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A Toddler’s Brain Damage Has Been Reversed Over a Year After Near Drowning

  • July 24, 2017

A series of oxygen treatments has reversed brain damage suffered by a toddler who nearly drowned last year. According to the New York Daily News, the child was under water for 15 minutes and unable to speak, walk or respond to verbal cues when she was revived. The hyperbaric-like treatments provided what doctors called “startling regrowth of tissue” that resulted in her being able to walk and speak even better than before the accident.

Hyperbaric treatments have been in the news lately as supplemental treatments for a variety of health problems. For example, I recently interviewed Dr. Abdul Kadir Slocum from the ChemoThermia Oncology Center in Turkey about his research on combining high-dose vitamin C with a ketogenic diet and hyperbaric oxygen therapy for cancer. It’s a promising field that I look forward to learning more about, in all areas from cancer to drowning.

Since we still have a month of summer left, this is a perfect time to point out that drowning is the second-leading cause of accidental death (second only to motor vehicle accidents) for kids aged 1 to 14. And, since it’s also possible to suffocate from delayed drowning up to 24 hours after leaving the water, if even a small amount of water is inhaled into your lungs, it’s also a good time to list some water safety suggestions.

Three signs of drowning you should be aware of are: 1) Drowning people are usually unable to call for help; 2) and 3) they can only struggle on the surface 20 to 60 seconds before they go under.

With “dry” drowning, a small amount of water is inhaled but symptoms don’t appear until much later. Dry drowning can also occur when no water enters the lungs, but rather a sudden rush of water into the throat (such as might occur from jumping into a pool with your mouth open) causes the airway to shut, causing suffocation.