Why Stopping Drinking is the Starting Line, Not the Finish Line
Updated: Sep 18
Specializing in exercise science and nutrition, Melissa Coetzee leads Algarve and Africa Wellness with a dedicated one-on-one approach. Her eight years of sobriety fuel a deeply personal commitment to helping clients achieve sustainable health transformations through professional expertise and lived experience.
Most people think of the day someone stops drinking as the end of the story. In the body, it is closer to the opening page. The brain and the organs that alcohol has been quietly damaging for years do not repair themselves the moment the drinking stops.
They repair themselves over the following weeks and months, and how well that repair goes depends on what happens during that window. For a private client, an executive, or anyone with a business and a family that cannot simply pause, that window is the actual problem nobody is writing about.
I think about this constantly because the people who come to us at Algarve Wellness rarely have the luxury of taking a year out of their lives. You want to optimise your time in treatment because you do not have that much time.
If you look at somebody who comes into treatment, they have got old behaviours, old habits, old reward systems, and old ways of thinking. When they want to leave, they need to have taken on all these new, better habits, these new ways of thinking. The new neural pathways. But this takes a long time. This does not happen in a month.
So the real question I sit with is not whether someone can stop drinking. It is how quickly we can support the biological repair that follows, so the limited time available is used as well as it possibly can be.
This is where hyperbaric oxygen therapy enters the conversation for us, not as a headline treatment, but as one part of that repair work.
Not new and not a trend
The first thing worth correcting is the assumption that hyperbaric oxygen is some new biohacking fashion. It is peer-reviewed, and it is not new, although a lot of people think it is. It has been in routine clinical use for more than forty years as an established treatment for gas embolism, carbon monoxide poisoning, decompression sickness, and slow-healing wounds. What is newer is the interest in how it might support recovery from alcohol dependence specifically. There is not that much research on it, which I do not understand, because there should be.
How it actually works
Under normal conditions, most of the oxygen your body carries travels attached to red blood cells, which are already close to fully loaded. Inside a pressurised chamber, additional oxygen dissolves directly into the blood plasma at levels roughly ten to twenty times higher than normal, depending on the pressure used. That oxygen-rich plasma can reach tissue that ordinary circulation struggles to serve, which is the basis for most of what follows.
What the research shows
A 2017 randomised study found that withdrawal symptoms were brought under control in an average of 3.72 days with hyperbaric oxygen, compared with 9.03 days without it. A larger 2022 study found that blood chemistry recovered faster with oxygen, although it did not find a measurable difference in symptom scores. The evidence during acute withdrawal is still developing, which is why I would rather point to what happens after that phase.
A University of Pennsylvania study found that the body’s own regenerative cells circulating in the bloodstream doubled after a single session and rose eightfold across a full course. A randomised trial in older adults found improvements in attention and processing speed alongside increased blood flow to the brain. For the liver, animal studies and reviews suggest reduced inflammation and support for cell regeneration after injury.
More people should be looking at this, especially for the brain. The brain fog, the memory issues, the chronic fatigue. It may help.
What two months actually looked like
A 64-year-old woman came to us after roughly thirty years of drinking. Her liver was in a terrible condition when she came in.
The first month was not clean, and I think that matters more than anything else about her story. It was very experimental because she still managed to get hold of alcohol. She was still very unsure. Humans are very complex, not very simple. Even when someone comes for help, they may still have the idea that they can drink or may not think they are really an alcoholic.
She stayed. She completed two months, with hyperbaric oxygen therapy three times a week alongside her programme. By the end of it, it was like she had a new liver.
I am not going to tell you the chamber did that on its own. She also stopped drinking, and those two months of abstinence were doing their own work. What I will tell you is that she had a limited window, and we used all of it. The body she left with was not the body she arrived in.
What it requires when done properly
Anyone taking disulfiram, sold as Antabuse, must have it fully cleared before entering a chamber. It can interfere with one of the body’s defences against oxygen toxicity and may increase the risk of complications. An untreated collapsed lung is a contraindication, while an active sinus infection or a head cold may also be reasons to postpone a session. I mention this because someone in recovery who books a session elsewhere without mentioning their medication could be at genuine risk, and that is worth knowing.
At Algarve Wellness, this happens through our partnership with Lourenço Ribeiro, longevity and integrative wellness specialist and founder of the Hyperbaric SPA in Albufeira and Faro, with medical oversight from Dr Catia Saraiva, a pulmonologist and hyperbaric medicine specialist.
Stopping drinking is the moment everyone notices. What happens in the weeks afterwards is quieter, and for someone who genuinely cannot give this a year, how well those weeks are used may matter just as much as the decision to stop at all.
If that is the position you are in, or someone you care about is, the conversation is worth having before the window closes.
Read more from Melissa Coetzee
Melissa Coetzee, CEO and Co-founder of Algarve Wellness
Focusing on the intersection of longevity approaches and science-based wellness protocols, I provide a transformative experience for one individual at a time. My professional foundation in exercise science and nutrition is complemented by a deep personal understanding of resilience, having maintained eight years of sobriety. Supported by a multidisciplinary team of experts, I design bespoke programs that prioritize long-term vitality and sustainable health. My work is dedicated to those who require exclusive, high-touch care that addresses the whole person. Click through to my profile to see how our collective knowledge is distilled into personalized protocols for our clients.
