You wouldn’t know anything was wrong with Danny Morales just by looking at him. He walks fine, talks fine, seems perfectly normal when you meet him at the coffee shop near his Phoenix apartment. But ask him about his grocery list from yesterday, and he’ll give you this sheepish grin.
“Hell if I know,” he says, stirring sugar into his coffee. “That’s the thing about getting your bell rung by an IED—nobody sees the damage, but it’s there.”
Morales got hurt in Fallujah back in ’06. A roadside bomb flipped his convoy vehicle. His buddies walked away with cuts and bruises. He walked away with what doctors eventually called a traumatic brain injury (TBI), though it took months of testing to figure that out.
The thing is, there are thousands of guys like Morales. The Defense Department’s got numbers showing more than 450,000 troops have been tagged with some kind of brain injury since 2000. That’s a lot of people stumbling through life with busted wiring upstairs.
Which makes what happened this year pretty significant. The VA, not exactly known for moving fast on anything, decided to start covering something called hyperbaric oxygen therapy for vets dealing with TBI symptoms that won’t quit.
Up until now, if you were a veteran with lingering brain injury problems, your options were pretty limited. The VA would try you on medications, maybe some cognitive therapy, and possibly counseling. When those didn’t work, which was often, you were basically told to deal with it and learn to live with it.
Some people started paying their own way for this oxygen therapy at private clinics.
The new policy means if you’ve got mild to moderate TBI and the regular treatments aren’t cutting it, the VA will actually pay for hyperbaric sessions.
The good news? This policy started rolling out earlier this year, should be everywhere by next year.
It didn’t happen overnight, though. Groups like the TreatNOW Coalition have been raising hell about this for years. The VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) jumped on board, too. They kept feeding with research studies and veteran testimonies in front of anyone who’d listen until somebody finally paid attention.
Picture a clear tube big enough to lie down in, kind of like an MRI machine, but see-through.
You breathe pure oxygen while they apply more atmospheric pressure inside.
The idea is that your blood carries way more oxygen than normal, which supposedly helps damaged brain tissue repair itself.
It’s not a new technology. Hospitals have used these chambers for decades to treat nasty non-healing wounds and ulcers, carbon monoxide poisoning, and many other such things.
But, using it for brain injuries is the newer angle!
The treatment usually means 40 to 80 sessions, roughly an hour each time. So you’re looking at several weeks of appointments, which is bothersome, but nevertheless doable if it actually helps.
The research is starting to back this up, too. A study that came out in 2021 observed the war veterans who underwent oxygen therapy, showing improvements in crucial cognitive metrics, including memory, focus, and decision-making.
Another study in 2022 found “moderate to strong effects” for long-term TBI symptoms.
It makes sense when you think about it. More oxygen means better blood flow, less swelling, and maybe faster healing in the brain areas that got scrambled.
Before this change, dealing with TBI treatment was incredibly difficult for war veterans.
Dr. Sarah Klein has been treating veterans in Denver for twelve years. She expresses how frustrating it was: “We’d exhaust our usual options pretty quickly,” she says. “Then what? Tell them to meditate more? It was awful having so few tools to work with.”
The geographic lottery made it worse. If you happened to live near Oklahoma or Texas, you might get into one of their pilot programs. Everyone else was left to fate’s chance unless they could afford private treatment.
Take Marcus Webb, an Army mechanic who got caught in a mortar attack in Iraq in 2008. He spent years dealing with headaches that wouldn’t quit, and what he calls “brain static” made it difficult to focus on anything for more than a few minutes.
“My wife would give me simple tasks and I’d mess them up,” Webb says. “Felt like I was disappointing everyone all the time.”
He finally scraped together money for oxygen therapy at a clinic in Dallas. Sixty sessions later, the fog started lifting. “Wasn’t like flipping a switch, but I could think straight again.”
Compare that to Linda Martinez, a Marine veteran who asked about hyperbaric therapy at her VA hospital in 2019, only to get told it was experimental, and hence, not covered. She was sent away and was told that it was a fake medicine.
“It made me feel like an idiot for even asking,” she remembers. Now she’s getting treatment through the same VA facility. “Wish I’d pushed harder back then, but at least it’s happening now.”
Let’s be practical and real. This isn’t some miracle cure-all, and getting it started everywhere won’t be smooth.
This is because most VA hospitals don’t have these pressure chambers.
Some doctors are still skeptical, too. But we can’t really blame them. Instead, we need to use bigger studies with lots of patients followed for years to really showcase how well this works and who would benefit exactly from this.
Then there’s the practical stuff. These treatment schedules eat up time. If you’re working full-time or live an hour from the nearest clinic, fitting in 60 appointments becomes a real challenge. Transportation, childcare, missing work, et al. It all adds up fast.
But when you’ve been dealing with TBI symptoms for years and running out of options, these problems seem manageable.
Tom Rivers used to be a Colonel, but now advocates with TreatNOW. He puts it simply: “We’re not promising magic bullets here. But we’re finally giving people a real shot at getting better instead of just telling them to cope better.”
This could ripple out beyond just veterans. As more people see results from oxygen therapy, civilian hospitals might start taking it seriously for other brain injury patients. We are talking about people like cops, firefighters, athletes, and car crash victims.
Scientists are poking around with whether it might help PTSD, long COVID brain fog, early dementia symptoms.
It’s true, the brain’s complicated as hell, but oxygen therapy seems to have moved beyond what we first thought.
The advocacy groups aren’t backing off either. They want more research money, standardized treatment protocols, the whole nine yards. Make this less of a crapshoot and more of a reliable medical intervention.
If you’re a war veteran still dealing with TBI symptoms, start with your regular VA doctor or neurologist. They’ll need to document that you’ve tried the standard treatments without enough improvement before they can refer you to a brain injury specialist.
That specialist looks at your specific symptoms, medical history, and current situation to decide if you’re a good candidate. It’s not an automatic approval, but it’s a real pathway that didn’t exist before.
Availability’s all over the map right now. Some VA hospitals have their own hyperbaric chambers, while others work with outside providers. Your care team should know what’s available locally and help coordinate everything.
The good news is there’s no time limit. Whether you got hurt last year or fifteen years ago, if symptoms are still troubling your life, you might qualify.
This policy change is about more than just adding another treatment option. It’s acknowledging that invisible wounds deserve the same attention and resources as the ones you can see. It validates what veterans have been saying for years about their ongoing symptoms being real and debilitating.
Morales, the guy from the beginning, finished his oxygen therapy sessions a few months back.
“I’m not gonna pretend I’m completely back to my old self,” he says. “But I can function again. I can be present for my kids. That’s everything to me.”
For families watching their loved ones struggle with the TBI aftermath, this expansion offers something that’s been scarce: genuine hope backed by institutional support.
The VA’s still got work to do on implementation and access, but this is real progress. Sometimes the system moves slowly, but when it moves in the right direction, it can change thousands of lives.
How do I get started with HBOT through the VA? Talk to your regular VA doctor or neurologist first. They need to document your TBI history and previous treatments before referring you to a specialist.
Can I get this at any VA hospital? Not yet. They’re still expanding access, and some places work with outside clinics. Your care team will know what’s available in your area.
Will this replace my current TBI treatments? Nope, it gets added to what you’re already doing when other treatments aren’t helping enough. Think addition, not replacement.
I got injured years ago—can I still qualify? Yeah, there’s no deadline. If TBI symptoms are still troubling your daily life, you might qualify regardless of when you got hurt.
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