Agree with bluekrikit! Update away if you feel drawn to. Would love to hear about it and I'm sure many in the community here would be highly curious about your experience with HBOT.

Well, ok I suppose I should write the major changes down somewhere! Ten treatments of 40 planned treatments into it:

Aside from the 90% improvement in dizziness (which is huge for me), I'm also noticing way less clumsiness. For the first time in ages, there are no bruises or cuts on my hands and arms now that I don't clumsily slam them into things like cabinets while putting away dishes. I'm also feeling sharper mentally, at least as much as the 2400 mg of gabapentin/neurotin a day will allow. I can kind of tell the difference in the gabapentin induced "stupids" versus the normal loss of cognitive abilities I feel I've experienced.

My pain relief is overall better, but it's been up and down for some reason. They say you can hit a wall where things get worse before they get better as nerves and vessels try to heal. So I should reserve comment on that one for further into the treatment. I've had migraines for years, something HBOT may help with. But I'm still having them at this point. And still no reduction of swelling, which is very bad in my case.

So there's the most objective report I can give right now. I hope this helps somebody. I continue to believe HBOT is a good, none-invasive alternative treatment for this disease. It may not work for everyone. There are probably different forms of and causes for CRPS. Perhaps this is the reason for so many different responses to different treatments. I have CRPS type 1, with no known inciting cause physically. It started abruptly with a swollen ankle the day I went to divorce court after my husband of 32 years left me. I'm now one year, ten months into it. I was diagnosed just over a year ago about nine months from the start of it.

Anyway, I feel hopeful!

Denise

Denise,

Thanks for the update, and so glad you're finding a noticeable improvement only 25% into the treatment schedule! Your body is doing some heavy detoxing so it would make sense that pain and other symptoms would be highly variable early on.

Love that you can feel your cognitive abilities improving, and love that you've read through everything on here you could find on HBOT. I did the same thing on this site, and every nook and cranny I could find on the internet. Based on what I found, HBOT is one of the first modalities I would recommend to anyone with more permanent symptoms. The difficulty then would be to educate yourself on the validity of different depths, durations, frequency of treatments, etc... but unfortunately the only way to really know anything is to research and experiment on yourself.

I do think that the effectiveness of HBOT, or any other modality, is directly proportional to how long the condition has existed, i.e. how long the immune system has been compromised. You've "only" been dealing with this for a little under 2 years, so a series of 40 dives wouldn't necessarily have the same impact on someone who has had the same symptoms for 10 years, as an example.

This might be a bit premature only 10 dives in, but a long time ago I found what appeared to be a highly reputable site that sells/leases hyperbaric chambers, with a wealth of information on appropriate protocols determined by much research and trial and error. From a cost perspective it was actually much less expensive to purchase a chamber and set your own schedule instead of going to treatment centers, (even if insurance paid for the treatment.) I'll try to hunt down the link again; maybe you'll find it helpful one day.

....How crazy is it that major changes in health (both positive and negative) are so often marked by major life events???

So happy for you - good for you.

I'm SO happy to hear of the improvements!!! Thank you for sharing! Please keep us informed of any updates!

finger crossed for more progress...thinking of you and all the sufferers of this disease...all my best!!