Brickell’s Casa Privée isn’t about massages and facials: This one-of-a-kind medical wellness center is far more scientific than that. Its enigmatic treatment rooms are lit up in brilliant color and dressed with inspiring, impressionistic portraits of movie stars (Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift). They offer the gentle buzz of the multisensory theta chamber (a spinning table delivering vestibular motion, binaural beats, cranial-electrotherapy stimulation and eye movement desensitization reprogramming) and a heatless red light LED therapy that’s effective for muscle repair and enhancing athletic performance. Those are just two of the many therapeutic options available. The most popular modality is hyperbaric oxygen therapy, renowned for its healing power, where the patient breathes 100% oxygen in a pressurized chamber. (We normally only breathe 21% oxygen in our atmosphere.) “Everybody has a sense of needing to improve themselves,” says Dr. Bankole Johnson, the founder of Casa Privée, “and hyperbaric oxygen is one of the most powerful ways of doing that, because it reduces inflammation, improves wellness and increases longevity. Inflammation comes in many forms—wound injuries, metabolic disorders, cancers, neurological disorders, neuropsychiatric disorders—so almost everyone’s got something that hyperbaric oxygen can help them with.”
Photos by Nick Garcia