"Sports Medicine Scams"

Many people in the Santa Cruz region are familiar with and use alternative medical therapies. Most of these therapies have little research to support their use, yet remain popular with the general public. At C.O.A.S.T. Rehab Services, we consider it a priority and part of our mission to provide our patients and the public with accurate and up to date information, especially as it pertains to health and sports. We understand that conventional medicine doesn't appeal to everyone and that alternative therapies can be very beneficial. The more (accurate) information made available, the better able people are to make decisions regarding their therapy.

                A recent article in The Sporting News discussed the use of Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber therapy. Some professional teams and training centers use these devices in the belief that healing time (of an injury) can be significantly shortened. Several professional hockey teams used hyperbaric oxygen therapy (pregame doses) a decade ago, with near disastrous results, because they believed it would enhance performance. Hyperbaric oxygen is a mode of therapy in which the patient breathes 100% oxygen at pressures greater than normal atmospheric (sea level) pressure. During treatment a patient sits in a closed chamber that is filled with pure oxygen at high pressure, usually for several hours. The healing power of pressurized oxygen has long been acknowledged for deep sea divers suffering from "the bends" and for other emergency infections and injuries treated in a hospital. But, the FDA has not approved the use of hyperbaric oxygen for the treatment of sports injuries, neurological conditions such as cerebral palsy, MS, migraine and strokes, or other illnesses such as cancer and AIDS----the targeted patient population of these scam artists. In fact, there are no sound, valid scientific studies that support that use. Beyond the questionable therapeutic value, there are potentially deadly dangers in hyperbaric therapy (seizure, fire). Emergencies are difficult to deal with because it takes several minutes to decompress the chamber before anyone can open the hatch to help the patient. For this and other reasons, the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS) has a well-established recommendation that hyperbaric chambers should be hospital-based.

                Magnet therapy is the latest rage among athletes, who claim it reduces pain and muscle soreness. It involves wearing small, static magnetic disks or sleeping on magnetic mattress pads. These magnets are very different from medical devices that produce pulsed electromagnetic fields which have been demonstrated effective for treating fractures. In fact, almost all of these magnetic disks produce no significant magnetic field at or beneath the skin's surface. The FDA has recently been investigating the claims being made by the companies that market these magnets, since magnetic disks have not been approved by the FDA for those purposes (that magnets can cure, treat, or mitigate any disease or can affect any change in the human body). To avoid trouble with the FDA, most suppliers emphasize only "comfort" and usually specifically state "no medical claims are made". Many magnetic therapy products have alternating arrays of north and south poles (multipolar) facing the patient. The "reach" (penetration) of this magnetic field is weak---a few millimeters at best. The mechanism most commonly offered for various therapeutic effects of magnets is improved blood circulation, despite a clear lack of evidence for such an effect (and despite the fact that blood is not magnetic). At present, we have no good reason to believe that magnets have any more healing power than crystals or copper bracelets.