Burn Injuries
Care and treatment of severe burn injuries is a long and complicated road for every patient. Serious burns are not only painful, but result in inflammation, swelling, infection, shock, destruction of tissue, scarring, and at times, death. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment of burns can result in better wound care with faster results and long-term benefits. HBOT is not always accessible to patients in burn units, but it has long been associated with wound care. Serious burns are wounds, and HBOT can dramatically affect how a person’s wounds heal.
What Happens When a Person Is Burned?
Burn injuries can be caused by heat, cold, friction, liquids, solids, radiation, chemicals, or electricity. No matter what the cause is, burns result from a common phenomena: tissue destruction from the transfer of too much energy to the tissue. When a person is burned, the skin is injured to varying degrees depending on the amount of energy delivered to the tissue. Burns are classified by severity and percent of the total skin surface area of the body involved. First degree burns are partial thickness of the skin layers. The best example is a mild sunburn where the skin is just red. Second degree burns involve more layers of the skin and are characterized by redness, swelling, and blistering. Third degree burns kill all layers of the skin and affect the underlying tissue. The skin in these burns is often white showing no blood flow and oxygen, or charred black. Fourth degree burns kill all layers of the skin and deeper tissues, including fat, muscle, tendon, and even bone. A typical description of a burn is “37% BSA (body surface area) burn with 10% third degree and 27% second degree.”
With the large amount of cell death occurring, the body’s immune system activates, but it becomes hyperactive and chaotic, resulting in a great deal of swelling, inflammation. and systemic immune system depression. Patients become very susceptible to overwhelming infection. This is not unique to burns, but is one of the main causes of death after a burn occurs. When skin cells are destroyed or injured, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to grow new skin when large surface areas are involved. Surgeries to cut away dead skin and tissue and multiple skin grafting procedures are often needed to repair the damaged area. Many patients are left with lifelong scarring, pain, and limited mobility. The benefit of HBOT for people with burn injuries is a result of its treatment of the swelling, damaged blood supply to burned skin, and inflammation. It can improve a person’s healing time, speed skin graft healing, decrease the number of surgeries, help prevent infection, speed the patient’s discharge from the hospital, and decrease costs.
Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment of Burn Injuries
One of the most widespread uses of HBOT in any injury is to treat swelling and bruising while also boosting the immune system. When a person experiences a severe burn, hyperbaric oxygen treatment of burn injuries can help reduce the chaotic immune response and greatly diminish swelling. This can be lifesaving and prevent partial thickness burns from progressing to third degree. HBOT also has inhibitory effects on harmful bacteria and increases oxygen throughout the body, both of which help resist infection.
While other treatments are available, HBOT has been proven to reduce swelling, infection, and inflammation more quickly, even by days or weeks. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment of burn injuries is safe and non-invasive, and although the burn itself is painful, HBOT is not. HBOT can also prevent sepsis, the overwhelming infection and serious side effects of large burns. Sepsis can come on suddenly and is often fatal. The prevention of sepsis is very important after a severe burn.
The Benefit of HBOT for People with Burn Injuries
Another serious side effect of burn injuries is scarring and recovery from skin grafts. One of the main treatments of severe burns is skin grafting, which is a long and painful process. Skin grafting involves the removal of damaged skin and tissue, selecting undamaged skin from another part of the body or from another source, harvesting the graft, and applying it to the clean burn wound for protection and healing.
The other benefit of HBOT for people with burn injuries is that skin grafts are more likely to take hold and mesh with the underlying tissue from which dead burned tissue has been removed. This has some similarities to how HBOT can help patients after surgery. In fact, HBOT to support skin grafts that are in danger of not adhering to the underlying tissue, i.e., “compromised” skin grafts, is one of the conditions routinely reimbursed by Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance companies in the U.S. HBOT for “compromised flaps and grafts” is recognized worldwide as an effective treatment. Skin grafting usually consists of multiple surgeries with breaks in between to allow the skin to heal. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment of burn injuries can help the skin to heal faster between surgeries, speeding up the healing process and helping a patient get back to their normal life. HBOT can also reduce scarring after surgery and skin grafts.
An additional benefit of HBOT for people with burn injuries is that it helps the body to generate new tissue, especially tiny new blood vessels, connective tissue (the tissue that connects our skin to underlying muscle and bone), and skin. There is no other therapy that can produce results of this nature with such successful and painless treatment. With hyperbaric oxygen treatment of burn injuries, burn victims can experience overall healing and long-term benefits. The ideal scenario for many patients would be to add HBOT to their care plan already in place to maximize healing and wellness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7224101/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8489886/
https://hbot.com/hyperbaric-oxygen-therapy/#benefits
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/hyperbaric-oxygen-therapy
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31091156/
https://www.healthpartners.com/care/hospitals/regions/specialties/burn-center/skin-grafting/
