Oxygen Upside Down

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Ray Peat (“Altitude and Mortality,” 2006) wrote …

“Breathing pure oxygen lowers the oxygen content of tissues; breathing rarefied air, or air with carbon dioxide, oxygenates and energizes the tissues; if this seems upside down, it’s because medical physiology has been taught upside down.”

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Achilles Rose, M.D. (Carbonic Acid in Medicine, 1905) wrote …

“Paul Bert found that animals placed in pure oxygen under a pressure of three atmospheres, or in ordinary atmospheric air under a pressure of fifteen atmospheres, have convulsions and quickly perish; whence it would appear that oxygen at high tension is inimical to life.

“This oxygen intoxication is characterized by an extraordinary reduction of the consumption of oxygen and by the formation of carbonic acid. All organisms, animal as well as vegetable, succumb alike. Even seeds of plants which in general are possessed of great power of resistance lose for a certain time, when exposed to oxygen under high pressure, their germinative power. Oxygen exerts a deleterious effect on the different organisms when they are exposed to it for a greater length of time, even at a tension far below the one which kills quickly. Bert observed that the development of eggs and the metamorphosis of insects were injured by a long stay in pure oxygen under ordinary pressure. When we inhale pure oxygen its consumption and the formation of carbonic acid become diminished. The deleterious effects of excess of oxygen and overaccumulation of carbonic acid when occurring together cause an animal to perish even when neither of the two gases by itself is present in a dangerous dose.”

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My “best friend forever” George Wellington Adams was an expert on hyperbaric medicine, but he missed the memo about the dangers of pure oxygen.

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Yes, Carbonic Acid in Medicine *IS* the book Ray Peat mentioned on One Radio Network.

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Paul Bert (1833-1886) is known as the “Father of Aviation Medicine.”

Oxygen toxicity is sometimes referred to as the “Paul Bert effect.”

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Paul Bert’s research also touched upon “innate immunity.”

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William Ernest Castle (Genetics and Eugenics, 1916) wrote …

“Paul Bert, many years ago, attempted to acclimatize some Daphniae (small fresh-water crustacea) to salt water by gradually adding salt to the aquarium. At the end of forty-five days, when the water contained 1.5 per cent of salt all the adults had died; but the eggs in their brood-chambers survived, and the new generation arising from these flourished well in the salt medium. This case has been cited as a case of inherited modification, but such it clearly is not, because the parents did not succeed in becoming acclimatized; they died without becoming modified sufficiently to exist in the salt water. But their egg-cells did become so modified, and the animals developing out of them were acclimatized, through direct response to the environment, not through inheritance.”
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