn about them. News sources, I found, were using terms like “conspiracy theory,” “imaginary,” “fictional technology,” and “dangerous” to refer to the idea. I found an older (2022) post by Mike Wendling from the BBC with the title “The Truth about ‘medbeds’—a miracle cure that doesn’t exist”; he used this lede (emphasis in the original):
Strange corners of the internet are awash with chatter about miracle devices that can cure nearly any ailment you can think of using the power of mystical energy. Some companies charge thousands for these “medbeds” - but their claims are far from proven.
The more I learned about medbeds beyond President Trump’s post, which was later deleted, the more I was reminded of HBOT. I wondered whether the medbeds looked like HBOT machines. I searched for images of medbeds on the Intertubes. Most of what I saw initially were from agencies, organizations, or companies that showed copyrighted images.1 I found one, however, that I couldn’t resist using. It’s from a press release published by PRLog.org for a company called USAMedBed.com:2
I felt like I’d gotten really lucky. This company made the connection between medbeds and HBOT for me. That’s what they’re selling! Coming soon! It’s right there on the wall beyond the machine.3
Back to HBOT
HBOT was sold to parents of children with autism, ADHD, and other disabilities. The idea was that spending time in a high-pressure, super-oxygenated environment (a chamber with 100% oxygen) would change the gasses in an individual’s blood. It’s supposed to improve oxygen supplies in the brain. That’s been helpful for deep sea divers suffering from “the bends.”
Although the therapy for kids with disabilities was pretty soundly debunked, some doctors (of various types) sold it and people bought it. Part of the reason that it continued to sell was that the vendors of the therapy could point to some research indicating that it was beneficial. I was a skeptical about that research.
Over on the old EBDBlog I published a post discussing one of the most widely discussed studies of HBOT training. Under the heading “Does Rossignol et al. show HMOT’s effective?” Here is my lede
The recently published study by Rossignol and colleagues about hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) for Autism has generated lots of commentary and is sure to lead to more. Because it is a treatment study and employs more careful methods than are common in many of the therapies promoted these days, I sat up and said, “Hmm. I ought to read this one.”
So I did. And I found it to be, indeed, a cut above much of the ersatz research that’s passed off as evidence in the Autism arena. But, I found some concerns, too.
Those concerns led me to poke about a bit on the Internet to see whether there were any others who were raising questions. There are. And I still have some more poking to do. But, I thought I ought to record my concerns. Thus this post.
I went on to discuss critiques by Steven Novella of the New England Skeptical Society and Evidence-based Medicine, Do’C of Leftbrain Rightbrain,4 and me. The simple summary is that there were plenty of reasons to doubt that the Rossignol et al. study actually showed benefits for kids with autism who underwent hyperbaric oxygen therapy. A review published by T. Xiong and colleagues (2016) in Cochrane Library showed that the Rossignol et al. study provide no evidence of benefits. A thorough analysis of both the theory and research by K. Harrison and T. Zane (2016) of the wonderful Science in Autism Treatment showed that the therapy is basically bogus.
In addition to the scientific complaints about HBOT therapy, there is a simpler and more compelling reason to avoid it for our kids or for anyone: Children with disabilities have died in incidents associated with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. In one case a grandmother died, too; in another a mother rushing to help her child after an explosion suffered injuries.
APNews: “Boy, 5, dies in hyperbaric chamber explosion at Michigan medical facility”; see also, Science-based Medicine, NBC News, Fox News, Detroit Free Press.
About Lawsuits: “Hyperbaric Chamber Lawsuit Filed Over Fire During Cerebral Palsy Treatment”; see also, Daily Mail.
So, maybe medbed is different. Maybe it has substantially better safety features. Maybe there are trustworthy studies showing that it “works.” Thanks the goddesses that it is apparently “vapor ware.”
Just one more thing: According to Beth Greenfield of Fortune, in a recorded interview the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said that he will “fix the U.S. Food and Drug Administation’s bias against … hyperbaric chambers.” So, I’m wondering what that bias is and what fix will be put in.
What do you, Dear Readers, think about medbed? HBOT?
References
Harrison K. L., & Zane, T. (2016). Is there science behind that?: Hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Science in Autism Treatment, 13(4), 28-33.
Xiong, T., Chen, H., Luo ,R., & Mu, D. (2016). Hyperbaric oxygen therapy for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 10. Art. No.: CD010922. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD010922.pub2.
Footnote
Generally I use public domain images on Special Education Today. I avoid using others’ images so that I can won’t have to secure permissions or handle lawyers demanding retractions of them. It’s much nicer for me to use images with Creative Commons licenses or those that are available without charge.
The Web link for USAMedBed.com goes directly to the company’s “store” page. I did not get warnings about the page being ‘unsafe,’ so I think you can visit it. If you do, you may be able to form some impressions of the nature of the company’s business. If you tour it, check the images for full body scans.
The writing on the wall (yes, I know) appears to me that it might have been added to the picture. It seems to me that the writing is in one perspective and the wall is in another. If the writing was on the wall, then it ought to be smaller at the right end than at the left end. Of course, may be person who created the photo didn’t mean for the text to be realistic. Oh, and one more thing: That Web address doesn’t work.
Novella’s critique is here and do’C’s is here.