From Research to Reality - Why I Explored Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy During Cancer Treatment
By Dale Atkinson
In October 2024, my life was reduced to numbers.
I was 35, had two very young sons, and had just been diagnosed with stage IV oesophageal adenocarcinoma – with a prognosis of just 11.5months. Before that, survival statistics were just something you saw in articles or heard doctors discuss about other people. After diagnosis, they very quickly become personal.
That shift is hard to explain unless you’ve lived it yourself. One minute you’re thinking about work, family, going for a beer with friends… normal life, and whatever’s for dinner. The next, you’re hearing your future discussed in timelines, percentages and treatment plans. It’s clinical language, but it lands in a very human way.
I underwent CAPOX chemotherapy and remain on immunotherapy (Pembrolizumab to be exact), and expect to until at least the end of 2026. Conventional treatment’s been central to my care, and I want to be absolutely clear about that from the outset. Nothing I explored was about replacing standard of care oncology – It was about asking a different question: what else might help me support my body and mind whilst going through something this brutal?
That’s the point where many cancer patients start researching supportive therapies – and, if you’re here reading this then maybe that’s the stage you’re at too?
The rabbit hole most patients eventually enter
A serious diagnosis creates a strange psychological state; one where you’re frightened, overwhelmed and often exhausted all at once, but you’re also desperate to feel that you still have some role in and control over what’s about to happen to you and your body.
For me, research became one of the few ways to feel I was still participating in and had control over my own care.
Not in a reckless way. Not by chasing miracle claims, putting faith in instagram influencer claims, or pretending the internet knows more than oncologists. Quite the opposite – I wanted to understand where supportive therapies might sit alongside conventional treatment, and where they clearly didn’t.
That led me into a wider world of recovery technologies – cold exposure, infrared sauna, red light therapy, pEMF and, my personal favourite, hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
I suspect this is familiar to many patients, especially those of you here reading this. Once you’re diagnosed, you don’t just want to know what the tumour’s doing, you want to know what might help with healing, recovery, fatigue, inflammation, resilience, sleep and quality of life (amongst many other things I’m sure). You want to know whether there are sensible adjunct therapies that you can use alongside conventional cancer treatment, ones that are worth understanding and considering properly.
Some of that’s physical. Some of it is psychological. Much of it is both.
Discovering hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT)
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy – often shortened to HBOT or HBOC – caught my attention quite early on in my journey, not least because it’s actually quite straightforward in both principle and application.
You sit or lie down inside a pressurised chamber and breathe oxygen at a higher concentration, normally somewhere between 90-98%, than you would in normal air, because the chamber pressure’s increased above normal atmospheric pressure, more oxygen can dissolve into the blood plasma and circulate through the body.
That’s what makes people curious about it.
Oxygen is central to healing physiology; It matters for energy production, tissue repair, immune function and recovery. HBOT’s already used medically in established settings such as decompression sickness (usually reserved to the diving community), carbon monoxide poisoning, certain wounds/post surgery healing and some radiation-related tissue injuries too. That’s important, because it means this isn’t just a fashionable wellness concept with a fancy price tag – like many of the things we all see on social media (and as I too have been victim of more than once along my journey – so please don’t beat yourself up if they got you too – the shame is their’s, for praying on the vulnerable, not yours for trying to find options). It has a real physiological basis and recognised medical uses.
At the same time, this is where the line needs to stay clear. HBOT’s not a cure for cancer, and it shouldn’t be presented as one. For cancer patients, the interest’s usually more specific and more modest than that. It’s often about whether HBOT may be helpful as a supportive therapy during cancer treatment or recovery, particularly in relation to healing, side effects, fatigue or general resilience in selected cases.
That’s a very different claim, and a much more responsible one.
Why recovery technologies started to make sense to me
Before cancer, I probably associated recovery technologies mostly with athletes, fighters and people who take their sleep score more seriously than most people take their mortgage.
After cancer, I saw them differently.
The body under serious treatment, is a body under heavy stress. Not the healthy, chosen stress of training, but very real physiological stress nonetheless. Chemotherapy, surgery, immunotherapy and radiotherapy can all take a heavy toll – They affect energy, inflammation, tissue health, sleep, appetite and mental bandwidth. So, it isn’t irrational for patients to ask whether some of the tools used in recovery settings might also be relevant in a medical one too.
That was the lens through which I started looking at HBOT, red light therapy and other recovery technologies.
Not because I thought any of them were magic.
Not because I wanted to swap medicine for machinery.
But, because I became interested in the overlap between performance, repair and supportive care. If oxygen delivery, tissue recovery and inflammation matter in injury and rehabilitation, it’s understandable that patients facing cancer treatment become curious too, surely…
Curiosity isn’t the problem – the problem comes when curiosity turns into certainty, be it true or false certainty, before the evidence does.
