The science and healing with ozone

Competing therapies: Div vs. Mah

Div (Direct IV Ozone) – Mah (Major Autohemotherapy)

Following in the footsteps of Dr. Charles Lindner, in 1948 Dr. William Turska of Oregon began to inject ozone intravenously. Five years later, Dr. Hans Wolff revealed a new therapy wherein blood was extracted from the patient and treated with oxygen and ozone and then reintroduced into the patient to cure a variety of diseases.

Known as major autohemotherapy (MAH), this technique still used today resulted in a split in the ozone therapy community. A large percentage of the doctors adopted the MAH technique, while other doctors continued using the DIV or direct intravenous method. When done correctly, both therapies are safe, but because of egos and misinformation many people who use the MAH method denigrate the DIV method, wrongly suggesting that it leads to death. This is simply not true. According to Dr. Howard Robins, in a recent interview I conducted (circa September 2020), most of the ozone therapists throughout the world use the DIV method. Dr. Robins, who has been an ozone therapist for over thirty years, started with the MAH method, which he implemented about 45,000 times from 1989–1995, and at that time he switched to DIV, which, along with his staff, he has used from 1995–2021. Averaging about two hundred applications a week, this calculates out to over 300,000 times, and no deaths have ever occurred. Dr. Robins also stated that the few reported deaths with ozone therapy have occurred with both methods. And when you research each situation, you find that these rare occurrences are most often linked to either unqualified quacks or a person who turned to this medical procedure as a last resort.

1. H. Effenberg

“It is a marvelous design by the Creator of the Universe to use this ozone blanket to shield our planet against the deadly onslaught of cosmic radiation and with gratitude to him we may lift our eyes to ozone—God’s gift to humanity,” writes J. H. Effenberg, Ph.D., associate professor of Natural Therapeutics for Sierra State University, in his compact, informative gem entitled Ozone: God’s Gift to Humanity. With an eclectic past that included being a military officer in charge of an army hospital in Germany, Effenberg also worked as a medical corps officer for the Turkish army and as a missionary traveling through China, Tibet, and Mongolia with funding from Seventh Day Adventists.

Concluding that “there is nothing of such great therapeutic value as that of ozone,” Effenberg split his book into three sections: covering ozone in the stratosphere, in the atmosphere, and as a therapeutic. His book begins with a quote from Dinsmore Alter and Clarence Clemenshaw, codirectors of the Griffith Observatory of Los Angeles: “Our air contains 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and traces of several other elements. . . . But the very minute quantity of ozone is as important as all the rest. Without ozone in the atmosphere life would disappear on the Earth.”

“If the ozone shield would vanish for only a minute,” Effenberg states, “these (UV) rays would undoubtedly destroy all living creatures and every sign of life on the Earth. Just as ozone cleanses the atmosphere, ozone therapy would cleanse the millions of microscopic dust particles, microbes and bacteria that we breathe every day.” Staying with the religious theme, Effenberg notes, “The Keeper of the Universe . . . in His great outdoor laboratory [produces] 1800 thunderstorms and 44,000 flashes of lightning constantly . . . [thereby creating] a tremendous amount of ozone which washes, cleanses . . . [and] refreshes the atmosphere.”

Oxygen, which Effenberg sees as the “breath of life . . . increases our energy and intensifies our life.” An allotrope of oxygen, ozone is “only a higher more concentrated more active and fortified form.” Working as “a super-oxidizing agent, it greatly increases the oxygen content in our bloodstream.” Since “most of our troubles are caused by insufficient oxidation, the air we breathe is more important than food.” As an example, Effenberg discusses the smog that hit Donora, Pennsylvania, in 1948. The smog was so thick that six thousand ­people were sent to hospitals, and “a goodly number were sent to their graves.”

Effenberg mentions Dr. Hans Kleinmann from Germany, who used ozone to successfully treat difficult-to-reach places—such as infections of the bladder, urethra, and intestines—with ozone gas. In direct contradiction to the scientists who mistakenly found that inhaling ozone was dangerous, Dr. August Caille from the New York Post-Graduate Medical School, circa 1888–1923, who earlier had been appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to the Medical Reserve Corps, used ozone inhalation to treat twenty-two children for a variety of diseases, including anemia, tuberculosis, and iron deficiency. He concluded, “Ozone inhalations have a very distinct curative effect” (1951). Renal failure was helped with ozone therapy by the work of Dr. Leo Verbon, director of Spaulding General Hospital in Portland, Oregon. Dr. David Lee from Louisiana successfully used ozone therapy to treat ear infections, urological conditions, gynecological problems, ulcers, and arthritis.

The Effenberg text also covers research on the use of ozone generators to change the environments of hospital rooms. E. W. Riesbeck, a consulting engineer from Chicago working throughout the 1940s, successfully treated patients with pneumonia when ozone was pumped into the room. In Paris, Drs. Abbe and Oudin treated thirty-eight tuberculosis patients with ozone inhalation. “All without exception experienced considerable improvement, permanent in most cases.”

Out of the millions of cases using ozone therapy, a few deaths have indeed occurred with both methods. However, in most cases the patient who died was in such ill health at the time that ozone therapy was probably used as a last resort. When administered by a qualified medical doctor treating a normal individual not at death’s door, this is a very safe procedure.

Hundreds of thousands are presently dying from the COVID virus. Many have died while on ventilators, and yet the FDA has not confiscated a single ventilator. So, when one reads the critical literature weighing against ozone therapy, it is notable that an extremely small number of patients, in over one hundred years of ozone therapy with MAH or DIV, have died. According to Saul Pressman in his compendium The Story of Ozone, 6th edition, out of the millions of ozone therapy treatments given in Germany over many decades, only four deaths have been documented with forty individuals reporting side effects.

