“General Guidelines for Clinical Application of Hydrogen-Oxygen Mixed Gas Inhalation Therapy” has been released for the first time.

The 18th Straits Forum Health and Wellness Sub-Forum was recently held in Xiamen, Fujian Province. Themed “Science and Technology Innovation and Digital Intelligence Empowering a Healthy Future,” this sub-forum focused on “expanding people-to-people exchanges and deepening integrated development,” fully implementing the “15th Five-Year Plan” deployment regarding the implementation of a health-first development strategy. It became a distinctive academic activity of this year’s Straits Forum, focusing on cutting-edge medical innovation and deeply cultivating the health and wellness fields of people across the Taiwan Strait and Hong Kong and Macao.

Zhong Nanshan, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and Director of the Guangzhou National Laboratory, along with over a thousand authoritative experts and representatives from the medical communities across the Taiwan Strait, Hong Kong, and Macao, attended the forum. During the forum’s symposium on “Development of Hydrogen-Oxygen Medicine,” the Chinese Association of Research Hospitals approved and released the group standard “General Guidelines for Clinical Application of Hydrogen-Oxygen Mixed Gas Inhalation Therapy” (T/CRHA 316–2026). The release of this standard fills a gap in the industry and marks a new stage in cooperation between the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao in the field of hydrogen-oxygen medicine, moving from previously fragmented and experience-based academic exchanges to a standardized, regulated, and long-term approach.

According to reports, this group standard was proposed by the Respiratory Diseases Committee of the Chinese Research Hospital Association and led by the National Center for Respiratory Medicine, in conjunction with several top-tier tertiary hospitals and authoritative research institutions nationwide. The standard strictly aligns with national standardization guidelines, clearly defining the clinical application scenarios, operational procedures, and application boundaries of hydrogen-oxygen inhalation therapy. It provides an authoritative basis for the standardized, safe, and standardized clinical promotion of cutting-edge medical technologies, and lays a solid institutional foundation for homogeneous diagnosis and treatment and standardized academic collaboration within the region.

In his speech, Academician Zhong Nanshan pointed out that hydrogen-oxygen medicine is one of the few original, fully independently controllable, and globally leading cutting-edge interdisciplinary medical technologies in my country, representing a highly representative independent innovation in the fields of biomedicine and gas medicine. Through long-term exploration by the domestic medical community, my country has formed a clinical application and research system for hydrogen-oxygen medicine with Chinese characteristics, ranking among the world’s leading levels in overall development. At the same time, he also emphasized that with the rapid expansion of the industry, the domestic hydrogen-oxygen medicine field has long suffered from problems such as inconsistent clinical application standards, an incomplete evidence-based system, unregulated application at the grassroots level, and rampant market chaos. This extensive development model has severely restricted the scientific popularization and long-term development of this original technology.

In response to the current situation, Academician Zhong Nanshan proposed that for hydrogen-oxygen medicine to achieve long-term healthy development, it must adhere to the core of evidence-based medicine, support the application of the technology with rigorous and sufficient clinical research data, and insist on standardization first and standard-led development. This requires unifying clinical operating procedures, improving the industry standard system, rectifying irregularities, addressing shortcomings in the discipline’s development, and propelling this original Chinese interdisciplinary innovative technology from the stage of empirical exploration into a new stage of high-quality development characterized by standardization, scientific rigor, and regulation. This will provide solid support for the safe and beneficial use of the technology, the optimization and upgrading of the discipline, and the orderly development of the industry.

The experts at the meeting believed that hydrogen-oxygen medicine, as a distinctive and independently controllable emerging discipline in my country’s gas medicine field, has the advantages of being non-invasive, safe, and universally applicable. It is widely applicable to various clinical scenarios such as critical care, rehabilitation of chronic airway diseases (especially COPD) and COVID-19, benign airway tumors, and postoperative respiratory function repair in the chest and lungs. At the same time, research has confirmed that hydrogen-oxygen medicine has a positive effect on adjuvant therapy for radiotherapy and chemotherapy of malignant tumors, early Alzheimer’s disease, and bone and joint diseases, and has outstanding value for people’s livelihood.

It is understood that after years of independent research and iterative innovation, my country has established a complete research system, clinical application system, and industrial support system for hydrogen-oxygen medicine. Domestically produced compliant medical equipment is continuously upgrading towards lightweight and intelligent designs, and its large-scale, systematic clinical application achievements rank among the top in the world, laying a solid foundation for joint academic research, technology promotion, and results sharing across the Taiwan Strait and Hong Kong and Macao. With its distinct advantages of being non-invasive, safe, and widely adaptable, hydrogen-oxygen medicine highly meets the health and medical needs of the special environment of high-altitude regions, demonstrating unique application value in the prevention and rehabilitation of altitude-related chronic diseases and altitude-related respiratory diseases, opening up new pathways for the universal prevention and treatment of respiratory chronic diseases and characteristic health governance in border areas.