“I’m here to help CHers avoid the terrible pain we all know so well by providing information outreach on safe and effective methods of controlling CH.”
This page is a tribute to one man’s work, told in his own public words. Pete Batcheller (“Batch”) is a real, named cluster-headache educator who published these methods openly and held a US patent on the central one. The clinical figures here are his own self-reported numbers from a small pilot he ran. It is not a controlled trial, and not our measurements.
The man who taught a generation of patients to breathe
If you spend any time in the cluster-headache forums reading about oxygen, you meet Pete Batcheller, known in the community as “Batch”, almost immediately. A retired US Navy fighter pilot and long-time chronic cluster-headache patient, he has spent the better part of two decades answering nearly every new patient’s oxygen question on Clusterbusters and CH.com, and he does more than answer. He worked out why the standard oxygen prescription so often fails, engineered a better way to deliver it, ran a study to test it, patented it, and then gave the whole thing away for free.
His central insight cuts against the instruction most patients are handed. A doctor writes “oxygen, 6–10 lpm by mask,” the patient tries it, it barely works, and they conclude oxygen is not for them. Batch’s answer, informed by thousands of hours breathing pure oxygen at altitude, is that the flow is simply far too low, and that the breathing pattern matters as much as the gas.
Who he is
Before any of this, he was “Batch” the aviator: an F-8 Crusader pilot, a “Yankee Air Pirate” flying off the carrier USS Hancock on Yankee Station off Vietnam around 1971, back when the Crusader was called the Mig Master and Top Gun didn’t exist yet. Over a 24-year Navy career he logged more than 3,000 hours in fighters and 426 carrier landings, 180 of them at night, every one of those hours breathing 100% oxygen from takeoff to trap.
He nearly became a doctor instead. He took a chemistry degree and a pre-med load at the University of Washington (biochem, genetics, comparative anatomy), then got one flight in a Navy trainer and never looked back.
“I got a flight in a T-34B trainer during my junior year at the UW… Out went the thought of med school and bedpans, and hello Naval Aviation for 24 years. I’d do it again if I could.”
That chemistry-major-turned-pilot is exactly the man who, decades later, would look at a failing oxygen prescription and see a respiratory-physiology problem nobody had bothered to solve. When he finally presented his findings at a neurology conference, he showed up in a cowboy getup, his words, so none of the neurologists would mistake him for one of their own. He grew up on a horse; these days he lives in the woods on the Kitsap peninsula west of Seattle, down a 900-foot logging road he keeps clear with a chainsaw. And he knew, from a career of it, that the high oxygen flows the textbooks warned against were nothing of the kind:
“As a Navy fighter pilot with over 3000 flight hours… breathing 100% oxygen from takeoff to landing on every flight and at very high respiration rates during high G-Force maneuvers… I knew oxygen flow rates this high were very safe.”
1. DEVO2: the demand-valve method
An oxygen demand valve delivers gas only when you inhale, at effectively unlimited peak flow, the same hardware military and emergency medicine use. Batch paired it with deliberate, forceful hyperventilation, and in 2008 he ran a pilot study to measure what happened. Seven patients (six chronic, one episodic) logged the pain level and time to abort for every single attack over eight weeks.
“364 aborts met the primary efficacy endpoint… This made the efficacy of the demand valve (DEVO2) method of aborting CH 364/366 or 99.4%. No other known CH abortive is this effective. As you can see, the DEVO2 method also produced CH aborts 3 to 4 times faster than aborting CH [at] a flow rate of 15 liters/minute.”
Two practical rules fall straight out of his data. The first is that the method is physically demanding: this is not passive mask-breathing.
“It’s hard work huffing and puffing like a big dog with respiration rates up around 20 inhalation-exhalation cycles/minute at forced vital capacity lung tidal volumes.”
The second is timing: because abort time climbed with the pain level at which he started, he hit every attack the instant it announced itself.
“The abort times increased with CH pain level at start of DEVO2 therapy. This is reason enough to start oxygen therapy at the first sign of an approaching CH.”
2. The mechanism: it isn’t only the oxygen
“Oxygen is only half of the abortive. The other half involves blowing off CO2 faster than the body generates it… by intentionally hyperventilating.”
