There is an entire industry catering to people who, as Webb once famously said on the hilarious Homeopathic A&E skit, have “more money than sense.” This is the so-called “wellness” industry, now supercharged by an online army of “wellness influencers”. At first approximation, this entire industry is basically a scam. That may sound unfair, but it is built into its very essence.
Consider – there is a proven and generally accepted process for determining which treatments and health interventions are safe and effective. Science-based practitioners will follow the recommendations of this process. It is imperfect, but it is by far the best we have.
The wellness industry largely sits outside of this process. That doesn’t mean everything offered under the umbrella of wellness is useless – they will incorporate some advice which aligns with scientific recommendations. But anything they offer that is science-based you will get from conventional outlets, and anything they offer that is outside of science-based recommendations range from experimental and premature to outright fraud and pseudoscience.
Their purpose is to prey on health concerns and fears using manipulative and misleading marketing tactics, often wrapped in harmful conspiracy theories and unscientific notions. There are countless examples on this site, and I am going to add one to the list – Extracorporeal Blood Oxygenation and Ozonation (EBOO).
This intervention is aimed at the high end of the market, to those getting older and realizing their millions cannot buy them the one thing they may want the most, extra time on this mortal coil, especially with prolonged youth and vigor.
The treatment is very invasive – it is essentially a blood pheresis treatment. Two IVs are placed, a large volume of the client’s blood is removed, treated, and returned to the client. The blood is oxygenated, exposed to ozone (which is a highly reactive form of oxygen), and then filtered. Some clinics will also expose the blood to UV light. None of these interventions have been shown to be effective in the general population, and the justifications are very thin.
The idea behind oxygenation is to improve oxygen delivery to the cells of the body. However, this makes not sense as a health-promotion intervention. If our hearts and lungs are working properly, the blood leaving our lungs should be between 98-100% saturated with oxygen. You can’t get better than 100%, so for those without specific cardiopulmonary disease, oxygenating the blood over one treatment will do absolutely nothing. Also, if someone did have pulmonary disease that reduced their ability to saturate their blood with oxygen, then a one-time treatment would do little to nothing. Generally these people need frequent or even continuous supplemental oxygen to increase their saturation on an ongoing basis. A one-time boost of oxygen will not help them much (try holding your breath to see how long your supply of oxygen lasts you).
The second component of the treatment is exposure to ozone, “ozonation”. The idea here is to expose the blood to oxidative stress in order to trigger the body’s antioxidant countermeasures. This is a typical gambit for alternative wellness treatments – either they do something generally considered good, in which case they are claimed to be a direct benefit, or they do the opposite, in which case they are claimed to be a benefit by triggering natural defenses. They win either way. So oxygenation is good, anti-oxidants are good, pro-inflammatory is good, anti-inflammatory is good – it’s all good.
The body does not need to be exposed to ozone to trigger the natural anti-oxidants, they are already triggered by the regular functioning of your mitochondria, the energy factory of your cells, which produce oxygen free radicals which are then scavenged by anti-oxidants. There is already an evolved balance of oxidative stress, which is also used by your immune system to fight invaders and also as a way to calibrate certain biological function to metabolic rate, and powerful protective antioxidants. There is no simple way to game this system, nor would you want to if it is functioning normally. Only if you have a specific disease which impairs your natural antioxidants would an intervention make sense.
Also notice how this claim significantly undercuts the “antioxidant” supplement claims of the wellness industry. They admit here that the body has natural antioxidants – in fact they are literally a thousand times stronger than anything you can get in a supplement. The treatment is also premised on the claim that some oxidative stress is a good thing, to maintain these natural mechanisms.
Finally the treatment filters the blood before returning it to the body. Again – in a healthy individual, the kidney is a finely tuned machine for precisely filtering the blood to remove toxins and maintain a balance of a long list of blood constituents. If your kidneys are functioning you do not need your blood filtered. And if you are having enough kidney disease to compromise this function, you should be getting dialysis ordered and monitored by a physician, not EBOO from a wellness center.
So the justification for EBOO is not convincing in the slightest, and is in line with typical alternative medicine hand-waving nonsense. But what about the clinical evidence – maybe it works despite the poor plausibility or by some other mechanism. This is also not convincing.
There is basically no research looking at the efficacy of EBOO in the general population, and no evidence for increased overall health and longevity. The scant research that does exist is in specific disease conditions, where at least there is some rationale. Here is a good example: Extracorporeal blood oxygenation and ozonation (EBOO): a controlled trial in patients with peripheral artery disease. This is a small pilot study showing some improvement in the skin lesions, but no change in vascularization. These are patients with vascular disease, so at least there is some minimal plausibility for a temporary benefit, from 14 treatments over 7 weeks. But the mechanism is unclear, and the results were never verified. This study is from 2005.
There are a few other studies, mostly by this same researcher, all in the early 2000s. At best they indicate there may be a role for this type of procedure in patients with severe skin lesions due to infection or poor oxygen delivery. This means there has been 25 years to do further research to study potential mechanisms and therapeutic effects. By now we should have a fairly definitive answer to the question of efficacy for EBOO, but there isn’t. We just have some preliminary research, some basic science, and then direct-to-consumer implausible claims not supported by research. That is the wellness industry.
