There's a hyperbaric chamber in Justin Bieber's house. There's one in Kendall Jenner's. There are reportedly tens of thousands of them now operating across the country in spas, gyms, and wellness clinics, run by chiropractors, physical therapists, and practitioners with no medical license at all. No state requires these facilities to be accredited. The man who runs the actual professional accreditation body for hyperbaric medicine described it like this in late 2025: "It's absolute anarchy and chaos."
That's not a sentence I'd write about cupping or rose quartz rollers, because those things can't catch fire with you inside them.
The Part Nobody's Regulating
Pure oxygen at high pressure is not a neutral wellness amenity. The FDA has received reports of serious injuries and deaths tied to hyperbaric devices, largely due to fire risk at high oxygen concentration, and in several incidents the root cause is still unknown. Even in properly supervised sessions, people can experience ear and sinus pain, ruptured eardrums, temporary vision changes, and, rarely, lung collapse. These devices are Class II medical devices, cleared by the FDA through a formal review process, which tells you something important, this was never meant to be self-serve. It was meant to be operated under medical supervision, in a facility built to handle what happens when something goes wrong with pressurized pure oxygen.
That's exactly the part that's missing in most of the places selling sessions right now. Hyperbaric chambers are increasingly showing up in wellness businesses run by people without medical degrees or sufficient training, and unsafe chambers may now number in the tens of thousands across the country. You're not just risking a wasted afternoon and a few hundred dollars. You're sitting inside a fire risk operated by someone whose only qualification might be that they bought the equipment.
The Twist, This One Actually Works
Here's where this story splits from everything else I cover. Most of what I write about is a real human experience wrapped around an invented mechanism, muscle testing, rose quartz, the rest. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy isn't that. The FDA has approved it for a specific set of serious medical conditions, including hard to heal wounds like diabetic foot ulcers, infections and swelling, severe burns, frostbite, gas gangrene, carbon monoxide poisoning, decompression sickness, sudden unexplained hearing loss, severe anemia when transfusions aren't an option, and tissue damage from radiation treatment. For those approved conditions, it's considered safe, complications are uncommon, and most insurance plans, including Medicare, cover the cost. If you've had radiation damage or a wound that won't heal, this is real medicine, with a documented mechanism, supervised by people trained to run it.
So the lie here isn't "this doesn't work." The lie is "this works for whatever I'm selling it to you for, in whatever facility I happen to be running."
The Stretch
Once a treatment is proven for something, it gets marketed for everything. Wellness businesses now sell hyperbaric chambers for conditions the FDA hasn't approved, including Alzheimer's disease, autism, cancer, Lyme disease, ADHD, sleep apnea, and anti-aging, and the evidence supporting these uses is thin to nonexistent. Some areas, concussion recovery, PTSD, post-COVID symptoms, are genuinely being studied. But a promising early study and an FDA approved indication are not the same thing, and the gap between them is exactly where this industry is currently operating, unsupervised.
Where This Leaves You
A real mechanism in the wrong hands is more dangerous than a fake one, not less, because the kernel of truth is what convinces you to stop asking questions. If someone offers you a session, ask whether the facility is accredited by the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society. Ask whether your condition is actually on the FDA's approved list, not just one a practitioner mentioned in passing. Ask who's supervising the room you're about to sit in pressurized pure oxygen inside of. If the answers are vague, that chamber isn't a wellness trend. It's a liability with a price tag.