A Case of Suspected Gas Embolism After an Incorrect DIV Ozone Injection

This will be a field day for critics of DIV ozone injections. And there are many. 

“We told you so! DIV is dangerous!!!”, I already hear them screech. 

“DIV injections can kill people!!!!!!”

Well, luckily no one died, the patient is still alive. But he does suffer from severe neurological side effects to this day. 

What I am talking about is the case of an incorrectly performed injection of ozone/oxygen gas mix intravenously that occurred around 14 months ago at a Dutch doctor's office. This has been reported a few weeks ago by the hurt patient himself in our Facebook group “The Ozone Group”.

What is important to note though is that this is not a case of a suspected gas embolism after a DIV injection. This is a case of a suspected gas embolism after an incorrect DIV injection. 

There is a crucial difference. 

Handling a kitchen knife correctly can produce a life-sustaining meal, but the incorrect handling of that very kitchen utensil can take a life. 

It’s the same with DIV, or really anything.

HOW you do it determines whether it’s safe or not. 

You can drive a car to take someone to an emergency room to save his life. Or you can drive a car to kill someone. 

The presented case here shows how DIV injections should never be performed. It stresses the importance of following safety precautions. 

So, let's look at exactly what happened.

But first, what the heck are DIV injections anyway?

What are DIV ozone injections? 

DIV stands for direct intravenous injection of an ozone/oxygen gas mix. This means a gas mixture of ozone and pure oxygen is injected directly into the vein. 

Yes, gas goes into a patient’s vein. 

The practice typically elicits shock and awe or pure hysterics from many ozone therapists.

Fact is that DIV, or variations of this method, have been performed millions of times for the past 60 years with an exceptional safety record. 

Just to cite two examples: Dr. Howard Robins has been doing DIV injections for the past 20 to 30 years. In that time, he successfully completed over 300,000 DIV administrations on his patients. How many people died in that time? Zero, according to the last count.

Another example is the practice of Oxyvenierung.

This is very similar to DIV in that during Oxyvenierung pure oxygen gas is injected into the vein (with DIV, one injects around 95 to 99% pure oxygen and only 1 to 5% ozone gas).

Oxyvenierung has been practiced in Germany for the past 60 years without a single fatality. A seller of Oxyvenierung supplies I talked estimates that an average of 100,000 injections of pure oxygen intravenously are performed every year.

This has likely only increased in the past few years. The reason for this is that German regulators have largely forbidden naturopaths to practice Major Autohemotherapy (the “standard” intravenous ozone treatment). Only medical doctors can perform MAH now.

The safe injection of oxygen gas into the vein requires specific techniques and precautions to make sure no air is ever injected, but only a pure mix of oxygen and ozone. (Air consists of around 80% nitrogen and only roughly 20% oxygen.) 

Thanks to an exhaustive conversation I had with the patient, it is clear that several serious mistakes were made during the injection. One of them was that not enough care was taken to clear the lines of air. 

Here is what happened: 

Around 14 months ago, the patient decided to undergo DIV ozone treatments to treat suspected Lyme disease. At that point he was suffering only mild symptoms.

At the doctor's office he received two 60 ml syringes full of ozone/oxygen gas intravenously. The 120 ml were injected within 1 to 2 minutes. 

Right after the injection of the second syringe the patient passed out with his eyes open. The eyes were staring forward and remained fixated in one position. He regained consciousness after 3 to 5 minutes. 

A few days later, he started experiencing troubling neurological symptoms. Those included sensations of his brain shutting down, sleeping difficulties, feeling miserable 24/7, going through feelings of fainting, and experiencing weird, scary sensations all the time. He is bedridden and feels like living in hell every day. 

The DIV injection was performed by a nurse at the office of a licensed medical doctor in the Netherlands, Europe. 

(The below screenshots are shared with permission from the poster who asked me to remove his name and picture. You can read the original post here.)

Why I suspect a gas embolism

I believe that the patient experienced a stroke from a gas embolism. (If you are a doctor or someone else with a deeper insight into such issues and disagree, please comment below.)

The fact that he passed out is an indication that a gas bubble could have entered a blood vessel in his brain and so possibly closed off the blood circulation for a certain amount of time. This led to the loss of consciousness.

An MRI was performed and did not find any trapped bubbles in his brain or any other abnormalities.

What is unusual is that the neurological deficits started showing up several days after the event, not immediately afterwards.

