A Personal Ozone Chronicle

I’ve been learning a lot about ozone lately through personal experimentation, after hearing about it from widely scattered sources.

The internet links for some of the sources I originally found are now broken, so I thought it worth my time and effort to memorialize what I currently know and believe, and document where I found my information. I hope it might help others seeking to exploit the gentle healing powers of this miraculous molecule.

Ozone is just one of several oxidative therapies. Chlorine dioxide, hydrogen peroxide, and Vitamin C are some other examples. All get used up by the body very quickly. That creates a challenge in getting them to where they may be needed within your body.

Ozone specifically treats the single most important cause of all disease - the inability to adequately extract energy from the air that we breathe.1 After all, we humans can survive maybe six minutes without air, a few days without water, a month or more without food, and years without sunlight2 (sorry mitochondriacs - optimizing light exposure can optimize health, but it is not nearly as essential as air, water and minerals).

Ozone also stimulates detoxification, helping your cells, kidney and liver remove toxic substances, such as:

• The waste products that our own bodies produce,

• Medications,

• Heavy metals, and

• Environmental chemicals.

It oxidizes them, so they can more easily be escorted to the exits.3

Speaking of the liver, Shallenberger describes a study which found that “ozone has a stimulatory effect on liver regeneration that may make it valuable as a [liver-protective] modality.”4 Improving liver function means you ability to filter out toxins and pathogens will improve - you’ll be healthier.

Ozone is also directly toxic to all microbes, including bacteria, fungi and viruses.5

Ozone is perhaps the best oxidative therapy for the do-it-yourselfer, because the many available forms of ozone are potentially longer lasting and offer the greatest number of ways for it to reach specific parts of the body. Which is why it is my favorite oxidative therapy for addressing chronic problems.

Your doctor, with his training and experience, has more options for administering ozone, being able to inject, infuse, insufflate, etc, which the average consumer won’t have the equipment or expertise to do. But a large part of what your doctor offers can be approximated with at-home therapies that don’t require expensive equipment, office visits or training in invasive medical techniques. Plus you avoid added expense, travel time to the doctor’s office, time waiting for the appointment, etc.

I believe a combination of ozone therapies can help the average person regain lost health, and thus dial back the clock on aging. So I want to share what I’ve learned, in the hope that it helps others regain some or all of their lost health.

Just remember that we are all unique, and what has worked for me may not work for you.

The oxygen molecule (O2) is composed of two oxygen atoms. Electricity or ultraviolet light can be applied to oxygen molecules to split them into single atoms (O). This doesn’t last long, as the atoms will quickly recombine into oxygen molecules, but a portion of them will reform as ozone (O3).6 These ozone molecules are short-lived, but there is a means of infusing ozone gas into oils or glycerin that preserves them for a much longer period of time (especially when refrigerated or frozen). This process results in the ozone bonding with fatty acids and forming ozonides.7

Fats differ in their affinity for ozone, meaning that some fats will hold more ozone than others. PurO3 has an ozonide index that describes the approximate relative ability of their oils to hold ozone. Coconut oil holds the least, and hemp oil holds the most, and there are a number of choices that fall in between those two ends of the spectrum.

Ozonides are far more stable than ozone and can last in the body from days to weeks.8 This allows ozonides to travel to parts of the body that are beyond the reach of topically applied or ingested ozone gas (or gas-infused water), which tends to get used up very quickly. Using ozonide at-home therapies provides a means of more effectively delivering the power of ozone to where it is most desired.

Ozonides have some great effects on our bodies:9

1. They stimulate the formation of cytokine molecules for our immune system,

2. They increase the delivery of oxygen to cells,

3. They stimulate cells to generate more energy,

4. They increase nitric oxide production, and

5. They stimulate antioxidant enzymes (by up to 300%!).

Item #3 is pretty much the current Holy Grail of healing: improving mitochondrial function. It’s the root of virtually all chronic disease, so improving mitochondrial function is basically the same as decreasing your chronic disease burden, pretty much regardless of which chronic disease(s) you have.

