Ingested oxygen therapy

Michelle Berriedale-Johnson describes her own experiences with ingested oxygen.

Click here for the relevance of oxygen therapy for electromagnetic sensitivity; click here for my protocol for ingesting food grade hydrogen peroxide; click here for aerobic oxygen – the easier option.

Although I have known of oxygen therapy for years (I had commissioned Jane Dean to write about the hyperbaric oxygen treatment that they used in her Breath for Life charity back in 2005), I only learnt about ingested oxygen when seeking some way to reduce my own sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation.

It was, of course, our prolific contributor John Scott (who has largely ‘cured’ his total food intolerance and crippling rhinitis with helminthic therapy) who pointed me, four years ago, in the direction of oxygen therapy via an American book by Madison Cavanaugh called The One-Minute Cure: The Secret to Healing Virtually All Diseases.

The premise of the book – and the therapy – is very simple. What is the element without which we cannot survive for more than 15 minutes, which makes up nearly 70% of the body and provides us with 90% of our biological energy – that is, effectively, our ‘life force’? It is, of course, oxygen.

Because most of us live in highly populated, industrialised areas the air that we breathe is polluted so that most of us are at least partially oxygen starved most of the time. Even if the air were better and we were to breathe deeply all of the time, it would be hard to get any significant extra benefit as only 15% of the oxygen that we breathe is absorbed by the blood and can therefore reach our cells.

The purpose of oxygen therapy, therefore, is to provide us with an oxygen boost which will strengthen each individual cell in the body and thereby the whole bodily system. As an extra benefit, by creating a more highly oxygenated environment within the body, viruses, bacteria and other pathogens, which only flourish in an anaerobic, or oxygen-free atmosphere, will be unable to survive.

Madison Cavanaugh touches on ozone machines and hyperbaric oxygen chambers as other ways to deliver extra oxygen but his preferred delivery system is food grade hydrogen peroxide.

For those who spent a little more time in the school lab than I did, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is just water with one extra oxygen atom. When it is absorbed by the body it releases the extra oxygen atom into the blood, thereby creating a flow of oxygen. Moreover, it ‘increases oxygen and haemoglobin disassociation’ thereby maximising the delivery of oxygen from the blood to the cells.

Can it work?

I have discussed Madison Cavanaugh's theories with a number of medical practitioners, the majority of whom did not believe that the active constituents of the H2O2 – the oxygen molecules – could have survived the acidic environment of the stomach for long enough to reach the blood stream and achieve anything useful.

The two exceptions were Dr Natasha Campbell McBride, originator of the GAPS diet, and Dr Andrew Goldsworthy of Imperial College (retired), an expert on electrosensitivity. Dr Goldsworthy wrote:

Your trick with the hydrogen peroxide looks interesting. It must be effective at much lower concentrations than you are drinking since your saliva (and the rest of your body) contains a very active catalase enzyme, which would destroy most of it before it entered the bloodstream.

Having said that, it reminds me of some experiments that we did many years ago in which we added a range of very low hydrogen peroxide concentrations to yeast cultures. We found that extremely low concentration stimulated growth and were arguably beneficial whereas higher concentrations inhibited growth and were arguably harmful.

It seems possible that the very tiny amounts of hydrogen peroxide you were ingesting were stimulating cellular activity, including repair mechanisms, so that it was better able to cope with the damage inflicted by subsequent exposure to electromagnetic fields.

Assuming that it can work – the relevance of oxygen to EMS/ES and to cell health

Madison Cavanaugh does not include electrical/electromagnetic sensitivity in his lengthy list of conditions for which the therapy is helpful (everything from AIDS to warts, via almost every other condition which could be affected by cell health) but it makes total sense that it should be relevant.

In ES the cell signalling system is disrupted by pulsed electromagnetic radiation thus weakening and damaging the cells and preventing them functioning properly. (For a more in depth explanation see the BSEM 2009 conference report and Dr Andrew Goldsworthy’s article on cell membrane permeability linked from it.) Therefore anything which is going to strengthen and boost cell function has to be beneficial.

Certainly, in my own case, that appears to be the case. Over the course of the first year in which I was using H2O2 my sensitivity to radiation reduced very significantly. (For a more detailed account of both ES and my personal treatment protocol see Managing electrosensitivity - could oxygen be an answer?)

Now, four years later, I can live a more or less normal, if electrically 'clean' life. This means that I do not use wifi, I do use a smartphone but only to text or on speakaphone and I have it on airplane mode whenever I am not actually 'connecting', I do not use a hands free telephone and I avoid, whenever possible, low energy light bulbs, fluorescent lights, the London underground and parts of the city where wifi is ubiquitous. I also work from home (where I have not allowed a smart meter to be installed) and 'shield' my workplace from the nearby mobile phone masts. All precautions that I would suggest that everyone should adopt if they wish to avoid becoming electrosensitive!

But I can travel, go to the theatre, concerts, meetings, other people's houses, shopping, walking and all of the stuff that most of us do on a daily basis. Compared to my situation at the start of the oxygen therapy when, apart from regular trips to remote parts of the country which were wifi and electricity free, I was virtually a prisoner in the back half of my house, unable even to use the garden as it was directly in path of the local phone mast's beams – I am completely cured!

To be fair, I had combined the oxygen therapy with all of the other electromagnetic radiation avoidance measures that I could think of, but I had been doing all of that for nine months before I started the oxygen therapy and although I had improved it was only a slight improvement and insignificant compared to the improvement post oxygen therapy.

