I will be lecturing at the Clinical Symposium on Advances in Skin & Wound Care: The Conference for Clinical Excellence that will be held September 27-October 1, 2014 at The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. The lecture title is: Demonstrating Evidence-based Patient Benefit with HBOT: What Will it Take to Convince the Skeptics?
In the last few years I have gone from being a diehard HBOT enthusiast to more of a skeptic. It’s not that I’ve lost faith in results that can be obtained with HBOT—especially in wound care—but rather noted with dismay how clinicians have applied HBOT with the consequence that too many of the wrong kind of patients are getting HBOT with no attendant benefit. One serious problem that has arisen from this sad state of affairs is that many societies and agencies are saying HBOT lacks credibility. Another problem with HBOT is that its practice lacks the use of biochemical and/or genetic markers that might tell us ahead of time which patients are most likely to be benefit. Finally, we are on the clock: if as a community we do not deal with these issues, many health care providers are likely to take HBOT off the approved list of adjunct treatments.
I will address all these issues in the lecture and propose a road map.