What’s the #1 way of improving mitochondrial function? Exercise. Ozone has many of the benefits of exercise, but requires very little commitment.

Part of why exercise is so beneficial is because it improves the ability to get oxygen to each cell in your body. When you exercise, you inhale more oxygen, and your blood circulation increases - your cells get more oxygen delivery than when you are sedentary. So your mitochondria work more efficiently, you heal faster and it’s harder for disease to take hold.

Ozone therapy can give your body some of those same benefits. The two in tandem are awesome.

An early ozone experience of mine was the result of wanting to know whether ultraviolet blood irradiation (UVBI) might improve one or more aspects of my health. My functional medicine doctor offered major autohemotherapy (MAH), which combines UVBI with ozone. The cost was $225 per treatment. I’ve since learned that it can take a half dozen treatments to really start to notice a difference (not cheap). But that first treatment almost certainly improved my health, just not in a clearly perceptible way.

There is a therapy similar to MAH, called Extracorporeal Blood Oxygenation and Ozonation (EBOO), which seems to be MAH minus the ultraviolet blood irradiation.

“Blood infusion of ozone is a surprisingly simple procedure. It entails drawing a pint of blood from the patient, and introducing specific amounts of ozone into the blood through a wire cord carrying a 300- volt charge. As the ozone is absorbed into the blood, the extra oxygen atoms are released into the blood, thereby creating a flood of oxygen. The blood then turns vivid red, which signifies healthy, oxygen-cleansed blood, and consequently, disease microorganisms are destroyed. The oxygenated blood is thereafter infused back to the patient, and as the oxygen-strengthened blood disperses, it confers some of its virucidal properties to the rest of the patient’s blood, thereby destroying the diseased microorganisms in the entire body.”10

I’ll circle back later to discuss a much simpler and cheaper do-it-yourself at-home therapy that seems to accomplish most of what EBOO does.

Next, I experimented with ozonated magnesium, which is often recommended to help cleanse the bowels. If you are constipated, it will definitely get your bowels moving. It will liquify your stools, but it won’t deplete you of electrolytes, like Milk of Magnesia can do.

Homozon used to be the form of ozonated magnesium that you wanted to use. It had been around for over 100 years before suddenly disappearing from the market in late 2024 (was this our government at work, protecting corporate interests over the public interest?). The next best substitute that I know of is Super OxyFlush (which is what I used).

There are other products on the market that claim to be ozonated magnesium, but the process of binding the ozone to magnesium is proprietary, and I suspect many of them don’t contain nearly as much ozone as these two products. Some may work reasonably well, I just have no knowledge of which ones might be better than others.

Ozonated magnesium gets activated by stomach acid, creating an ozone gas. It tends to get used up in the stomach and small intestines. If you have insufficient stomach acid, taking a supplemental acid like apple cider vinegar or citric acid is necessary to activate the product.

Suggested dosing of ozonated magnesium is discussed on page 258 of Ed McCabe’s book, Flood Your Body With Oxygen (2008). I followed the basic recommendation for more than a month. Since then, I’ve taken one capsule of Super OxyFlush with each meal and one or two capsules before bed for several months, which is basically inline with the directions found on the bottle.

Ozonated oils were my next experiment. They come in topical, capsule and rectal suppository forms.

Topically, they are great for skin problems (though it seems it is mostly symptom relief, not a cure, at least for gentle ozonated coconut oil), or to get ozonides to an organ that is near the skin surface.

They can be ingested in capsule form. The ozonides tend to last longer in the digestive tract, surviving to the large intestine, where ozonated magnesium is unlikely to reach.

As rectal suppositories, the ozonides can be absorbed almost directly into the hepatic portal vein, which carries blood and nutrients from the gastrointestinal system, gallbladder, pancreas and spleen to the liver. So less gets used up by stomach acid by ingestion. Suppositories are better able to get ozonides to the lower part of the large intestine and to the organs of the abdominal cavity. Despite the social taboo of rectal administration, it quickly became my favorite ozone option, as I will explain later.

