An Important Adjunct to Living a Longer, Healthier Life   Michael Grant White

Around 1996, I bought a great book written by Dr. Mandfred von Ardenne of Germany. I was short of cash then due to the Loma Prieta Earthquake, but felt it was so important that I spent my last $80. Boy, was it worth it! Dr. von Ardenne was probably Otto Warberg's prize student. Warberg, you may recall, received the 1931 Nobel Prize for proving that cancer can only grow in an oxygen-starved environment. Cancer is anaerobic. Manfred went on to do approximately 150 studies combining exercise with extra oxygen. He called it Oxygen Multistep Therapy, and I gladly spent my last bit of cash to learn about it.

Now, I see that many people are borrowing his ideas and calling it Exercise with Oxygen Therapy (EWOT) and have created programs using some of his techniques. However, EWOT is an illness-model paradigm. It addresses sick people. See your doctor about this if you are sick.  So if you are not sick or just do not want to get sick or want to enhance your wellness or exercise program then read on.

Manfred and Otto made such good sense about the importance of oxygen that I created my own program, which I call Oxygen Enhanced Exercise (OEE), a non-medical model, which we will talk about later in this article.

A primary reason for aging is the failure of enzymatic systems that are responsible for your body's uptake and utilization of oxygen. When your cells don't get enough oxygen, they get weaker and weaker—and so do you. See Oxygen and aging

Exercising while breathing supplemental oxygen may greatly increase the amount of oxygen in the blood plasma, i.e., the nearly colorless liquid carrying the red and white cells. This can be determined by testing the blood-oxygen levels in the arteries or veins. Quite often after 15 minutes of exercising with oxygen, there is a dramatic "pinking" of an exerciser’s skin. If this can be seen by simple observation, then it follows that the tiny capillaries, the blood vessels tinier than a strand of hair, are carrying extra oxygen not only to the skin’s surface, but to all the cells in the body. Energy, vision and mental clarity may improve immediately. Streaming, energy currents, buzzing, tingling, and breeze-like sensations may be felt in different areas of the body. 

Many contemporary scientists say you can't increase the oxygen in your blood by breathing extra oxygen. I disagree. What they most likely mean is that you can't increase the oxygen in your red blood cells, which are responsible for transporting oxygen to the tissues. The reason many say the amount of oxygen in the red blood cells cannot be increased is because, under most circumstances, they are already 97.3% saturated with oxygen. So they say a three-percent increase will make little difference, and the red blood cells won't accept the extra oxygen anyway.

William Campbell Douglas, MD in his landmark Stop Aging or Slow the Process: How Exercise with Oxygen Therapy (EWOT) Can Help has clarified this.  While the red blood cell info is true, the role of oxygen in the plasma needs to be considered. Many (but not all) people can, by taking lots of slow deep breaths, cause the oxygen content of the plasma itself to be significantly increased, and thus oxygen will be "pushed" into the body's cells without the aid of the red blood cells. Dr. Douglas  shows that it is based on the "Law of Mass Action," which states that if you build up the concentration of a certain component in a chemical mixture high enough, chemical combining will take place with other elements in the mixture, which under normal circumstances wouldn’t happen. In this way, the normal "shunting," or oxygen's bypassing cellular uptake, is partly reduced and the cells get extra O2 anyway.

Transformational breathwork (where one lies down and gently increases their breathing rate for a period of time) works a great deal in this manner, and this partly explains why so many "healings" occur by just doing more good breathing  in a safe and supportive environment. more about

Most of the oxygen in the plasma under these high-saturation circumstances will be shunted/bypassed and "wasted" in that it will not be absorbed by the cells, which normally expect to be "fed" oxygen by the red blood cells. But if only one-tenth of one percent of this oxygen gets through, and you offer your cells this extra O2 dose every day, there will be an extensive increase in your total tissue-oxygen levels. My goal is to keep the oxygen level of my blood as close to optimum (100% on the pulse oxymeter scale) for as long as possible—and ideally, for life.  Majid Ali, MD in his Oxygen and Aging is to me the best information source on all this.   He is a pathologist (blood specialist) and has performed over 20,000 tests using the High Resolution Bradford microscope.  The Bradford (dark field) magnifies 12,000 times while conventional microscopes magnify 400 times. At 12,000 X You can learn a lot about blood that most others do no know about.   Ali shares many powerful insights and some great pictures of live blood analysis in his DVD  about Fibromyalgia

USING MORE OXYGEN TO GET MORE OXYGEN = A net loss.
You can run, swim or walk for miles and not increase the oxygen content of your blood. You may even decrease your blood oxygen as the body burns oxygen to cover the degree of increased muscular activity.  

You may also be producing insufficient blood-CO2 levels that will compromise O2 transfer into the blood cells and the mitochondria. Thus, you will not develop "oxygen-rich blood" if you have this form of hidden hyperventilation, also called "overbreathing." 

Overbreathing can only be uncovered if you test your CO2 levels to make sure you are producing enough. Dr. Peter Litchfield, one of the Optimal Breathing Institute’s core faculty members, has invented such a device that is portable and can be used by lay people as well as health professionals. 

OXYGEN KILLERS
The most punishing oxygen users for the body are major operations, cancer, chemotherapy, X-ray therapy, and extensive burns. (High stress levels, especially when accumulated over time, and trauma, also play a large role in oxygen depletion.) Operations have an instant draining effect on the C02. Within 24 hours, C02 drops below the danger zone and, according to an MD I know, it can take 50 days or more to make a reasonable recovery. I suggest that (when practical) surgeons put their patients on EWOT before and after surgery, but make sure they test for correlations of UDB and/or overbreathing FIRST.

CANCER loves a low-oxygen environment and so, although chemotherapy and radiation may be killing some cancer cells, they are probably encouraging the growth of more cancer, because these interventions rob the tissues of oxygen. Either the cancer starts growing again or a new type of cancer can start. Perhaps that's why with childhood leukemia, while the leukemia appears to have gone away after chemotherapy, often a new cancer, such as lymphoma, can develop and kill the child.

Because of the known fact that cancer cannot live in a high-oxygen environment, I am convinced that EWOT is one of the better adjunct-therapy choices for most cancers (but not ALL cancers due to lymphatic density and colonic intestinal accumulations/debris, where cancer hides outside of the primary blood system). See also www.breathing.com/articles/cancer.htm.

I can't guarantee OEE's effectiveness on cancer, but I'm still convinced that it works as a preventive and can promote a better environment for cancer recovery. 

PUTTING IT INTO PRACTICE

There are an infinite variety of ways that you can incorporate your home version of EWOT or OEE, so let's talk about some of the nuts and bolts about how to do it. Get a refurbished oxygen concentrator, and use it along with a treadmill or stationary bicycle. I have one I call O2E2 due to its short size and shape. Your initial investment will be about $450, delivered in the continental U.S. Over time, your cost per exercise session will be just pennies.

During OEE, it's a good idea to monitor your heartbeat with a $100.00 pulse oxymeter. If your pulse gets over your age subtracted from 190, you should slow down. (Conventional approaches advise 220 minus your age, but people can drop dead during and after passing a stress test, so I am not keen on 220 heartbeats per minute, and I have arbitrarily lowered my threshold to 190 minus my age.)

Naturally, common sense advises that if you feel faint, you should stop and rest. If you are not sure just how fit you are, or you are a little nervous, just go for two or three minutes at a slow speed the first time and find your level of tolerance, increasing it incrementally. If you are still tired or dizzy, consult your health professional. Actually it is a good idea to consult with your health professional before engaging in any new health program.  Recommended program   Oxygen Concentrators