Cristiano Ronaldo Uses HBOT to Speed Up Knee Injury Recovery
Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid has underwent Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) in a clinic, during holiday in Ibiza, to speed up the recovery of his knee injury, as per a report in the journal Marca.
Ronaldo sustained the injury after challenge from Dimitri Payet of France, early on during Euro 2016 final on July 10 at Paris. The Portugal captain tried to continue, but soon was stretched off in pain. However, he came back for supporting his team from the touchline during the extra time, and then came to lift the trophy following Eder’s late winner.
Neither Madrid nor Portuguese FA have confirmed the degree of the injury. However, a strain in ligament in Ronaldo’s left knee has been reported, because of which he would miss the whole preseason programme of his club, including UEFA Super Cup that’s against Sevilla on August 9 in Trondheim.
Ronaldo is currently on holiday at Ibiza and his luxury yacht was found close to the one of Lionel Messi of Barcelona. As per reports, Ronaldo has paid visits to the Clinica Evidental twice. It’s a dental clinical and also offers Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) as an added service, as per Marca.
The story of Marca about the visit states that Ronaldo inhales pure oxygen under high pressure within a hermetically sealed chamber called hyperbaric chamber. This boosts the level of oxygen in the blood, allowing faster healing of an injury, although there isn’t any real clinical evidence yet proving that it’s actually useful.
An unnamed spokesperson of the clinic said Marca that hyperbaric medicine stimulates recovery from injury and regeneration of tissues. In this way, the therapy reduces the risks of physical deterioration or future injury. HBOT quickens the recovery time. The treatment is today one among the highly effective complementary therapies for injury recovery.
If Ronaldo misses the matches of Madrid against Bayern Munich, Chelsea, and Paris Saint-Germain at the time of their U.S. tour, and doesn’t play against Sevilla too, he would not participate in any pre-season games prior to the beginning of the La Liga campaign.
Ronaldo has sustained several knee issues in the past. He suffered from a tendonitis problem at the time of the 2014 World Cup and the 2013–14 club campaign, which posed a risk for his career. However, more recently, that problem appears to have eased.
What is HBOT?
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) is a treatment option in which 100% oxygen is administered at a pressure greater than 1 ATA. To carry out the therapy, the patient is placed in a monoplace or multiplace chamber, and usually a pressure of 1.5–3.0 ATA is applied to the vessels. The duration for the therapy ranges from 60 to 120 minutes, and it’s carried out about once or twice per day. In a monoplace chamber, an individual inhales oxygen from the chamber directly. In a multiplace chamber, oxygen is supplied to an individual through a mask.
At a pressure of 2.0 ATA, the oxygen content in blood is increased about 2.5%. Adequate oxygen gets dissolved in the plasma so as to fulfill the tissue needs while haemoglobin-bound oxygen is absent, raising the tissue oxygen tensions about 10-fold (1000%). The thing to note is that HBOT is free from any unfavorable side effects. Problems like confinement anxiety, middle ear barotrauma, and oxygen toxicity are controlled well with proper pre-exposure measures.
An individual should undergo HBOT only after the approval from a qualified medical practitioner. The therapy is administered under the supervision of an authorized healthcare provider.
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy is used by several eminent sportspersons to quicken healing as well as improve overall health and fitness. Other than healing sports injuries fast, HBOT works as an effective treatment for many conditions — thermal burns, carbon monoxide poisoning, gas or air embolism, decompression sickness, diabetic wounds, exceptional loss of blood (anemia), intracranial abscess and more.