Obviously, this is a deeply unscientific, purely anecdotal account of one person’s experience in relation to one specific condition. I have no reason to believe – or not to believe – that it will work for anyone else for ES or for any other condition. However, there are so few routes to any degree of recovery on offer for those who are electrosensitive, that anything is worth a try – especially since ingested oxygen is both incredibly cheap and, provided you follow the guidelines, totally safe. Even more so now that I have discovered aerobic oxygen.

Hydrogen peroxide has been given a GRAS designation by the US FDA (eg Generally Recognised As Safe). However, it should be treated with respect – it is a ‘reactive’ chemical which can cause health hazards if not used properly and is toxic when concentrated. For those who are interested:

My protocol for ingesting food grade hydrogen peroxide

Grades
There are a number of different grades of hydrogen peroxide available including pharmaceutical, beautician, reagent, electronic and technical, none of which are suitable because they are the wrong strength and contain a  number of stabilisers, neutralisers etc.

When I was using H2O2 you could buy food grade H2O2 (the ONLY one you should use) at 35% strength but the regulations, in the UK at least, have now changed and the highest strength you can buy without a license is 12%. In reality, the highest strength you can buy is 3% but if you buy from Bobby's Health Shop (where I bought mine) they give you the 'conversion rates'.

It is also important that you dilute the hydrogen peroxide in distilled water so as to ensure that it is as pure as possible. Obtainable from a chemist or a hardware store.

How much to take and when
Madison Cavanaugh suggests a month long regime gradually building up the dose from three drops in a beaker of distilled water to 25 drops taken three times a day – followed by an ongoing ‘maintenance dose’.
(If you are using 3% that will mean that 12 drops of 3% is equivalent to 1 drop of 35%.)

However, he (along with other oxygen therapists) insists that it should be taken on an empty stomach – three hours after eating and one hour before the next meal. I found this almost impossible to organise so I developed my own protocol by which I took a large glass of distilled water with around 10 drops of hydrogen peroxide to bed with me and drank it during the course of the night as I woke up.

This of course works very well for a middle-aged women who tends to wake up quite often during the night anyhow – but may not work so well for others who sleep through ... Although, since insomnia is one of the many symptoms of ES, most sufferers may have little difficulty in following my regime!

I also found that over about 10 drops per glass it became unacceptably bleachy tasting and made me feel slightly ill.

However, I am not suggesting that this regime is right for anyone – merely telling you what I have done. If you are interested in experimenting I would suggest both that you bought Madison Cavanaugh’s book (I have only given a very brief overview of what he says) and check out other advocates of hydrogen peroxide oxygen therapy on the web – I found several although they all said very much the same.

Aerobic oxygen

I had used the hydrogen peroxide therapy very successfully for about a year when I came across a fascinating article in an old (2000) copy of Positive Health on the history of oxygen therapies. In the course of the article it also explained why it was that all my medics had refused to accept that the H2O2 therapy actually worked.

'...although hydrogen peroxide, chlorine dioxide and ozone will carry oxygen for a short time, which can be shown by adding them to water, they are unstable forms of oxygen. In a water test, the oxygen content increases for a short time initially, but will drop within a matter of hours and cease to be effective.'

However, they went on to talk about 'aerobic oxygen', a stable oxygen product which had been developed in Canada 'using a solution of sodium and chlorine, two of the most important and abundant electrolytes of body fluid, to act as the carriers for concentrated molecules of oxygen which are released through the digestive process and absorbed into the bloodstream......

The oxygen molecule in Aerobic Oxygen is loosely bonded and is therefore what is considered to be a stable oxygen molecule. This molecule will remain bonded until some function of the body requires the oxygen, at which time the bond is broken and the oxygen is used.'

Frustratingly, the Canadian Aerobic Oxygen site offers a number of articles and endless testimonials but only two laboratory analyses, one showing that adding 10 drops of Aerobic oxygen to 240ml of dionised water increased its oxygen content by 442%, the other showing a significant increase in blood level of oxygen after the ingestion of Aerobic Oxygen. One would have liked to see a somewhat more scientific approach – and some serious medical studies or trials would certainly have been nice. But although oxygen is very widely used in conventional medical practice as an inhaled or even injected therapy, ingesting oxygen does not seem to feature at all.

However, assuming that what Positive Health and the Good For You Corp (the makers of the aerobic oxygen) are right, and assuming that you wish to boost your oxygen levels by 'drinking' oxygen rather than sitting in a hyperbaric chamber, using Aerobic Oxygen is certainly a lot easier and a lot less scary than using hydrogen peroxide. So I went for it.

Heeding the warnings that ' Aerobic Oxygen made by the Good For You Corp' was the best and that I should not be tempted by other, possibly cheaper, products, I ordered some from the Finchley Clinic at roughly £16 for 60ml - a good few weeks' supply. (If you live outside the UK, I am sure that Google will discover you other sources of supply around the world.) And I have been using it ever since. I have certainly suffered no discernible ill effects and, as I described above, my electrosensitivity is massively improved.

I have always been pretty healthy but certainly, over the course of the last four years I think I have logged two colds, two or three stomach upsets (quite possibly due to something I ate) and a few headaches. Whether the absence of any more serious illnesses has anything to do with the oxygen or is down to a combination of good genes and relatively healthy living I have no way of telling. But I am not about to give it up!

January 2015

If anyone has any comments or questions on any of the above, bearing in mind that neither I nor FoodsMatter have any medical training and are therefore unable to give medical advice, please email us and we will add your contribution as a comment.

From Jacquie:

A long time ago I enquired about hyperbaric oxygen beause the centre was moved from Gosport to Chichester. Got very negative replies and the pressure would not suit my ears. Instead we bought an Airnergy machine which we do daily. Used by athletes and good for chests and eyes but haven't had any other miracle cures.

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