Wound Wizard can’t honestly tell you that the treatment is painful, or that it’s painless. How a session feels isn’t something to guess at on your behalf.
What can be described is the setting. During this treatment you sit inside a special chamber, where the air pressure is about two and a half times greater than the normal pressure in the atmosphere. Sessions usually go to 2.4 atmospheres at 100% oxygen and last around two hours, with two ten-minute oxygen breaks.
The part of the body most affected by the pressure change is the ear. The most common complication of hyperbaric oxygen therapy is barotrauma, which is injury caused by gases expanding in a confined space. The most common form is rupture or irritation of the eardrum. Damage to the inner, middle and outer ear canals is among the more serious injuries.
If you’ve ever felt your ears block on a plane coming in to land, you’ve felt the ordinary version of what the chamber does. What people routinely feel during a session can’t be spelled out here, but the ears are clearly the part under pressure. That makes ear discomfort the thing to ask the unit about: how pressure is equalized, what you’ll be asked to do as the pressure rises, and what to report.
Claustrophobia can also be an issue, especially in a monoplace chamber, which is a single-person chamber rather than a room. That’s a real clinical consideration, not a weakness, and it’s worth raising before a course begins.
If you’re being offered this treatment for a wound, the most useful thing is to ask the unit directly what people commonly feel, what is done about ear pressure, and what they want to hear about afterward. They answer these questions every day.