hyperbaric-oxygen-chamberThe BART Foundation aims to promote better outcomes for brain injury survivors by answering three questions – which alternative therapies are likely to work, where can they be found, and how can they be afforded? One of the ways we fulfill our mission is by carefully watching global research and clinical trial outcomes and sharing that information in user-friendly language with the TBI/ABI community. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) is one of the safe, alternative therapies the BART Foundation believes may help brain injury survivors. Perhaps if HBOT becomes more widely accepted as a treatment option, TBI/ABI/PCS survivors will be able to gain better access to this life-changing treatment.We wanted to share this exhaustive bibliography of scientific evidence supporting HBOT as an effective treatment for TBI/ABI.  It was compiled by Dr. Paul Harch (learn more about him at the bottom of this page), a thought leader and hyperbaric medicine expert at  LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana. For those who still think HBOT is merely anecdotal or placebo, this is a very healthy tonic!  TBI/ABI survivors and their families continue to find it frustrating that in light of this weight of evidence, the American medical establishment still turgidly declines to embrace HBOT.

The bibliography is nearly 50 pages long and contains addendum pieces about TBI and HBOT interventions. We have saved the document as a PDF for those who wish to print it out. Many of the research articles and books referenced are available online or can be requested through your local public library. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to help as best we can.

About Dr. Paul Harch

Harch_PaulPaul G. Harch, M.D. is an emergency medicine and hyperbaric medicine clinician who is also the director of the University Medical Center Hyperbaric Medicine Department and Clinical Professor of Medicine, Section of Emergency Medicine at LSU School of Medicine, New Orleans. He graduated from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine after a magna cum laude/Phi Beta Kappa graduation from the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Harch initiated and maintains a private practice that has resulted in the largest case experience in neurological hyperbaric medicine in the world. In this practice he adapted the concepts of conventional hyperbaric oxygen therapy to wounds in the central nervous system that spawned the subsequent academic and research practice. Beginning with brain-injured divers and boxers in 1989, he applied his protocol to the first HBOT-treated cerebral palsy (1992) and autistic children (1996-2000) in this country and multiple other cerebral disorders, including most recently the first PET-documented Alzheimer’s case (1/2019) and a subacute drowned child (Medical Gas Research 3/2017). This drowning case was the first demonstration of global regrowth of brain tissue in humans. He has successfully treated U.S. servicemen with TBI and PTSD, publishing the latest findings in Medical Gas Research (10/2017). His studies in brain-injured veterans have continued with a recently completed randomized trial funded by a Louisiana-generated congressional appropriation. The early case experience was confirmed in an animal model of chronic traumatic brain injury that was published in Brain Research in October 2007. This is the first and only improvement of chronic brain injury in the history of science and was achieved using Dr. Harch’s human protocol of HBOT in traumatic brain injury. He has presented his clinical experience and research four times to the U.S. Congress and has been nominated for the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. In April 2007, he published the Oxygen Revolution with co-author Virginia McCullough. This groundbreaking book, which was released in its third updated edition in May 2016, explains HBOT as an epigenetic therapy with expected revolutionary effects on medicine and neurology.