What was done incorrectly

After exchanging messages with the patient, I understand that the nurse made the following mistakes:

• She injected the ozone/oxygen mix too quickly. This is the most important part of injecting pure oxygen gas. It needs to be done very slowly to give the blood time to absorb the oxygen bubbles. A generally accepted speed for DIV injections are 2 to 6 ml/min. According to Dr. Wichert, intravenous oxygen is administered at speeds of 1 to 2.5 ml/min. How quickly did the nurse inject? According to my conversation with the patient, she injected two 60 ml syringes within one to two minutes. This translates into an insane speed of 60 to 120 ml/min. Which means she injected around 10 to 120 times faster than what is considered safe. She disrespected the most important rule of safe DIV ozone injections.

• She did not clear the line of the butterfly needle from air. When you pull out a fresh butterfly needle out of the packaging, there is air in the line and inside the needle. You need to flush those dead spaces with pure oxygen or pure oxygen/ozone mix to purge the line and needle from air. This was not done. How do we know? Because the patient said that the nurse first inserted the butterfly needle into the patient’s vein, and then she attached the syringe to the line. Which means that the line of the butterfly needle was not flushed with oxygen/ozone mix. Consequently, the line of the butterfly needle likely contained air by the time the ozone/oxygen mix was injected. Consequently, it can't be excluded that the air caused the embolism.

• The patient did not rest long enough afterwards. The minimum resting time should be 30 minutes. He says that he remained in the reclined chair for around 15 minutes. 

How the DIV injection should have been performed and why

• The line of the butterfly needle should be flushed with oxygen/ozone first and then injected into the patient’s vein. The line of a needle contains several ml of air when it’s removed from the packaging. Those need to be cleared with pure oxygen before the injection. This is also the reason why nurses remove air from a syringe before they perform any type of injection – to prevent air embolisms. This is even recommended for insulin users who use very short needles that typically don't go deeper than the body's fat layer. Unfortunately, I observed that over the years nurses seem to have become more negligent in this regard. And it is not clear why. Negligence has seemingly creeped into the everyday medical practice. Yes, injecting small amounts of air into the vein may not cause any problems for many patients, but it can lead to a deadly gas embolism in others. Given that hospitals are notoriously unwilling to report on their blunders (ask any retired nurse), we may not know the exact number of patients having been killed due to medical sloppiness. To keep DIV injections as safe as possible, the greatest care should be taken to clear all lines from the smallest amounts of air. The correct way would have been to fill the syringe with ozone/oxygen first, then attach the butterfly needle, then push out around 5 ml of the ozone/oxygen mix out, and then insert the needle (with the attached syringe) into the patient's vein. 

• Speed. The injection was performed much too fast. The fastest you can go with DIV is 1 ml every 10 seconds. A good average is 1 ml every 20 seconds. Some need to go as slow as 1 ml every 30 seconds. To inject someone with 120 ml of oxygen/ozone gas within less than one minute is frankly insane. I am surprised that this doctor hasn’t killed anyone yet. Experiments performed on animals over the past 100 years clearly showed that you can kill a mammal when you inject too much oxygen gas too fast. This has been documented by Franz J. Kreutzer in his brilliant book “Intravenous Oxygen Therapy“. 

• The patient was not given enough amount of time to rest after the injection. The practice of oxyvenierung dictates a resting time of at least 30 minutes. This should be also the standard for DIV ozone injections. The resting period is extremely important. It gives the oxygen bubbles enough time to be fully absorbed by the blood. I believe that this simple practice can prevent 99% of all possible complications from DIV.

Example of how DIV should not be performed

The presented case is an example of how DIV ozone injections should not be performed under any circumstances. Luckily, the patient survived, but the story could have easily ended much more tragically.

The presented case does not show the dangers of DIV injections, it rather shows the dangers of disregarding crucial safety precautions during DIV injections.

In a macabre way, this case can be even taken as an example of how safe DIV injections are. If it is true, as the patient said, that the doctor performs DIV injections in this same manner regularly on dozens of patients every week, yet has not hurt anyone else, then it shows how rare complications from DIV are. Even if they are performed in the unsafest of ways.

Still, this should not embolden practitioners or home users to become more negligent, but to use more caution. Just because complications are exceedingly rare does not mean that they should not be taken seriously.

Update 10.01.2022: After checking in with the patient, he suggested I do some minor changes regarding when he lost consciousness: It was not during the second syringe but seconds after the second syringe was injected. 

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If you want to learn how to perform DIV ozone injections as safely as possible, learn it in a step-by-step manner with the help of this book. 

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