Dive company brings decompression to dry land

WASILLA -- Bogard Road seems like the wrong place for a company that specializes in tug-boat operations, at-sea spill response, and underwater construction to set up shop.

American Marine had offices in Anchorage, Los Angeles, and Honolulu and before coming to Wasilla. The typical American Marine client owns an oil platform, a fishing boat, or very a large dock.

It might seem unlikely that such a company would open an office an hour from the nearest port, install a $250,000 machine and make plans to train and employ a dozen people. It would be unlikely, if not for the company's move into the health care -- specifically into hyperbaric medicine, an area in which American Marine's expertise in diving operations can be applied to dry land.

"Hyperbaric medicine is no longer an alternative medicine, it's in the mainstream now," said Jim Thompson, American Marine's supervisor of hyperbarics. Thompson is in charge of getting the Valley operation going.

Hyperbaric medicine has been documented as far back as the1660s, when a British physician named Henshaw treated patients by having them breathe compressed air inside a chamber he called a domicilium. Since Henshaw, medicine has alternately embraced and rejected hyperbaric chambers as a tool for healing. Some hyperbaric devotees were treated as dangerous quacks while others installed large chambers in hospitals so surgery could be performed in a pressurized operating room.

In the 1930s and 40s, deep-sea divers found that hyperbaric chambers similar to Henshaw's domicilium were the only safe way to treat aereoembolism, or the bends, a condition caused by rapid decompression when a diver rises to the surface too quickly and nitrogen bubbles form in their blood. Naval researchers around the world took to hyperbaric chambers fast and they have become a mainstay of diving safety.

"If a diver got hurt at 140 feet, you'd take him back down to 140 in the chamber," Thompson said. The diver is then brought "up" to normal surface air pressure slowly, using valves on the chamber to decompress the air inside.

Thompson said natural air is approximately 79 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen, with minute proportions of other molecules. When the body is under higher-than-normal pressure, oxygen is more efficiently absorbed by blood and tissue cells. The leftover nitrogen, which ought to be on it's way out of the body, becomes dangerous -- even fatal -- when a diver decompresses too quickly.

During the 1940s, the U.S. Navy added pure oxygen to it's decompression procedures. The air inside American Marine's hyperbaric chamber in Wasilla is regular air, but the chamber is equipped with an oxygen mask so the patient can breathe pure oxygen while in the pressurized chamber. There is a narrow bed for the patient, and room for three more people. One American Marine technician always accompanies the patient, and two more technicians run the controls outside the chamber.

Over the last decade, hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) therapy has been adopted by some doctors to treat a range of conditions, from smoke inhalation to burns to diabetic foot and leg ulcers. Physical therapists have started to use the chambers for sprains, claiming that breathing pure oxygen under pressure helps speed the body's natural healing process.

The chamber in Wasilla is capable of simulating depths of 225 feet, but Thompson said most medical treatments use far less pressure.

"For people that are getting wound care, their treatment depths are much less," he said, "sometimes people get pressurized in airplanes as much as they do with some [of our] treatment protocols."

Thompson said that Medicaid and Medicare approve of the therapy for 14 different diagnoses, and many private insurance companies are recognizing HBO therapy as well. He cautioned, however, that HBO is "not a miracle cure" and that American Marine only works with patients who have a doctor's prescription.

With the medical establishment seemingly a few steps behind, the dive company is in the position of offering a technology that most physicians have yet to adopt.

"There are a select few physicians who are on the cutting edge of this technology," Thompson said, adding that American medical schools only recently started to teach the HBO therapy applications.

This doesn't bother Thompson. He said the company plans to install two more chambers in Wasilla. American Marine also has an agreement with Valley Hospital, that will give the company access to doctors and patients as the technology becomes more popular. Thompson said the 12 jobs his operation provides are just a start.

"In Australia, it's commonly used during follow-up physical therapy for back injuries, and there will be more positions for physical therapists out here once they start using it for that," Thompson said. "It's just a matter of time."