HBO healing, considered cheating?

For this blog, I'm going to talk about something that has been a bit of a controversy throughout the sports medicine world in using HBO to recover from injuries quicker.

HBO means Hyperbaric Oxygen, which is obtained in a tube-shaped chamber in which the patient sits or can even sleep inside in order to speed their recovery for several different types of injuries. It's most popular treatments include lower extremity damage in diabetic patients, a laceration or incision that is compromisingly deep, and different types of integumentary infections.

The operation involves "a treatment in which 100% oxygen is delivered to a patient at greater than two times the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level." (Zamboni) This removes the strain of the patients hemoglobin to deliver the needed oxygen to an oxygen deficient wound site, and makes recovery and repair of the tissue much easier and require less time.

However, this treatment isn't only used in clinical settings, we are finding that athletes such as the infamous David Beckham have been using this method of healing for quite some time. This is where the controversy arises. In 2007, Yankees' pitcher Andy Petite was outed in the Mitchell report for using a performance enhancing drug earlier in his career; and as you can probably guess, he caught hell for it too. Harassed and doubted, haters just seem to love to come at baseball players who've been caught using steroids or HGH; Petite however, wasn't trying to get bigger and more muscular, he did it to recover from an injury.

(http://www.newsday.com/news/pettitte-admits-using-hgh-not-steroids-1.877443)

Fined, suspended, and defamed, Andy's reputation is going to have a permanent smudge forever. But who accused David Beckham of cheating? No one. Even though they did nearly the exact same thing, using the means of medical technology to speed a recovery beyond what the regular body is capable of, European icon David Beckham has escaped without a scratch, which Andy Petite has suffered a deep gash.

Keep your eye out for this, to see if it joins the growing list of things that overcritical sports experts have put on their black list.