A treatment once associated with divers is now helping trauma survivors reclaim memory, sleep, and stability
Sarah (name changed) served for more than 20 years in the Israeli Air Force as a combat medic. During that time, she took part in high-level missions that exposed her to extreme situations—from watching people be blown apart to treating the wounded under fire.
In one particularly horrific moment, she was asked to pull apart the body of a mother clinging to her two severely burned children.
Those images stayed with her long after the missions ended. But it was only after she retired that the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) began to surface.
In the years that followed, Sarah trained as a nurse practitioner and joined an intensive care unit. The high-pressure environment appears to have triggered the delayed onset of her PTSD, bringing it fully to the surface.
Suddenly, Sarah, now a mother, struggled with basic daily tasks. She became irritable, her morale dropped, and she described an overwhelming sense of shame. She stopped eating meat because she could not bring herself to pull chicken off the bone. She began experiencing flashbacks and nightmares, especially of the burned children. She also suffered from mild depression, severe anxiety, sleep disturbances, and heightened hyperarousal.
Eventually, she was forced to leave her job, and her husband pushed her to seek help. She tried talk therapy and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, but neither provided relief. At 60 years old, she was referred to the Aviv Clinic with what had become treatment-resistant PTSD.
Sarah was offered hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT. According to her case, published in 2024 by an Israeli medical team in Annals of Case Reports, her nightmares stopped during the course of treatment, and she began to recall happier memories from earlier in her life.
Over time, she reported a growing sense of peace. Three months after completing HBOT, Read more Full article