Topical Oxygen Therapy: What Clinicians Should Know

Hi, I am Dr. Windy Cole. I'm the Director of Wound Care Research at Kent State University College of Podiatric Medicine. I'm also the National Director of Clinical Education, Safety and Quality for Woundtech.

Well, I think as clinicians, wound care, podiatry, whatever our focus is, we need to really stay abreast of new and innovative technologies that can benefit our patients and a wide variety of patients. I think topical oxygen is one of these disruptive technologies that has the ability to affect patient outcomes. 

So it really does have a wide variety of uses, which is great. When you have a new technology, the more patients that you could treat with it, the better, in my opinion. And really, any patient that suffers with a chronic non-healing wound that hasn't seen success, I should say, with our standard of care therapies, topical oxygen therapy as an adjunctive product, it can be beneficial. So really all stalled, non-healing chronic wounds of all etiologies can benefit from topical oxygen therapy.

Yeah. I have to say I'm not alone in this. All of us were looking for really innovative ways to treat patients during the pandemic, and I had a particularly difficult patient case. This particular patient had a biopsy diagnosed calciphylaxis wound. She was on the kidney transplant list. Unfortunately, she was unable to have her kidney transplant until her wound healed. She, of course, is a fragile at-risk patient during the pandemic. We know that we tried to isolate these folks from care in large medical centers and in wound care clinics and tried to have them stay safe at home. So I was able to utilize topical oxygen therapy for this patient with telemedicine visits to help to heal a very difficult and challenging wound type. The patient was able to get back onto the transplant list and subsequently she underwent her transplant. So that was just a wonderful, innovative way to use a new product during a difficult time, and that was actually published and a really good success for this particular technology.