I stumbled upon ozonated glycerin when Robert Jay Rowen, MD reported on his amazing progress in treating a woman’s breast tumor with OG injections. His substack is where you want to go for a deep dive about how OG works its magic on the body. I’ll try to give you a simple overview.

Ozonated glycerin is “portable ozone.” It doesn’t get used up immediately by the body like ozone gas does, and it has a longer non-refrigerated shelf life than ozonated oils and capsules.

Glycerin is soluble in both oil and water, which means that it can deliver ozonides to places that ozonated oils can’t get at. It also tends to penetrate deeper into the skin when applied topically. There’s also evidence that it may stimulate skin stem cells, giving me hope that it may permanently heal my sun-damaged skin.

The most exciting thing about ozonated glycerin is that it can be nebulized. A nebulizer is used to create a fine mist that is inhaled into your lungs and sinuses. I wrote an earlier article about how nebulizing hydrogen peroxide (another oxidative therapy) had resolved my 50 years of chronic sinus inflammation. Jim Bridge, DVM CVA FAAO has reported the same effect from nebulizing OG.11

The really intriguing thing about nebulized OG is that, in experiments performed by Jim Bridge, it appears that nebulizing 3 ml (1/10th of an ounce) of OG, plus normal saline “to the fill line,” provides more ozone in less time that doing MAH, and that it is “like using the lungs as an EBOO” (in other words, there is no need for an IV in order to ozonate your blood).12

For less than the cost of an MAH treatment, it is possible to buy a good nebulizer13 and two ounces of OG, enough for nearly two dozen treatments!

If you attempt this, be sure to pay attention to your body! If you start to feel any sort of minor airway irritation, that’s probably a sign that you’ve nebulized enough for one day. It’s best to start with a low dose and work your way up to larger doses over time.

I believe that MAH treatments are typically spaced out a week apart, so when we’ve nebulized OG that is what we have done. We opted to start with 15% OG, though even amounts as low as 5% are likely beneficial (30% is probably the maximum concentration, to avoid doing more harm than good). Recommendations that we’ve used in the past for nebulizing with hydrogen peroxide call for 10-15 minute treatments, (around 4-5 ml or so) so that’s the duration that we’ve used with OG. The one time I tried extending past a half hour started to produce some very mild throat irritation at the 15% concentration.

Dr. Shallenberger, the unofficial Godfather of Ozone, asserts the following benefits of ozone therapy:14

1. Stress relief,

2. Relaxation,

3. Improved sleep,

4. Burns excess fat and cellulite, and

5. It just generally makes you feel great.

His recommendation has been to invest $3,000 in a quality ozone generator, in order to:

• Produce your own ozone,

• Make ozonated water,

• Do rectal ozone gas insufflations, etc.

But he made that recommendation years ago, long before OG hit the scene and when few commercially produced ozonated oils were available. It seems to me that reasonably priced OG obviates the need to make such a significant capital investment, and to have to find the space needed for storing the equipment and supplies, etc. And you don’t need to use ozone for years before recouping your investment cost.

Dr. Shallenberger advocates using ozone to prevent disease, a process he calls pre-conditioning.

He described some animal studies where one group of animals were pre-conditioned with ozone, while other groups were pre-conditioned with oxygen or had no pre-conditioning. The animals were given heart, intestinal, liver and kidney injuries, and those on ozone recovered far better than the controls. That suggests that if you were to pre-condition with ozone, your odds of surviving a health crisis such as a heart attack should be greatly improved.

The key to longevity is how well you weather such crises. If they don’t kill you outright, often they dig your grave a little bit deeper after each event. In time, you will fall into the grave that you’ve been digging for yourself, at which point you’ve lost the fight. Ozone would seem to be a way to fill in a part of the grave that gets dug after every health crisis, delaying the inevitable and increasing your health span.

