What actually happens in a hydrogen therapy session

If you are weighing up a first hydrogen therapy visit and want to know exactly what you are walking into, here is the plain version. You arrive and we talk for about ten minutes, you settle into a chair for another five, and then you breathe air with hydrogen mixed into it through a soft tube resting at your nose for forty-five minutes. After that you put your coat on and drive home.

That is the whole of it. The part most people are nervous about — the machine, the tube, the not knowing — turns out to be the least eventful part of the hour. So here is what happens in a hydrogen therapy session at our clinic in Norton Fitzwarren, minute by minute.

Arrival and a proper conversation: about ten minutes

There is no reception desk. Either Agnieszka or Piotr opens the front door, the one with the grapevine growing up the brick, and says hello properly rather than from behind a counter.

We show you the room before anything is switched on. We ask what brought you, whether you take any medication, whether you are pregnant, and whether anything about the idea worries you. If you have a health condition, we will say what we always say: speak to your GP or another qualified healthcare professional first. You can read more about the building and the setting on our clinic page.

There is a kettle, and there is time. If you would rather talk for fifteen minutes than ten, we do.

Getting comfortable: about five minutes

You stay fully clothed. Nothing is injected, nothing is swallowed, and nothing goes in your ears or your mouth.

The chair reclines as far, or as little, as you want it to. There is a blanket if you feel the cold. If you would like the blind down, we put the blind down. Bring a book, headphones, your phone — none of it interferes.

The hydrogen inhalation session itself: forty-five minutes

The hydrogen comes through a soft nasal cannula, a light tube that loops over your ears and rests just below your nostrils. It sits far more lightly than it looks.

Then not much happens, and this is where we tend to disappoint people. Hydrogen is odourless and tasteless, so there is nothing to smell and nothing to taste. There is a quiet hum from the machine in the corner. Some people read, some scroll, some doze off, some chat to us the whole way through.

One of us is nearby the entire time. If you want to stop after ten minutes, you say so and we stop. We will not ask you to justify it. If your nose feels a little dry, say so and we will fetch you a glass of water.

What most people actually notice

Most people describe it afterwards as a quiet forty-five minutes in a comfortable chair. That is the honest summary.

We are not going to tell you how you will feel, because we do not know, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. Some people get up feeling relaxed. Some get up feeling exactly as they did when they sat down. Both are entirely normal outcomes of an hour spent sitting still.

Leaving: straight back to your day

A session involves no sedatives, no anaesthetic and nothing invasive, so there is no medical reason to wait before driving or going back to work. People go straight on to the school run, the office, or the shops in Taunton. Nothing needs to wear off.

We will not hurry you out of the door either. If you want to sit with a cup of tea and ask more questions, that is usually the best bit of our morning.

Is a hydrogen inhalation session safe?

This is the question people are often too polite to ask first, so we will answer it directly.

• Concentration and flammability. Hydrogen only becomes flammable in air above roughly four per cent by volume. Well-designed inhalation equipment is built to stay below that threshold — and a 2019 paper in Medical Gas Research, which measured the output of different inhalers, found that not every device on the market does. That finding is exactly why we checked the output of ours before opening. Worth noting: most of that paper's authors worked for a hydrogen device manufacturer, so read it with that in mind.
• What has been measured in people. In 2021, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital reported a small phase one study in which eight healthy adults breathed 2.4 per cent hydrogen in medical air through a high-flow nasal cannula, under hospital monitoring — a different delivery set-up from the soft cannula we use — for between 24 and 72 hours. They reported no clinically significant adverse effects. Eight people is a very small study, it looked at safety rather than benefit, and the authors themselves wrote that future studies need to be larger.

Beyond that: hydrogen therapy is not a medical treatment and is not a substitute for advice from your GP or another qualified healthcare professional. If you are pregnant, take medication, or are managing a health condition, please speak to them before you book. If you are unwell on the day, ring us and cancel — there is no charge.

What we are not claiming

We do not claim that a session cures, treats or fixes anything, and we will not start. The published science on molecular hydrogen is early and mostly small in scale.

The paper that set the field going was published in Nature Medicine in 2007, where Ohsawa and colleagues proposed that hydrogen acts as a selective antioxidant, reducing oxidative stress in cultured cells and in a rat model of brain injury. That is laboratory and animal work. It is interesting, and it is not a promise about how you will feel on a Tuesday afternoon in Somerset. We have written about that research, and its limits, in our piece on hydrogen and oxidative stress.

People come to us curious, and curiosity is a fair reason to try something once. It is not a reason for us to promise you an outcome.

Booking a first visit

If reading all this has made the unknown a bit smaller, the gentlest way in is the twenty-minute taster at £45 — a short introduction at your own pace, with time to ask anything before we begin. You can book a taster session here, and the session lengths and packages are listed on our pricing page.

If you would rather understand the equipment first, start with how hydrogen therapy works. And if you would simply rather talk to a human, ring us or book a free consultation. We would rather talk than sell.