Giuseppina Benincasa Feingold, MD | HBOT Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy | BART Foundation

Dr. Jo Feingold shares her personal story of becoming and HBOT practitioner. Her daughter, born with profound CP, attained remarkable growth and achievement through the use of HBOT.

To learn more about HBOT, the BART Foundation and the vetted resources the foundation curates please visit our website at:

https://www.thebartfoundation.org


Full Transcription:

I got into hyperbaric oxygen therapy mostly because of my daughter, actually only because of my daughter. My second pregnancy was a child who had brain damage at birth and we were not sure where she would end up when she was born. They told me that she could be anywhere between mild developmental delay to a complete vegetative state and that was about it. And I took her home. She was not progressing at all. And by the time that she was three and a half, she could say maybe 30 words that were comprehensible only to the immediate family. She had severe drooling, could not sit unsupported. And basically that was our life. And so when somebody suggested to me that I should take my daughter to do hyperbaric oxygen therapy, I thought they had two heads. I thought I knew it all. I was a pediatrician, my husband was a pediatrician, and both of us knew what we were doing. And this person from my hometown continued to bother my mother about it until one time he said, "I'll pay for it, if you just take her."

And so I said, "Okay, there's got to be something to this." And so we treated her and she was ... Lisa was part of the one study that was being conducted at Cornell New York Hospital. And I remember calling the neurologist and saying to her, "Look, I have a big house, five kids, one who's handicapped, and two jobs. If this is all snake oil, let me know because I won't do it." And she said, "I started out trying to prove that it was snake oil and I've become convinced that it does work." So I treated my daughter and she had her first 40 treatments in 1999 and then once I saw that she started to talk, I took her for another 80 treatments. So she did 120 treatments between December of '99 and June of 2000 and by that time she could speak in sentences and was toilet trained night and day.

So that's how I got into it. Once I saw the results that we had with my daughter, I became really disillusioned with medicine because I said, "Wait a minute. If I would have treated her three years ago, who knows where she would have ended up?" And now here's my daughter who still doesn't sit unsupported. And I said, "We have to be able to give her more treatments." So I sold my house and I bought my first chamber, and that's when I met Bart. And his history was that he was involved in a motor vehicle accident. He had severe traumatic brain injury, and the parents just really were desperate to find something that would help. He was not verbal, he was walking, but needed maximal assistance. He was not making eye contact. And basically that was one of the first things we started to see. Eye contact and speech. And he was my first TBI that I treated, and the results were amazing. I think it's a form of therapy, which is safe and it can have a profound effect on someone suffering from TBI.