In 1973 the International Ozone Association was formed to help foster the concept of using ozone as a disinfectant, and three years later the EPA gave ozone their seal of approval “as an anti-microbial oxidizing agent.” Eight years after that, “the Olympics officially began using ozone to disinfect pool water.”

Pain Relief

Another therapy of note is cited in the Journal of Prolotherapy, “Prolozone is a technique that combines the principles of neural therapy, Prolotherapy, and ozone therapy. It involves injecting combinations of procaine, anti-inflammatory medications, homeopathic remedies, vitamins, minerals, proliferatives, and ozone/oxygen gas into degenerated or injured joints, and into areas of pain.”

This technique is a derivative that was first developed in the late 1930s by Ohio surgeon Dr. George Hackett. A graduate of Cornell Medical School, Dr. Hackett studied numerous injuries while working for insurance companies. Over time he concluded that pain could be relieved by relaxing ligaments in the targeted areas (e.g., shoulder, knee, and lower back). This led the doctor to inject simple dextrose into the affected area, and this led to remarkable results. He treated upward of five thousand patients with this technique, which was continued through the 1950s all the way through the 1990s by Hackett’s protégé, Dr. Gustav Hemwall.

In a study of 1,871 patients, Hemwall said that 99% of them reported improvement with 75% of those saying that the pain had substantially been reduced and that their ligaments regained their strength. What Drs. Hackett and Hemwall were saying was that this process allowed these afflicted areas to regenerate.

After being a physician for ten years, Dr. Frank Shallenberger attended a four-day seminar in Germany in 1983, and that is where he learned not only about ozone therapy but also an advancement of the Hackett-Hemwall technique wherein German doctors were injecting not only dextrose into afflicted joints but also ozone. Using this technique Dr. Shallenberger stated, “I learned that inflammation decreased, swelling decreased, and most importantly pain decreased. How and why all this was happening was not explained, but the procedure had been done for years, and several clinical studies had verified the effect.” Since these injections were painful, Dr. Shallenberger refined this technique to include procaine, which blocks the pain of the needle, and he also added to the mix “anti-inflammatory medications,” numerous vitamins and minerals such as magnesium, niacin, folic acid, and vitamins B12 and B6 as well as other “proliferatives, and a mixture of ozone/oxygen gas into degenerated or injured joints, and into areas of pain” (Shallenberger 2011).

Having studied this medical procedure for literally decades and having trained hundreds of medical doctors, Dr. Shallenberger has coined the technique Prolozone, concluding that “that Prolozone works by improving oxygen utilization in a localized area of damaged connective tissue, allowing it to heal, and to restore full function” (Shallenbergr 2021).

Immune Response and Self-Repair

When the body is wounded or infected, a series of effects are launched. For instance, antibodies rush to the area to stop the infection. This is achieved by macrophages and other immune cells, which release such enzymes and disinfectants as hydrogen peroxide and ozone. From his research, Dr. Velio Bocci, one of the world’s leading ozone therapists, hypothesizes that one of the functions of ozone is to trigger the release of stem cells that are borne in the bone marrow. In the case of an exterior wound to the skin, such as an abrasion or puncture that leads to bleeding, once a scab is formed, eventually the skin regenerates. Dr. Bocci suggests that this occurs with the help of stem cells that have the ability to develop into many different types to help repair the body. Thus, it is fair to suggest that the same process is occurring with Prolozone. The presence of ozone prompts stem cells to be drawn to the area to help ligaments self-repair.

In the early 1980s ozone expert Ed McCabe met World War II physician and longtime ozone therapist Dr. Robert Mayer. This meeting at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami helped McCabe learn about ozone therapy, and that led to his book Oxygen Therapies: A New Way of Approaching Disease, published in 1988. Billing himself as “Mr. Oxygen,” McCabe has made a number of informative YouTube videos that explain that viruses cannot survive in an oxygen-rich environment.

AIDS

McCabe points out a very important, counterintuitive finding when ozone therapy is used to treat AIDS patients, particularly those suffering from additional diseases such as pneumonia, shingles, candida, and thrush. In one AIDS patient—a male prostitute suffering from all of these diseases, sometimes simultaneously—his viral count went up after first being treated with ozone therapy. Still, in the midst of this healing process, a polymerase chain reaction test, which detects genetic viral material, showed that the treatment was doing its job. Medical doctors unfamiliar with ozone therapy could make the mistake of thinking that it was hurting the patient. In fact, according to McCabe, ozone “stirs everything up,” bringing out “inactivated microbes” that are in the process of dying. “Only much later, after detox and all the dross has settled down and been flushed out, will the test be more reliable.” The solution, McCabe advises, is to make sure the doctors are educated with regard to this type of situation.

Cancer

Based upon the work of Nobel Prize winner Otto Warburg, ozone therapists began to realize that cancer was caused in part due to a lack of oxygen delivery. In the early 1950s Drs. Zable, Seeger, Varro, and Werkmeister began to treat cancer patients with ozone therapy. This work was followed up by Dr. George Freibott, who claimed that he cured a patient riddled with tumors with ozone therapy, saying that they were “shed” after treatment. In fact, it was this lecture that occurred over thirty-five years ago that led me to cover this topic when the COVID pandemic began (Tesla Centennial Symposium, Colorado Springs, 1984). On other occasions, Dr. Freibott also had success treating AIDS patients with ozone therapy. Pressman reports in The Story of Ozone that “Dr. Horst Kief also reported success treating AIDS” and that some of this research was being funded by NATO. In Canada, Captain Michael E. Shannon, a scientist working for their Department of National Defense, was also obtaining funding (Pressman 1996).