My biologic dentist does pre-conditioning, with both Vitamin C and ozone. She will infuse patients with 20 grams or more of Vitamin C by IV a day or so before an invasive procedure. It tends to kill off bad bacteria that may be circulating in your blood, reducing the chance of infection and making it possible for any wound to heal faster. She’ll also put ozone gas directly into any wound as a means of speeding healing and further reducing the likelihood of an infection taking hold.

Clearly, ozone isn’t the only oxidative therapy that can pre-condition the body to better survive a health crisis. I’ve come across other authors who suggest using particular oxidative therapies to improve your baseline health. And I think they are onto something important. Their view is that oxygen utilization is the single most important predictor of your risk for degenerative disease and premature aging.15

Ozone is a means of improving your body’s oxygen utilization, and thus reducing your risk of disease and the rate at which you age. When ozone is introduced into your body, it stimulates the mitochondria in your cells tens times better than plain oxygen to use the oxygen they get more efficiently.16 It greatly improves mitochondrial function.

With those preliminaries out of the way, I’d want to share experiences from my personal ozone journey.

Ozonated magnesium’s immediate effect is to clean out your digestive tract. As a result, your bowel motility increases, and stuff generally transits through the bowels within about 24 hours. Which means there’s less chance for things to linger and ferment, feeding pathogenic bugs. That means less inflammation and more chance for the gut lining to heal. Though from personal experience I’d say ozonated magnesium by itself won’t heal the gut lining (some people say that L-ascorbate is the best option to do that), but I believe it does improve the odds of success when using other gut-healing strategies.

The most notable effect of months of ozonated magnesium use is that it appears to have been what lifted the brain fog I experienced as a symptom of the gut dysbiosis that I developed in 2021. My cognition is back to normal, whereas for quite a while I had a difficult time recalling recently acquired knowledge.

I’m still using ozonated magnesium while I continue my journey to hopefully permanently resolve my gut dysbiosis at some point in the near future.

I also have had chronic pancreatitis (an inflamed pancreas) since 2019. Improved motility meant that I could avoid constipation, and thus avoid further angering my inflamed pancreas. It is now rare that I notice any hint of my pancreas being inflamed, whereas before, even when it was well managed, I could always feel it was there lurking in the background, especially if I did much bending at the waist. That would compress my inflamed pancreas, and it would clearly let me know it didn’t like that one bit!

Ozonated magnesium hasn’t cured my pancreatitis, but it has helped to make it something that is very well managed (in combination with a supplement of betaine hydrochloride, pepsin and bitter herbs).

After I had completed my first course of ten ozonated hemp oil suppositories, I had a sudden, surprising mid-season boost in my cycling performance, giving me considerably more energy than was “normal” at the time. It was like a log jam had been cleared somewhere in my body (most likely my liver). Once that blockage was cleared, normal energy flow resumed immediately. I suspect these effects had something to do with the fact that the suppositories had easy access to the portal vein to the liver, where the ozonides could easily help oxidize toxins, making them easier for the liver to excrete.

The liver plays a crucial role in blood rejuvenation by producing proteins that help regulate blood clotting and by filtering toxins from the blood. It also supports the production of new blood cells, ensuring the body maintains healthy blood levels and functions properly.

Improving those functions might explain my performance gains, as healthier blood cells are capable of carrying more oxygen, and cellular oxygen levels are a limiting factor in anaerobic cycling performance.

When your cellular oxygen levels drop, you can’t perform as hard. When they go up you can.

It wasn’t long after my suppository experience that I started nebulizing ozonated glycerin. Initially I found that after each treatment I’d have a lot of extra energy. Enough that I’d uncharacteristically be looking for ways to burn it off.

After several such treatments, it seems that my energy levels have remained elevated, despite discontinuing the nebulization for the past few weeks.

In fact, I just spent a couple of days tearing apart some garage cabinets and recycling the wood to rebuild them into a more functional configuration. That involved a lot of bending at the waist and getting up and down from the floor: activities that would typically exacerbate my chronic pancreatitis.

