SHOP
Whole Body O2 Brain O2 Immune O2 Fatigue O2 Glossary Intended Use
New User Onboarding Whole Body O2 Practitioner Certification Certification Portal
OXYGEN LIBRARY
O2 Training vs Therapy PubMed Portal Oxygen Multistep Book Inaccuracy Report
Competitors LiveO2 to EWOT
SUPPORT
970-658-2789 Schedule Appointment Our Team Join a Meeting
Experiments — Oxygen Library

The Super Glue Junkie: How Altitude Caused 30 Years of Foot Cracks

30 years of painful heel fissures. Dozens of creams, two feet full of super glue. The answer wasn’t dry skin — it was altitude. And 15 minutes on the first LiveO2 system fixed it the next morning.

30 yrs Using super glue on foot cracks
7,500 ft Home altitude (Colorado)
15 min First LiveO2 session duration
Next day Red zone around heels — gone
Foot cracks caused by altitude hypoxia

The Mystery Nobody Could Solve

My name is Mark, and I was a super glue junkie for about 30 years. Heel fissures — deep cracks in the skin on my feet — caused pain with every step. If I didn’t super-glue them shut, walking hurt.

I tried every cream. I scrubbed. I moisturized. The popular answer was always “dry skin” — which was both wrong and useless. The cracks kept coming back.

What made it strange: the cracks had a pattern. They got worse with stress. They healed on vacation. They disappeared on business trips to sea level. They returned a couple weeks after coming home.

None of the dry-skin explanations accounted for any of that.

Mark's toe cracks — 30 years of heel fissures
Toe cracks that returned with every stress cycle — no cream, filing, or treatment stopped them
Mark's heel cracks — deep fissures from altitude hypoxia
The heel fissures that disappeared at sea level and returned within weeks of coming home to Colorado

“A great, nearly lifelong mystery governed the grimace of about one in four of the steps I took my whole life.”

— Mark, LiveO2 founder

The Clue That Changed Everything

A trip to Cleveland broke the pattern. Two Myers Cocktails and a week at low altitude — when Mark returned home, the cracks were gone. Replaced with healthy pink skin underneath the peeling remnants of old tissue.

That was reproducible. And it was explainable.

The Cleveland Equation

Colorado (Home)

7,500 feet altitude. Roughly 1/3 less atmosphere than sea level. Every breath delivers significantly less oxygen than at sea level.

Cleveland (Sea Level)

Full atmospheric pressure. Same as spending a week in a mild hyperbaric environment. Feet healed completely within the week.

The altitude was the variable. Living at 7,500 feet meant chronic, low-grade oxygen deficit — not enough to feel dramatically different day-to-day, but enough to compromise how the body repairs tissue under the skin of the feet.

Von Ardenne’s Callus Reflex

Working with Manfred von Ardenne’s oxygen research at the time, Mark found the mechanism: the callus reflex.

How Hypoxia Causes Poor-Quality Skin

Stress of any kind — work pressure, life events, physical strain — triggers inflammation. Inflammation triggers accelerated cell growth. Under normal oxygen levels, those new cells are healthy and organized. Under hypoxic conditions, they’re rushed, poorly constructed, and structurally weak.

Weak cells crack under mechanical stress. The heels — weight-bearing surfaces — feel it first. Stress precedes cracks by about two weeks because that’s how long it takes the poor-quality cells to grow in and fail.

Sea level healed the feet not because of rest or humidity — but because full atmospheric oxygen allowed the body to grow decent cells. High altitude grew bad ones. The super glue was just the patch on a biology problem.

15 Minutes on the First LiveO2 System

After the Cleveland trip, Mark returned home. Let his feet crack again — just enough to break out the super glue. Then he stepped onto the first LiveO2 system he had built.

15 minutes.

What Happened

Day 0 (session day): 15-minute LiveO2 session. Feet were cracked. Super glue had been applied.

Next morning: The red zone of inflammation around the heels — gone. Completely.

Next several days: Poor quality skin began to erode. Healthy tissue underneath visible.

Following 6 months: No fissures. No super glue. The problem did not return.

Ongoing maintenance: When the telltale redness reappears on the soles — time for another session. “That fixes it every time.”

Mark's foot — healthy skin in 2026, maintained with LiveO2
2026 — no fissures, no super glue. Oxygen levels maintained with periodic LiveO2 sessions.

The same single session also resolved nagging issues in the hips, neck, and back that had been present for years. All downstream of the same mechanism: chronic altitude hypoxia creating systemic inflammation that degraded tissue quality wherever mechanical stress was highest.

Frequently Asked Questions

Heel fissures are deep cracks in the skin on the bottom and sides of the heels. The conventional explanation — “dry skin” — is incomplete. The real mechanism in this case: hypoxic inflammation (triggered by chronic altitude oxygen deficit or stress) causes accelerated growth of poor-quality skin cells. Those cells lack structural integrity and crack under the normal mechanical load of walking. Moisturizer can’t fix structurally deficient cells.
At sea level, full atmospheric pressure delivers significantly more oxygen per breath than at 7,500 feet altitude. With adequate oxygen available, the body grows higher-quality replacement skin cells — organized, elastic, and structurally sound. A week at sea level was equivalent to mild hyperbaric therapy. The heels healed because the biology finally had enough oxygen to do repair work correctly.
The callus reflex is the phenomenon where stressed, hypoxic tissue responds to inflammation by proliferating large quantities of poor-quality cells. Rather than growing fewer, better-constructed cells, hypoxic tissue grows more, weaker cells — which are structurally insufficient and prone to mechanical failure (cracking, callus formation, etc.). Von Ardenne’s research identified oxygen as the limiting factor in cellular construction quality.
The LiveO2 session delivered a concentrated dose of oxygenated blood to peripheral tissues — including the feet — that 30 years of breathing thin mountain air had never provided. One session was enough to extinguish the active inflammation (the red zone was gone the next morning) and allow the body’s normal repair mechanisms to run correctly. The poor-quality skin eroded over days as healthy replacement tissue grew in underneath.
Mark monitors for the “telltale redness” on the soles of his feet — the early sign of returning inflammation — and uses that as the trigger for another session. Since the initial fix, no persistent fissures have returned. The frequency needed varies by individual lifestyle, altitude, and stress load. One session when early warning signs appear has been sufficient to prevent recurrence.
Yes — and Mark found that the single session also resolved chronic pain in his hips, neck, and back. These areas had been under the same chronic hypoxic stress. The callus reflex produces poor-quality tissue wherever structural demand is high — not just in the feet. Joints, tendons, and connective tissue under repetitive load are all candidates for hypoxia-driven degradation, and all potentially responsive to oxygen training.

More from the Oxygen Library

Experiments
Before and After: What 2 Sessions Did to Parkinson’s Motor Function
 Experiments
ALS and Oxygen Training: Bill Brown’s Before-and-After Walking Experiment
 Experiments
Concussion Recovery in 2 Days: The CNSVS Neurological Panel Results
 Physiology
The Alkali Connection: What Your Urine pH Reveals About Oxygen