Dr. Bonnie's Chamber of Health

If you're over 50, chances are the phrase "hyperbaric chamber" will send you right back to "Sea Hunt," the classic TV show – black-and-white, first aired in 1957 – that starred Lloyd Bridges (father of Jeff, for you youngsters) as retired Navy frogman Mike Nelson. Once in awhile a diver would swim to the surface too fast and get "the bends" – decompression sickness, essentially too much gas in the bloodstream – and need to be slowly "recompressed" with oxygen in a submarine-shaped diving bell.
Well, Mike Nelson would be right at home in Brookfield these days, because the town now boasts its own chamber, at a therapy practice newly started by Brookfield Family Chiropractic's Dr. Bonnie Zschunke and her husband, Michael. Called the Emsa Health and Wellness Center (after the Zschunkes' daughters, Emma and Samantha), it focuses on more "natural" treatments for chronic health issues such as Lyme disease and multiple sclerosis... both of which "Dr. Bonnie" suffers from.
As anyone with these illnesses can tell you (I've had Lyme a couple times; my wife  has MS), treatment is very often ineffectual, painful or even counter-productive (need I add, expensive?). That's certainly been Dr. Bonnie's experience: after being diagnosed with MS in November 2008, she started one of the standard treatments – the once-a-week, self-administered interferon injection Avonex – but found the side effects ("flu-like symptoms" is the standard description) debilitating. "In October last year I got really sick – I was down to 100 pounds, missing work. I'd lose two days, easy, every week. I couldn't be alone – Mike had to be with me, I'd have a fever of 103 or 104, and take lots of drugs just to control the fever. And interferon – it's hard on the liver and kidneys, too."
She knew there had to be a better way – in large measure because she was familiar with auto-immune and related diseases since her teenage years, when she contracted "valley fever" (caused by inhaling the mold spores of a Western fungus) while attending Arizona State University. Conventional therapies didn't work well. "I was on a lot of drugs," she says, "and eventually I felt like a victim of the drugs." But through a Tempe-area osteopath, and later with a chiropractor, she discovered homeopathy. She abandoned pre-law for Human Biology, and ended up in chiropractic school in Chicago. Michael, her college beau, worked in finance there, but in 1999 they moved to Brookfield, where he grew up.
Dr. Bonnie has spent the last few months searching for an alternative to Avonex. "Hypnotherapy helped tremendously," she says of the three-and-a-half-hour sessions. "It helped me emotionally, which then helped me physically. It's not that you quack like a duck or something – it brings things out in your subconscious, things you don't know." She also tried "energy healing," which attempts to re-balance the body's energy flow (acupuncture and reiki are likely the best-known forms of energy medicine), and massage therapy, and lymphatic draining ("It's kind of the opposite of massage," says Dr. Bonnie, "it's very shallow"). And, of course, frequent chiropractic adjustments.
Those therapies helped, to one extent or another, but it was her experience in a hyperbaric chamber – owned by a chiropractic student in Easton, who bought the device to treat Lyme patients – that worked best. After two treatments, she says, "I felt better than I had in years." She tried to locate similar, open-to-the-public hyperbaric chambers closer to home, but couldn't – local hospitals owned them, but wouldn't make them available for the kind of treatment Dr. Bonnie had in mind. Wound care is the traditional hospital use for such chambers, and non-wound application has gotten "traction" mostly in Europe, California and Florida.
The solution? Buy one herself! "Mike said, 'You can't have it at home, everyone's going to come over to use it!'" So the Zschunkes decided to extend the existing business – just a couple doors down from the chiropractic office, in a strip mall on upper Federal Road – and "go public." Says Dr. Bonnie, "We got the CO last Friday. Mike's used the chamber – he hasn't snored in four days, he's been sleeping great!"
While impressive to look at, the chamber is fairly simple, as is the science behind it. The pressured environment, combined with pure oxygen administered through a mask, "pushes" large amounts of oxygen into the blood, and this oxygenation apparently revitalizes "old" cells (yes, I'm over-simplifying, that's my job!). Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, or HBOT, still generates skepticism in some quarters of mainstream medicine – one reason the therapy is not covered by insurance – but doesn't seem to have nasty side effects, and to date, in Connecticut, is largely unregulated. Fortunately, says Dr. Bonnie, HBOT "falls under my scope of practice," though she plans to get the official, unrequired certification to operate the machine.
"It's not a cure for anything," Dr. Bonnie says of HBOT, "It's a maintenance thing. For some people it could be every day; for others, maybe twice a year." She suspects most of her clients will be Lyme patients, but the hot-off-the-press Emsa brochure gives a laundry list of possible ailments to treat, from autism to stress (and hangovers!). Sessions, usually an hour long, cost an average of $79 (before volume discounts), and patients can read and watch DVDs, text and phone, during treatment. "The kids," says Dr. Bonnie, "they've played cards. A lot of adults fall asleep in the second half hour."
But be sure to knock before entering – Mike Zschunke might be in there, catching a few... yeah, you fill in the rest....