Why responsible access matters
One thing cancer teaches you very quickly is that access matters almost as much as information.
There’s a big difference between reading about something online and being able to explore it in a setting that feels safe, grounded and honest. That’s one reason initiatives like the one at Lincoln Performance & Recovery Clinic matter.
They’ve chosen to offer free HBOT sessions for people with a cancer diagnosis, supported by donations. That matters because many patients are already curious about supportive therapies, but have no idea where to ask questions without either being dismissed outright or sold false hope.
That gap is real, and something I too experienced early in my journey.
Patients are often told, quite rightly, to be cautious about anything outside standard treatment. But caution on its own isn’t enough. People also need sensible, responsible spaces where they can ask practical questions, understand what a therapy is, where it may or may not fit, and what sort of expectations are realistic.
That’s especially important in oncological settings, where people are often more vulnerable and the market’s full of overpriced and overhyped nonsense, usually dressed up as certainty.
The best support isn’t hype – Its honest conversation.
The strange twist in my story
In an odd twist, my research into recovery technologies didn’t stay theoretical.
That wider reading eventually led me to acquire a small UK recovery equipment retailer, Peak Health & Fitness (www.peakhealthandfitness.co.uk), which I now run alongside my treatment.
It wasn’t part of some grand masterplan. Instead, it came from a much simpler instinct – Cancer has a way of making life feel painfully narrow, I needed something that still pointed forwards, and I needed something useful to build whilst everything else felt uncertain.
There’s also a family dimension to all of this, in that my eldest son named my tumour ‘Dave’, which made it easier for us to talk about something frightening in a way that was honest but not overwhelming. Children have a strange talent for cutting through the unbearable. Adults, meanwhile, tend to respond by opening thirty browser tabs and trying to become amateur physiologists by midnight.
That, more or less, was me.
What patients should understand about adjunct therapies
If I’ve learnt anything from this experience, it’s that serious illness forces you to hold two things at once.
Hope, and discipline.
You need hope because without it the whole process becomes psychologically unmanageable. But you also need discipline, because fear and desperation can make anyone vulnerable to bad claims and people trying to sell false hope in expensive bottles.
That’s why I think adjunct therapies should be approached with open-minded scepticism.
Ask what the therapy actually is.
Ask what it’s already used for, and why.
Ask what evidence exists for your situation, not someone else’s.
Ask what the risks are.
Ask whether it fits safely alongside your treatment.
And ask your oncology team, even if the answers aren’t always as nuanced as you would like.
Some supportive approaches may prove genuinely useful in specific settings, whereas others are hugely overhyped. Much of the challenge for patients in the modern age is learning how to tell the difference without becoming either gullible or closed off. None of us are perfect at this, even with practice it’s sometimes impossible to tell the difference between snake oil and the real thing.
For me, exploring HBOT was never about rejecting conventional medicine. It was about recognising that patients are allowed to care about more than just scan results. We’re allowed to care about how we feel, how we function, how we recover, and how we hold ourselves together whilst treatment does what treatment does to us.
Cancer closes off your world quickly, but being thoughtfully curious can help open it up again.
It’s also important to understand that not every treatment will work for everyone, and not every claim will hold up under examination. However, there’s real value in maintaining an open yet critical mindset.
That, to me, is where resilience exists.
Not in miracle language, not in blind faith, but in the decision to stay engaged, stay thoughtful, and keep looking for sensible ways to support yourself whilst walking through something hard.
References
1.Mayo Clinic – Hyperbaric oxygen therapy
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/hyperbaric-oxygen-therapy/about/pac-20394380
2.Cancer Research UK – Difference between complementary and alternative therapies
3.Peak Health & Fitness – Cold Water Therapy and Cancer Recovery: What the Science Says
https://peakhealthandfitness.co.uk/blogs/learn/cold-water-therapy-cancer-recovery-uk
4.Ortega MA, et al. – A General Overview on the Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy: Applications, Mechanisms and Translational Opportunities
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8465921/
5.National Cancer Institute – Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) for Patients
https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/cam/patient
6.Bhutani S, et al. – Hyperbaric oxygen and wound healing
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3495382/
7.The Life Organic – HBOT and Cancer – Potential Benefits, Limits and What Patients Should Know
https://thelifeorganic.com/hyperbaric-oxygen-therapy-cancer-benefits/
8.NHS England – Reviewing Hyperbaric Oxygen Services: Consultation Guide
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/reviewing-hyperbaric-oxygen-services-consultation-guide/
9.Macmillan Cancer Support – About complementary therapies
10.Cochrane Review – Hyperbaric oxygen therapy for late radiation tissue injury
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD005005.pub5/full
11.Lincoln Cryolab – Cancer support page
https://lincolncryolab.co.uk/cancer/
12.The ASCO Post – Alternative Therapies: Knowledge Is Power, but Consider the Source
