How Does Ozone Act? How and Why Can We Avoid Ozone Toxicity?

Abstract

This is one of the most important chapters because I believe that, if the ozonetherapist understands how ozone reacts with body fluids and cells, he can achieve useful therapeutic results. The patient represents the substrate yielding a number of biochemical, pharmacological and psycho-neuro-immunological reactions and as such, she/he is an essential part of the process. Although oxygen represents the bulk (95-98 %) of the gas mixture, by considering the enormous dilution of the small reinfused oxygenated-ozonated blood with venous blood, it has a negligible role. While, only thanks to oxygen we can live, this gas has a negative effect on the long run because cell respiration allows the formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), among which, hydroxyl radical (OH .-) is one of the most destructive radical compounds for precious enzymes and DNA. Almost every one knows that ageing, the metabolic disorders (atherosclerosis, diabetes, cell degeneration) can be worsened by ROS and, only in part, we can prevent their damageable effects. Ironically, even the partial lack of oxygen (hypoxia), observable in ischemic vascular diseases, represents the cause of death due to limb ischaemia, heart infarction and stroke. Moreover, hypoxia enhances neoplastic metastatisation and ultimately leads to death. Ozone, the triatomic oxygen, synthesized in the stratosphere to protect us from excessive UV radiation, can be precisely produced with a medical generator but it is up to us to use it proficiently as a real drug. As ozone is one of the most potent oxidants, we must learn how to tame it and the scope of this chapter is to define its therapeutic coefficient, or, in simple words, to distinguish the therapeutic from the toxic dose. When I ask physicians how ozone acts, I receive odd answers: a favoured one is the esoteric idea that ozone, during its decomposition to oxygen, will transfer some energy to the body thus invigorating it, and another is that ozone will be absorbed and, after entering into the cells, will turn them on. In comparison to other complementary approaches based on philosophical postulations, a positive characteristic of ozonetherapy is that it can undergo the most objective scientific investigation carried out with normal 19 Chapter 4 biological and clinical methods. It has been unfortunate that for several decades, empiricism and the lack of basic studies have delayed an understanding of the mechanisms of action. Moreover, dangerous, even deadly infusion of ozone by quacks, a good dose of prejudice and the inconsistent dogma that " ozone is always toxic " are responsible for the strong and dull opposition of conventional medicine to the use of ozonetherapy. However I will persevere in my endeavour and I feel confident that this wrong belief will change in the near future. At the moment my duty is to schematically try to demonstrate that ozone obeys perfectly well to common physical, chemical, physiological and pharmacological notions and that its activities modulating several cellular functions are already known.