At the end of two days, I felt no hint of my pancreas being inflamed. Whereas at one point in the near past, just being constipated was enough to make my pancreas very angry and greatly limit my ability to do such physical tasks.

Using the OG rectal suppositories has likely helped to heal my pancreas, as the portal vein serves most abdominal internal organs.

The nebulized OG seems to have taken things a step further, to the point where I’m now starting to wonder if my chronic pancreatitis may soon be a thing of the past? Normally, after a lot of bending at the waist there is at least a tiny hint of a reminder that there is still some inflammation. Recently, that tiny hint has been almost entirely missing. If my pancreatitis isn’t yet cured, it’s easily 90% better than it was back in 2019.

I’ve written in the past about how three summers of wandering by bicycle in the mid-1980s caused my then rapidly-balding scalp to amass a lot of sun damage. Enough that 30 years later dermatologists started to recommend that I use a highly toxic chemotherapy cream to control my scalp’s vast forest of actinic keratoses (AKs: pre-cancerous lesions). I refused, due to potential negative side effects (including organ damage or death), and the fact that the stuff could permanently discolor my skin. It was so toxic it was necessary to wear gloves when applying it, and it was several hundred dollars for a tiny tube. That same post listed the many ways I’ve tried in the past to manage my pesky AKs.

Then I started applying 100% OG directly to my face and scalp. Initially I was doing that about twice per week. I’d put it on in the morning, and wash it off with a late afternoon shower. At one point I think that frequency was a bit too much, as it left the skin on my scalp very dried out. After that, I would at most apply it once per week. I now apply it as needed, perhaps once per month. Any new, inflamed AK will calm down very quickly.

After about two months of on and off use, I no longer have any AKs on my face, and they are increasingly rare on my scalp. Before then, I had areas on my cheeks and just in front of and below my ears that were recurring problems. They’ve been AWOL now for more than a month.

Parts of my scalp were in a lot worse shape. I had one area that I think may have also had an underlying fungal infection, and that area is now looking as good as any other part of my scalp.

I don’t think that my AK problem is 100% resolved, but it’s easily 80% better. I suspect over time it will continue to improve, as much from my other ozone efforts as from topical application. I’m hoping at some point in the near future it will start to be a distant memory.

One day, after having used ozonated hemp oil suppositories daily for a few weeks, it was time to trim my toenails. I have fungus in four of the toenails on my right foot, and a prelude to trimming the nail of my big toe involves first trying to dig out some of the fungus. When I did that, it was reeking of ozonated hemp oil!

I took that as a sign that perhaps I was overdoing things a bit. But it also occurred to me that over time the ozonated hemp oil may finally put an end to my toenail fungus, since the biggest challenge is figuring out how to get at the fungus deep under the nail.

I had heard it said that oxidative therapies tend to get drawn toward hypoxic (low oxygen) areas, and my experience would seem to bear that out. Impaired circulation is what allows fungus to set up shop in the first place, and it seems ozone can find a way to those areas of poor circulation.

It can take six months or more for a toenail to grow completely out, so I won’t know for months whether this may be the key to finally ending this decades-old scourge. But it has motivated me to try to also keep up with topical treatments, plus foot soaks in chlorine dioxide or hydrogen peroxide. This would seem to be my best chance yet at evicting that pesky fungus!

I currently use the suppositories every few days, thinking that should be enough to keep the pressure on the fungus while I wait and see whether it will be gone once the nail has grown out completely.

Robert Jay Rowen, MD stated in a recent post that a number of people had commented that he looked younger than when he had last seen them three years ago. He attributed the change to his once-daily dose of one teaspoon of ozonated glycerin.

I, too, get occasional comments that I seem to be aging younger, while everyone else that I know seems to be aging older. Or that I look a lot younger than my 69 years. My use of ozone in general seems to be a big part of that, with the ozonated hemp oil suppositories probably having generated the biggest impact. And I think that is primarily because it has improved my liver and bowel health. When your liver is struggling, your body will resort to vicarious elimination via the skin, and that sets up the dinner table for various uninvited passing microbes, who stop for a free meal and then decide to take up residence in your skin. Eliminating those uninvited guests is a sure way to look younger and healthier.

