Understanding what hyperbaric oxygen can do for hearing loss

DEAR DR. ROACH: I was just diagnosed with sudden sensorineural hearing loss.

They gave me a steroid injection into the ear and more steroids by mouth, but they say it’s up to me whether I want to try hyperbaric oxygen.

Do you have any opinion on it? How does breathing pure oxygen at two atmospheres help anything? Is there some underlying theory to explain why people do this? It seems to me all this …