GIVEN that supplemental oxygen is widely recognized in medicine as the only effective treatment for CO poisoning...
WHY do SSA’s Medicare and Medicaid guidelines not permit the prescription of supplemental oxygen for chronic CO poisoning despite many objective measures of tissue hypoxia in these cases, including low VO2max?
Most medical insurance companies in USA follow the government's policy and only pay for home oxygen is cases of chronically or episodically low arterial oxygen levels, as measured by pulse oximetery or arterial blood gases.
But these measures of O2 saturation (aka SatO2 or O2Sat) are typically normal in people with chronic CO poisoning. Their problem is not with loading oxygen from their lungs into their blood but with unloading it from their blood into tissues and organs, as can be seen by the smaller than normal gap between their arterial and venous oxygen levels.
(For a copy of Donnay's protocol on screening, testing, and treating chronic CO poisoning, please contact us.) 