How Could Oxygen Healing Gels Help Your Pets?

If you are shopping for supplements and creams to help your pet manage or mitigate health issues, you may have stumbled upon different oxygen healing rubs. Read on to learn more about these products and how they could potentially help your pet.

How Do These Healing Rubs Work?

Oxygen supply is important for wound healing as it helps cells make protein and it helps tissue make granulated tissue, or new tissue, during wound healing. Proper oxygen supply is important to prevent infection during wound healing. There are different delivery methods for oxygen therapies, like in-office hyperbaric chambers, IV Ozone therapy, or oxygen-infused salves. With oxygen healing rubs, oxygen atoms are infused in the salve and react as they come into contact with diseased or inflamed tissue. For instance, healthy cells are surrounded by enzymatic coatings, while viruses and bacteria have no coating. The oxygen atoms won't hurt healthy cells because of this coating, but they can penetrate bacteria and viruses and disrupt their reproductive cycles.

What Could These Healing Rubs Treat?

There are different oxygen healing rubs on the market, so you will have to look at different suppliers' products to get a breakdown of what can or can't be treated. Over-the-counter healing gels could be used to treat:

• Cysts
• Skin yeast/fungus
• Dermatitis
• Scars
• Strains/sprain swelling
• Joint or muscle pain
• Itching from insect bites/hot spots

Your vet may even use certain types of oxygen healing rubs for certain wound dressings.  

What Do Studies Say?

In one study, researchers were looking for ways to help horses with guttural pouch mycosis, which is a type of fungal infection. As long as a horse didn't have epistaxis (a hemorrhage from the nasal cavity) or any lesions over major arteries, topical oxygen therapy could be used to reverse the fungal infection. If a horse had other complications, topical oxygen gels could still be used with other interventions to improve inflammatory lesions.

Another study looked at topical oxygen therapy for pigs to see if these dressings would help animals who'd undergone skin-flap surgery. Flaps that were treated with the oxygen dressing seemed to have fewer clinical failures, which could suggest that increasing oxygen supply could improve overall wound healing. Inflammation, bacterial infections, ischemia (inadequate blood supply), and scar tissue are all possible complications of poor healing, so dissolved oxygen dressings could potentially mitigate these issues.  

These types of studies may be looking at different oxygen healing rubs that are used by veterinarians; so again, it's important that you look at different supplier products to see what a specific healing rub can or can't do for your pet. Reach out to a local company for more information, like Derm Creations.