Scientific foundations of ozone therapy

Published scientific research

Schwartz, A. et al. (2012). Ozone Therapy and Its Scientific Foundations. Revista Española de Ozonoterapia, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 199–232.

"This document, based on the latest books and scientific articles on the subject, updates the recent findings that justify, from the scientific point of view, the medical use of ozone (…). As with any healing technique, ozone therapy is dependent on the dosage. It is important to understand that in clinical practice the concentrations of ozone are lower than the toxic levels by several orders of magnitude."

As of October 2021, the Medline database (PubMed) contained 4,024 documents related to ozone therapy — including 301 clinical trials, 207 randomised controlled trials, 55 systematic reviews and 33 meta-analyses — supporting the use of ozone in medicine. The US National Institutes of Health clinical-studies database listed 61 registered ozone-therapy studies.

Ozone therapy and COVID-19

In February 2021, the WHO officially stated that there were then no specific pharmaceutical treatments available for COVID-19 and called on all sectors to act. The International Scientific Committee of Ozone Therapy (ISCO3) proposed, based exclusively on available scientific data, the potential use of ozone therapy as a complementary therapy, in the paper "Potential use of ozone in SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19" (14 March 2020).

The main results of subsequent studies indicated that ozone decreased inflammation indices and assisted-breathing time, improved oxygen saturation and normalised CRP in shorter periods. The routes of application studied were ozonised saline solution, major autohemotherapy and rectal insufflation.

Ozonised saline solution (O3SS)

Ozonised saline solution is a practice developed by the Russian school of ozone therapy (Nizhny Novgorod) and, with considerable success, has been implemented over the last decade in several countries. It is a route of application recommended by the Madrid Declaration on Ozone Therapy (item 3.1.3).

Its complementary use in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 was studied at the Viamed Virgen de la Paloma Hospital in Madrid (Spain); the research was published in J Pharm Pharmacogn Res 9(2): 126–142. The WHO's virtual library "COVID-19 – Global literature on coronavirus disease" has published several investigations on ozonised saline solution and COVID-19.

An experimental treatment

For COVID-19 specifically, ozone "cannot be considered an already proven therapy, but one more experimental treatment (…). The paucity of studies on a safe treatment with reasonable evidence of efficacy should encourage further research until it can be known whether it works or not." Confusing a scarcity of evidence with an absence of evidence is a serious epistemological error.

This is an educational summary. Ozone therapy is a complementary, adjunctive treatment performed by a licensed physician and does not replace a personalised medical evaluation.