Treatment options for lasting Covid symptoms are limited, but initial studies suggest hyperbaric oxygen could help.
Efrati acknowledges the price barrier but attributes it to the stage of the innovation, comparing oxygen therapy to cell phones: “In the beginning, they were expensive and huge, and now it’s cheap and everyone has one. Why? Because it works, and the same thing will happen here.”
Others aren’t yet convinced. “It’s a very small study, and the results aren’t stellar, so it could be a false-positive finding,” says Frances Williams, a professor of genomic epidemiology at King’s College London who specializes in studying chronic pain syndromes. “There have been multiple studies of hyperbaric oxygen for all sorts of diseases—like venous ulcer and stroke—but overall it has not really had overwhelmingly positive results in any of them. So I remain rather skeptical.
While the study was small, meaning its results shouldn’t yet be used as evidence to support broad use of hyperbaric therapy for long Covid, it was a double-blind randomized controlled trial—the gold standard for testing medical interventions. The fact that the therapy showed promise under these conditions suggests it should be investigated further, particularly as there’s so little else available to treat Covid’s lasting symptoms.
Efrati has no doubt that the treatment’s helpfulness will be proven in time and the therapy will gain widespread acceptance as a long-Covid treatment. “We have more papers coming, and thousands of people on our waiting list,” he says. “My job is to show the research works.”
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