Paul Harch, MD
Paul G. Harch, MD is an emergency medicine and hyperbaric medicine clinician who is Clinical Professor of Medicine, Section of Emergency Medicine, at LSU School of Medicine, New Orleans, and former director of the University Medical Center Hyperbaric Medicine Department and LSU Hyperbaric Medicine Fellowship. Dr. Harch initiated and maintains a private practice that has resulted in the largest case experience in neurological hyperbaric medicine in the world. In this practice he adapted the concepts of conventional hyperbaric oxygen therapy to wounds in the central nervous system that spawned the subsequent academic and research practice. Beginning with brain injured divers and boxers in 1989, he applied his protocol to the first HBOT-treated cerebral palsy (1992) and autistic children (1996-2000) in this country and multiple other cerebral disorders, including most recently the first PET documented Alzheimer’s case (1/2019) and a subacute drowned child (Medical Gas Research 3/2017). This drowning case was the first demonstration of global regrowth of brain tissue in humans. He has successfully treated U.S. servicemen with TBI and PTSD, publishing the first case in 2009, a case series in 2012, a case-controlled series in 2019, and in March, 2020 a randomized controlled trial in civilians and veterans with mild traumatic brain injury. This human work was buttressed by application of the human protocol to animals in 2007 that stands as the first and only improvement of chronic brain injury in animals in the history of science. Dr. Harch’s work and perspective on hyperbaric oxygen therapy was published in his book, The Oxygen Revolution, where HBOT is explained as an epigenetic therapy with expected revolutionary effects on medicine and neurology. In March, 2020 his proposal for the application of HBOT to COVID-19 pneumonia and respiratory failure has spawned multiple HBOT trials for this disease.
