Common misconceptions about oxygen inhalation

1. Oxygen is only needed when you are sick.

Life is inseparable from oxygen. According to the aging time of human organs due to hypoxia, the brain begins to age before the age of 30, and the heart will suffer from frequent diseases after the age of 40. The lungs are the weaker organs of the human body, which begin to age at the age of 20, accelerate the ageing at the age of 40. And the kidneys age at the age of 40. The skin tissue gradually ages after the age of 25, and the bones begin to age at the age of 35. Oxygen ensures normal metabolism of organs, and chronic hypoxia leads to accelerated aging of organs.

Every disease has a developmental process. Every moment of this process is accompanied by the damage of hypoxia to the body. Some damages are often irreversible, and the patient's body has a great compensatory function. Activating this compensatory function has a considerable effect on the body's recovery and improving the quality of life, which is why doctors recommend patients to inhale oxygen. Therefore, the decline of lung function means that the oxygen supply to the whole body is reduced, so the sooner people use an oxygen concentrator, then body will change better.

Now many patients have just been discharged from the hospital or after surgery and insist on taking oxygen every day for a period of time, and their body will recover better. After the body is damaged, its metabolism is abnormal, and it takes a long time for the body to recover. Especially for diseases that need to correct the hypoxia state, it is necessary to insist on oxygen inhalation in an early and timely manner. Continue to inhale oxygen until symptoms are relieved and disappear, but also maintain oxygen to consolidate.

2. Oxygen inhalation can cause oxygen toxicity.

At present, molecular sieve household oxygen concentrators with more than 90% oxygen concentration basically rely on nasal oxygen tubes or oxygen masks to inhale oxygen, which belongs to open-style oxygen inhalation. That is when a person inhale oxygen through the concentrator, in addition to inhaling oxygen, they also inhale some air. The oxygen concentration that actually reaches the alveoli is the oxygen concentration after mixing with air, which is the inspired oxygen concentration. The formula for inspired oxygen concentration and oxygen concentration is Inhaled oxygen concentration = 21 + 4 * oxygen flow. The ideal indicator for normal lung function is that 5L oxygen flow with an inspired oxygen concentration of more than 90%, and the actual inspired oxygen concentration is 41%.

In fact, in patients with pulmonary function disease, the inspired oxygen concentration is about 28--35%. Therefore, the respiratory doctor told the patient to insist on inhaling oxygen at home after discharge, adjust the flow rate to 1.5--3L, and the oxygen concentration is about 30%, which refers to the household 5L oxygen concentrator. To sum up, it can also be seen that the oxygen concentrator with 1L and 2L flow has no actual therapeutic value. That is only suitable for maintaining good health. More than 3L oxygen flow has therapeutic value, especially for patients with lung disease, only 5L or even more than 5L oxygen flow can achieve the effect of oxygen therapy, and there is no possibility of oxygen poisoning.

3. Oxygen inhalation will be addictive and dependent.

Oxygen inhalation will not produce dependence, there will be adaptability. And there is a qualitative difference between them. What is a dependency? Dependence in medicine refers to the dependence of a certain drug, especially drugs that act on the nervous system, which are more likely to produce dependence, including both mental dependence and physical dependence. The so-called mental dependence refers to the patient's abnormal thirst for the addictive drug, so as to obtain the abnormal pleasure after taking the drug. The so-called physical dependence refers to a certain pathophysiological change in the nervous system after a patient takes a certain drug repeatedly, so that the drug needs to persist in the body in order to avoid withdrawal symptoms caused by drug withdrawal.

Healthy oxygen inhalation or hospital oxygen therapy obviously do not meet the above conditions, and the reasons are as follows:

*Oxygen is not a medicine;

*Oxygen is a gas that the human body needs to continuously ingest from the air for a long time during its lifetime;

*The symptoms of hypoxia that need to be relieved by oxygen inhalation do not bring any abnormal pleasure;

*We can't expect that the symptoms of oxygen inhalation will be gone once, and the previous symptoms that appear after the oxygen inhalation is stopped are actually the manifestation of hypoxia, not withdrawal symptoms.

What is adaptability?

People living in a certain altitude environment for a long time will adapt to the oxygen content in the air there. Suddenly changing an oxygen environment will cause discomfort in a short period of time, just like people living in the mainland suddenly go to the plateau, or people living in the plateau suddenly come to the mainland, there will be a process of oxygen adaptation. This kind of adaptation is qualitatively different from dependence, and it is also different from the addiction or dependence of general drugs, which usually adapts gradually over time.

Oxygen therapy does not have drugs entering the human body. Inhalation of oxygen directly increases the oxygen content of arterial blood, changes the hypoxic state of the human body, and restores and accelerates the metabolism of organs, so oxygen inhalation does not create addiction or dependence.

4. People subconsciously do not accept oxygen inhalation.

This kind of psychology is more common in middle-aged people and young people. When it comes to oxygen inhalation, they feel that they are about to die before they take oxygen for first aid. Some people think that they are sick when they mention oxygen inhalation. These cognitions are actually ignorance of oxygen therapy. The benefits of oxygen therapy are everywhere, even in the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology for the important award of oxygen therapy in the intervention of oxygen therapy in cancer symptoms. The COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 of respiratory oxygen therapy has pushed the benefits of oxygen therapy to the highlight.