Batch’s most useful contribution may be conceptual. He argued the abort is driven less by oxygen concentration than by blowing off carbon dioxide. Fast, forced breathing drops blood CO2, which raises blood pH; the more alkaline blood both constricts the vessels around the trigeminal nerve and lets haemoglobin load more oxygen (the Bohr effect). High flow, in his telling, matters mostly because it lets you hyperventilate without re-breathing your own CO2.
“Intentionally hyperventilating with 100% oxygen… blows off CO2 from the lungs faster than the body generates it. This elevates blood pH… increases blood hemoglobin’s affinity for oxygen… a super-oxygenated flow of blood to the brain at roughly 115% of that obtained breathing room air. This results in a very rapid vasoconstriction of the trigeminovascular system.”
3. The low-cost method, and the $1 “Redneck Reservoir”
If CO2 is the lever, most of the abort can be done with room air, and only a little pure oxygen. Around 2010–2011 Batch published a variant: hyperventilate room air for 30 seconds, inhale one full lungful of 100% oxygen, hold it 30 seconds, exhale hard, repeat. Same ~7-minute abort, at roughly a tenth of the gas.
“Hyperventilating… with room air for 30 seconds followed by the inhalation of a lungful of 100% oxygen that’s held for 30 seconds… results in an average abort time of 7 minutes for a total of 28 liters of oxygen per abort. That’s roughly a tenth the amount of oxygen consumed with each abort with an oxygen demand valve.”
To deliver that held lungful without an expensive valve, he built a reservoir from a kitchen trash bag and a cut-down Coke bottle, the “Redneck Reservoir”, which, he likes to point out, out-performs his $500 demand valve on the one axis that matters mid-attack: no resistance when you inhale.
“I have a $500 oxygen demand valve and the Redneck Reservoir bag has zero resistance during inhale… Not so for the oxygen demand valve.”
4. Rebound, and staying on the gas
The other recurring practical problem with oxygen is the “chaser”: the attack returning minutes after you come off the tank. Batch’s fix is the one the wider community echoes: don’t stop the instant the pain lifts.
“Staying on oxygen breathing normally for 5 to 10 minutes after the pain stops helps increase the time between CH.”
5. The fight he didn’t have to pick
Batch didn’t stop at technique. In 2010 the US Patent Office issued him a patent on the demand-valve method of aborting cluster headache, not to profit from it, but to document it (it has since expired). He served as a director of O.U.C.H., a cluster-headache patient organization, worked from 2007 with the headache neurologist Dr. Todd Rozen, and in 2013 joined the American Academy of Neurology as a cluster-headache researcher, presenting a poster of his survey data at the AAN’s 2014 annual meeting in Philadelphia. A retired fighter pilot, standing at a scientific poster among the field’s leading neurologists, holding his own.
And when he learned that Medicare simply would not cover home oxygen for cluster headache, leaving the poorest and sickest patients to go without the one abortive that reliably works, he spent years trying to overturn it, joining an American Headache Society effort with neurologists who brought a binder of thirty studies to the table. They lost. So Batch did the next thing: he taught patients, in patient detail, how to get the same medical-grade oxygen legally and cheaply as welding gas, and how to build the reservoir bag above for a dollar. If the system wouldn’t help them, he would.
Why he does it
Here is the part that should be said plainly. In roughly two decades of this, covering the studies, the patent, the conferences, the thousands of answered posts, and the trips to meet neurologists in Norway and Germany, Pete Batcheller has never taken a cent. By his own accounting he has spent an average of around $2,500 a year of his own money to do it, and reached at least two new patients a week for years. He is not a doctor and never pretended to be one; he is a patient who refused to let other patients suffer for lack of information he already had.
“I don’t sell anything, nor have I taken one cent in remuneration for any of my posts… My wife will attest to that fact, as she does our books.”
How to weigh this
None of this is a randomised trial. It is one determined patient’s engineering, a seven-person pilot, and the better part of two decades of forum teaching, and it should be read that way. But it lines up almost perfectly with what a wider reading of the cluster-headache communities shows across thousands of unrelated records: the people oxygen “doesn’t work” for are very often running it at too low a flow, with the wrong delivery, too late. A great many of the firsthand abort reports in those communities are simply his advice, handed back by the people it worked for.
He has never taken a dollar for any of it. What he wants is simpler: that the next person doubled over at three in the morning would already know how to breathe.
For Batch, with thanks.