Dr. Shallenberger advocates ozone therapy as the most versatile tool in clinical practice, and says it is useful for approximately 80% of general medical and dental practice cases.17

I would agree, and say that the same holds true for home therapy use. It’s not a cure-all, but it certainly seems to make a lot of chronic issues better. Different forms of ozone work optimally for different conditions, so it can take some experimenting to determine what will work best to improve your personal health challenges.

My personal experience has been that use of ozone therapies have dialed back the clock for me. The lack of stamina and energy that I chalked up to old age reversed in fairly quick order after starting on ozone. Many of my chronic health problems (gut dysbiosis, chronic pancreatitis, brain fog, sun-damaged skin, etc) have all improved considerably over the past six months.

I have every reason to believe continued use of ozone therapies will result in further health improvements. And should I have an unexpected health crisis, or suffer some unforeseen trauma, ozone’s pre-conditioning effects should greatly improve my odds of surviving and recovering more fully.

If you are capable of wisely listening to your own body, I highly recommend experimenting with various ozone therapies to see how they might help to restore your health and improve your healthspan.

I noted earlier how if we go without oxygen for more than a few minutes we die.

The current belief is that we harvest oxygen from the air, yet Gerald Pollock of the University of Washington has cast doubt on that notion.18 He has proposed that oxygen can’t cross the membranes of the lung’s alveoli, that instead what happens is that electrons are stripped from oxygen molecules there and transferred to red blood cells, since electrons can cross the membranes. The RBC’s oxygen molecules (carried by hemoglobin) are depleted of electrons when they arrive at the lungs, and are in need of being recharged as they begin another circuit through our circulatory systems. So our lungs are how we maintain sufficient electrical charge in our bodies.

If we don’t acquire oxygen via our lungs, then it would seem that we acquire it primarily from our diet, or perhaps also transdermally, especially during intense, sweat-producing exercise.

Some of the most healthful water in the world is highly oxygenated mountain stream water. Whereas the water most of us drink has been sitting in miles of underground pipes, often pumped from underground or gravity fed from large water towers. It hasn’t been exposed to the air for a long time, or allowed to splash and vortex as a means of extracting oxygen from the atmosphere on its journey to our water tap. So our modern diet is more oxygen-depleted than that of our recent ancestors.

Intense aerobic exercise causes us to sweat while we run or bicycle, creating our own wind resistance. I suspect our sweat gets oxygenated as a result, and some of that cooled, oxygenated water may manage to get reabsorbed back into our skin.

Ocean water is also highly oxygenated, from waves crashing on the shore. And it also has a full complement of minerals that mirrors the percentages found in our bodies. So ocean swimming might also be another source of transdermal oxygen acquisition.

In essence, modern life has left us oxygen depleted. Ozone and other oxidative therapies can step in to restore some of the traditional balance that has been lost due to our modern lifestyles.

If you are interested in other oxidative therapies, I would suggest the following sources of information:

• Andreas Kalcker for information on chlorine dioxide,

• Curious Outlier for information on chlorine dioxide (and also on remote ischemic conditioning, which has many of the same benefits as oxidative therapies),

• Robert Jay Rowen, MD for information on ozone therapies in general and ozonated glycerin in particular,

• Ed McCabe’s book, Flood Your Body With Oxygen, for a general overview of all oxidative therapies, and

• Madison Cavanaugh’s book, The One Minute Cure, for information on hydrogen peroxide.

And also be sure to check out the sources in the footnotes!

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Disclaimer: I write about my personal experiences, and what works for me may not work for you. I have no healthcare training, but I’ve been reading passionately on healthcare since being diagnosed with melanoma in early 2004. If you have delegated responsibility for your health to someone else, you should probably continue to do so. If you accept full responsibility for your own health, I hope that the experiences and opinions that I share will help you on your personal healing journey.