Bottled Oxygen Down at the Tavern

(Page 2 of 2)

March/April 1990
By Beach Conger, M.D. 
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It would seem to make sense. If 21% is adequate, 100% must be dynamite. Those who have tried it swear by it. Only one problem: We can't use that much oxygen. We don't use air the way an engine uses gasoline—the higher the octane, the better it runs. We extract oxygen from the air the way miners take coal from the ground. Once in the lungs, the lung miners place the oxygen in little buckets. The buckets are called red blood cells. As each red cell is filled up, it moves along to make way for the next one. The red blood cells run along circulatory tunnels to the various organs, where they are unloaded according to demand. Since there are more than enough lung miners in the lungs to dig out oxygen—except in those cases where they have been poisoned—what limits the amount of oxygen that gets to our cells is not the richness of oxygen at the bottom but the number of buckets available to carry it to the top. So a person who wants more oxygen faster needs to get more red blood cells, not higher concentrations of oxygen.

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Long-distance runners have already figured this out. This is why many go in for blood doping instead of oxygen drugging. Runners, I think, are much smarter than football players. After all, only runners can understand why it's worthwhile to spend two hours beating yourself to exhaustion with no more tangible compensation than a printed T-shirt and a cup of soup, while a football player won't run for more than a few seconds, and not even that unless you give him a couple hundred thousand dollars for encouragement.

What's the best way to get the body to make more red blood cells? Give it less oxygen. You can do this by moving to the mountains, but for most people this is too much trouble. Fortunately, at the rate we are cutting down the trees that make oxygen, and are producing carbon monoxide that depletes it, it won't be long before the air at sea level will have as much oxygen as that on Mount Everest. We will be making red blood cells like crazy.

Then we can really use our oxygen tanks.

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