When you enter La Casa, you may notice a particular fragrance in the air that seems familiar, but you can’t quite place it. This is the O3, also known as ozone, which we generate from an air purifier every evening after we close, and every morning before we open. Ozone is a natural gas that is generated naturally by lightning flashes, as well as ocean waves, waterfalls, and sunlight on fields of snow. It has the effect of cleansing the atmosphere.
La Casa also uses ozone for whole-body detoxification. We introduce medical-grade ozone into the body through a steam sauna. The steam opens up the pores of the skin, and the ozone is absorbed into the pores, effecting distribution through the bloodstream, and then throughout the rest of the body. You stay in the steam cabinet for up to 30 minutes, and you come out with your whole body carrying a sweet scent as though you were caught unexpectedly in a refreshing, summer drizzle.
Ozone was first used in WWI to sterilize battle wounds. We learned then that it kills all manner of pathogens—in fact, every pathogen known to mankind is destroyed upon contact with ozone, including the cancer cell. In 1959, a medical machine was built on Germany and O3 started to be used in wider medical application.
Ozone is an activated, unstable, trivalent (three atoms) form of oxygen. Oxygen is O2; ozone is O3. Over a period of 20-30 minutes, ozone breaks down into two atoms of regular oxygen by giving up one atom of singlet oxygen (O). This singlet oxygen is a powerful oxidizing agent. When ozone enters the bloodstream and separates into O2 and O, the healthy cells, armed with antioxidants, absorb the O2 and repel the O, which zeroes in on the diseased cells and neutralizes them. At one shot then, ozone nourishes healthy cells and destroys malfunctioning ones. Ozone therapy, thus, provides all the benefits of oxygen therapy—which is believed to have anti-aging properties, improves body functioning and promotes longevity by preventing cell death.
The use of ozone as a therapy has been used in medical clinics throughout Europe for 70 years, and extensive research has been conducted to determine its precise health benefits. There are now over 3000 studies documenting the efficacy of ozone therapy. Just as one example, a study in Brazil looked at 300 patients with herpes. With ozone, pain elimination was effective in 90% of the patients. 30% had no further out-breaks for a year. Ozone inactivates bacteria, viruses, yeast, protozoa and fungi; it enhances circulation and purifies the blood and lymphatic system; it stimulates oxygen metabolism and disrupts malignant tumor metabolism; it reduces inflammation and pain; it excretes heavy metals; it normalizes hormone and enzyme production; it improves brain function because the brain uses over 15% of all oxygen in the body. Ozone is the best free radical scavenger that exists; it stimulates the production of the specific enzymes in the cell wall that serve to protect the cell from free radical damage (superoxide dismutase, catalase, and glutathione peroxidase).
Ozone therapy is cheap to administer, and this is perhaps one of the reasons it has never taken hold as a mainstream therapy in this country. Yet, in other parts of the world, there are whole hospitals devoted to doing ozone therapy. Today 70% of the 10,000 M.D.’s in Germany use ozone.
The key to why ozone works in reversing so many different disease-states is quite simple. As we age, the efficiency with which we extract oxygen from the environment and transport it to cells is lessened. When the body doesn’t have sufficient oxygen, it reverts to a lower level of functional ability: it can’t carry out its hundreds of thousands of activities necessary for health. Instead of burning glucose through the process of oxidation, as healthy cells do, the oxygen-starved cells ferment glucose anaerobically (without oxygen), producing large amounts of lactic acid. Cells and tissues, then, become over-acidified; they break down, leading to the various diseases of cancer,heart disease, arthritis, autoimmune diseases, and other immune insufficiencies.
When ozone is used in cancer conditions, unlike chemotherapy and radiation, it has no adverse side-effects. It kills pathogens, but leaves healthy cells intact. An article in Science in 1980 reported that ozone inhibits the development of cancer cells “without damage to healthy cells.”
Ozone is also an effective water purification system. Over 3000 cities around the world bubble ozone into its water supplies, including Moscow, Montreal and Los Angeles. La Casa uses ozone to filter its water for both colonics ad well as the floatation chamber.
Ozone has gotten a bad rep in this country because of its association with smog and air pollution. Not only is ozone produced by natural phenomena, it is also produced by pollution. When sunlight, moisture and temperature meet the chemical molecules that constitute pollution, a photochemical reaction takes place that strips off one of the molecules of atmospheric oxygen (O2) and forms ozone (O3), or activated oxygen. In other words, the more pollution there is, the more ozone is generated. On polluted days, we get a high ozone count, but without ozone, the cities would be so polluted, they would be unlivable.
As with any detoxification, you may have a slight detoxifying reaction. This will most likely take the form of an allergy-like reaction – a runny nose, eye tearing, or temporary fatigue. Like any detox, this reaction is good, not bad. The ozone is simply doing its job by breaking down the pollutants in your body. Spectra tests have confirmed that when mucus is discharged, this material is the by-products of the toxins that are being broken down. The lungs produce the mucus in order to get rid of these by-products.