Randal McCloy was as close to dead as you could ever be when he was rushed to hospital. The 27 year old coal miner had sustained the following injuries thanks to an explosion and subsequent 41 hours buried in a mine shaft.

He was in a coma, his heart was barely beating, one of his lungs had completely collapsed, his liver and kidneys had shut down, and his brain was severely damaged due to exposure to carbon monoxide.


At best he would be severely brain damaged as over 40hours exposure to carbon monoxide had stripped the protective myelin sheath from most of his brain’s neurons.

Dr Bailes, his neurosurgeon was quoted: “there’s no drug that can help reverse that sort of damage to the brain.”

While McCloy was being given oxygen infusions in a hyperbaric chamber, Dr. Bailes was struck by inspiration: He ordered a daily dose of 15,000 milligrams (mg) docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) for the miner. In layman's terms?

"Fish oil," says Dr. Bailes.

Several weeks passed. Then, unexpectedly, McCloy emerged from his coma. This in itself was amazing, but he wasn't done. In the weeks that followed, he stunned even the most optimistic experts by recovering his memory and gradually regaining his ability to walk, talk, and see, a turnaround that many in the medical field called miraculous.
Although Dr. Bailes believes the hyperbaric chamber may have worked some magic on the myelin, he thinks much of the credit belongs elsewhere. "The omega-3s helped rebuild the damaged gray and white matter of his brain," says Dr. Bailes, who now takes his own medicine, swallowing a fish-oil supplement each morning. On his orders, McCloy, still recuperating at home, continues to take fish oil daily. "I would say he should be on it for a lifetime," says Dr. Bailes. "But then, I think everybody should."

Maybe what fish oil needed all along was a better publicist. After all, this isn't the medical community's first infatuation with omega-3s. Back in 1970, a pair of Danish researchers, Hans Olaf Bang and Jorn Dyerberg, traveled to Greenland to uncover why the Eskimo population there had a low incidence of heart disease despite subsisting on a high-fat diet. Their finding: The Eskimos' blood contained high levels of omega-3s, establishing the first link to heart health. But even though this discovery spurred additional omega-3 research throughout the '70s and '80s, the public remained more interested in other nutrients—none of which had the unfortunate words "fish" or "fatty" in their names.
Source: http://health.msn.com

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