After daughter’s Lyme Disease healed, Bonifay family builds hyperbaric chamber for community

Excerpted from WJHG.com  ( Posted: 10/06/2010 )

Bonifay – As more and more young people in Northwest Florida contract lyme disease, one family in Bonifay are fighting back by opening a hyperbaric oxygen center in Holmes County. They say those type of treatments helped heal their daughter.

Bonifay – The medical community used to believe lyme disease did not exist below the Mason-Dixon line. But the high number of young people in Northwest Florida who have recently contracted the disease has proven that theory very wrong.

The illness is caused by lyme bacteria which is carried by deer ticks. Once infected, the bacteria hides in the body, making the complex disease very difficult to diagnose. A Bonifay family impacted by the disease, is taking a big step to help others find the same healing their daughter did.

Today Megan Guthrie is a thriving 25-year-old. Her story was very different 3 years ago. “She went from a vibrant young teenager to a bed-ridden young adult and it was heart wrenching,” said Melea Flanary, Megan’s aunt. For months Megan went from doctor to doctor trying to figure out where her painful symptoms were coming from. “I had MRI after MRI, cat-scan after cat-scan, they could not figure out what was going on,” said Megan.

Because lyme disease mimics other illnesses it’s often misdiagnosed as fibromylgia, MS or ALS. “I finally had the right test done and I tested positive for the lyme bacteria. I was on antibiotics for 2.5 years and still I wasn’t getting anywhere,” said Megan. That’s when she went online and found Robert Sand’s clinic in San Diego.

The first person to open an outpatient hyperbaric oxygen center in the US, Sands credits the power of oxygen for saving thousands of patients. He is the founder and CEO of Healing Chambers International. “I call oxygen God’s gunpowder, we give all those little white blood cells a big boost. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy actually, at the correct pressure, actually produces something that everybody thinks are bad…free radicals. Free radicals are good if you are sick. You need them because your body actually uses them as poisons to kill bugs. Once they’ve killed the bugs, your body comes along and scavenges them all and gets rid of them.”


~ by Rob on October 8, 2010.

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