Delta Regional Medical Center

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Thomas Reich, M.D., Otolaryngology - ENT more

 

(Greenville, MS) If you’ve ever used a pencil eraser, enjoyed a carbonated soft drink or breathed laughing gas at the dentist, you owe a debt to Joseph Priestly, the inventor of all that who died 204 years ago on February 6, 1804.

 

A friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, Priestly was an English chemist and clergyman who immigrated to Pennsylvania after his home chapel was burned down by those unhappy with his support of the French Revolution.

 

But Priestly has had a much more profound impact on people’s lives than enabling them to be members of the Pepsi generation.

 

"Priestly was one of two men credited with the discovery of oxygen," explained Dr. Satwinder Singh, Internal Medicine/Infectious Disease. "Shortly before his death, doctors in England were already beginning to explore the medical uses of oxygen to treat and fight disease. Today, hyperbaric oxygen chambers are used to treat over a dozen conditions and have helped thousands since the origination of their use in the mid-’60s."

 

The Wound Healing Center, a service of Delta Regional Medical Center, contains two (2) hyperbaric oxygen chambers and has treated over 1,000 patients since opening in 1998.

 

The hyperbaric oxygen chambers are a marriage between a reclining bed, a home audio system and state-of-the-art medical technology. Relaxing on a bed encased within a large see-through plastic shell, patients can watch movies on televisions and VCR players mounted above the chamber while hearing the movies and conversing with others outside the chamber through a speaker system. The only physical sensation resulting from the treatment is a slight pressure on the eardrum, such as that felt when a plane lands, as the air in the chamber is compressed.

 

The chambers work by surrounding the patient with 100 percent oxygen at twice the normal atmospheric pressure. This increases the amount of oxygen in the patient’s blood and, in the case of wounds, allows red blood cells to pass more easily through the plasma into the wound to heal it from the inside out. 

  

Although hyperbaric oxygen chambers are used to treat such exotic ailments as cyanide poisoning, brown reclusive spider bites and the bends, more common uses include treating bone or skin damaged by radiation treatments, wounds that are slow to heal due to diabetes and progressive infections that endanger healthy tissue and bone.

 

Likely candidates for treatment are those suffering from diabetic ulcers, pressure ulcers, infections, compromised skin grafts and flaps, and wounds that haven’t healed within 30 days. On average, after a schedule of 90-minute to two-hour sessions, wounds heal in 12 to 16 weeks.

 

"Certainly Priestly’s isolation of oxygen also paved the way for the introduction of breathing tanks that help us explore outer space and the deepest oceans," said Dr. Singh, "but the medical therapies available through hyperbaric oxygen chambers certainly rival them. I see the results and how it helps people every day."

 

For more information call The Wound Healing Center located at 300 S. Washington Ave, West Campus of Delta Regional Medical Center.