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Is Ozone Therapy Therapeutic?
- Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 42, Number 1, Autumn 1998
- pp. 131-143
- 10.1353/pbm.1998.0056
- Article
- Additional Information
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IS OZONE THERAPY THERAPEUTIC? VELIO BOCCI* Introduction Almost everyone knows that ozone located in the stratosphere protects the earth from excessive ultraviolet irradiation but, when present in the troposphere, it harms humans, animals, and plants [1, 2]. Ozone is a kind ofvery reactive superoxygen (the triatomic form). A strong oxidant, when it is inhaled with other acidic pollutants it is toxic for the lungs, mostly because the lining fluid of the airway surface is unable to neutralize the nasty mixture contaminating the air [13]. Thus, there is a great concern on the one hand for the thinning or presence of holes in the stratospheric ozone layer and, on the other, for the increasing concentration of ozone in the streets of large cities like Los Angeles and Firenze. Even inanimate but precious statues exposed to the offending environment suffer and lose their ancient splendor. The concern about human health and forest decline is so high that every week the interested reader can find several articles in the current scientific literature dealing with the problem of ozone toxicity. In contrast, the therapeutic use of ozone in human and veterinary medicine is hardly mentioned, if not purposefully avoided. Indeed, some people are surprised to hear that ozone, if it is used in judicious and well-defined amounts, can be beneficial in some human diseases where orthodox medicine fails to be so. Unfortunately, the ozone-therapeutic approach in Western countries is discredited, because it too often has been performed in an empirical, often unscrupulous, fashion by practitioners who do not know the basic mechanisms of action and think naively that the human body can be treated as a water sterilization plant. The skepticism regarding the biological and clinical effects ofozone therapy is not altogether unjustified, and it arises either from the awareness of ozone toxicity or from the scanty The author wishes to thank Mrs. Helen Carter for linguistic revision and Mrs. Patrizia Marrocchesi for carefully editing the manuscript. This work has been partially supported by MURST national (40 percent) and local (60 percent) funds. ""Institute of General Physiology, University of Siena, Via Laterina 8, 53100 Siena, Italy.© 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/98/4201-1083$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 42, 1 ¦ Autumn 1998 131 and poor scientific documentation [4] . There is also an incomprehensible refusal to accept the therapy, despite the fact that ozone therapy is performed each year in several hundred thousand patients around the world, mostly in Russia, Poland, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Belgium , Brazil, Cuba, and—last but not least—in five states in the United States. In other countries, ozone therapy remains in a sort of limbo. However , in 1995 the Office of Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health wisely classified ozone therapy among the pharmacological and biological treatments and welcomed serious investigations. Thus, as often happens for complementary medical approaches, there is a contrasting situation : on one side the believers consider ozone therapy a wonderful remedy , and, on the other, orthodox medicine does not even want to critically examine its activity. Who Is Right and Who Is Wrong? I believe that both schools of thought are partly right and partly wrong and that the time has come to open a dialogue. It appears important to emphasize at once that ozone therapy ought to be used onlywhen orthodox medicine is unable to offer a valid treatment. Moreover, some practical reservations remain, and I am not at all sure that ozone therapy will be able to acquire a stable position in the medical armamentarium until appropriate investigations are carried out. My perplexity is born out by a number of problems that need to be solved. First, in spite ofgolden rules released by the International Ozone Association , it remains doubtful if all manufacturers of medical ozone generators adhere strictly to them, with the resulting risk that the delivery of precise concentrations of ozone may vary in different or even in the same country. Ozone is generated by using pure oxygen that always remains the bulk of the gas mixture. Ozone can be regarded as the active drug, and as such it must be produced and used in a reproducible...