Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
A Salt Lake hospital is using a new hyperbaric chamber that goes both ways. In other words, it can take folks below sea level or higher than Mount Everest.
Intermountain Medical Center is up and running now, but two years ago, while it was still under construction, we saw the beginnings of something rather unique. A $1.2 million steel chamber was lifted into its new home on a special weight-bearing floor. The finished product is a pressurized oxygen room nicely bundled so you can hardly tell it's there.
It is one of the few rectangular-shaped chambers in the country. It's bigger, more comfortable than what you may expect. In fact, it's like walking into a room in a house, enabling patients to stay a long time, if necessary.
Lindell Weaver, M.D., director of hyperbaric medicine, said, "This is not only hyperbaric, meaning increased pressure, it's also hypobaric, it will go to altitude."
That means the chamber can take its occupants down as far as 99 feet below sea level, if needed, to speed up the healing of wounds or treat carbon monoxide poisoning. Or it can go the other way, to simulate conditions up to an altitude of 30,000 feet.
Going up opens a new door for research. For example, are people living at higher altitudes more susceptible to sleep disorders? Researchers would start at sea level. "And then could take that patient, while monitoring sleep, to whatever altitude we have interest. We could bring them back to this altitude and go to 8,000 feet to 10,000 feet," Weaver said.
It could also be used to help a patient with heart disease who wants to know if a plane flight might aggravate their condition. "We can take them to an aircraft altitude of 8,000 feet and simulate the aircraft flight for two or three hours while monitoring them," Weaver said.
Athletes in training could even go inside to test their endurance at different altitudes. The list goes on.
The unique rectangular-shaped chamber was built in Australia. It was among the first of its kind to be delivered to the United States.
E-mail: eyeates@ksl.com
