Archive for the 'Buteyko Articles' Category
Monday, March 20th, 2006
Until recently, western medical research has been inconclusive in determining whether or not there is real benefit for an asthmatic to conduct breathing exercises as part of an overall asthma management program. These exercises have certainly been popular in many alternative type asthma management programs but have not yet been embraced by allopathic, or traditional western physicians.
But they are beneficial and will help an asthma sufferer reduce symptoms and increase strength.
The most often practiced technique is Buteyko (named after the Russian doctor who developed them). In very simple terms, Buteyko exercises involve breathing through the nose (not mouth), exhaling for as long as possible and then holding the breath as long as possible at the end of the exhale. During the inhale, a series of short, but shallow breaths are practiced.
While breathing techniques have long been supported by naturopathic physicians, it is only in the last several years that the allopathic medical community (traditional doctors) has moved to try and quantify any potential benefit from these exercises. One study, published in the March 2004 edition of “Current Opinion in Pulmonary Medicine” concluded there might be some benefit, although more study was required.
In several patient groups using buteyko training, there did appear to be reduced asthma symptoms although lung function did not appreciably change (as measured by PEFR). Nevertheless, patients felt better and did experience a reduction in need for relief medications.
Since asthma is related to inflammation of the lungs and constriction of the smooth involuntary bronchiole muscles, how can doing breathing exercises help alleviate symptoms?
For starters, it is estimated that some 30% of asthmatics suffer some degree of breathing dysfunction. Bad habits are easily learned when suffering from asthma symptoms and it is not uncommon for those habits to continue in between attacks – breathing through the mouth and short, shallow breaths for example.
This type of breathing deprives the lungs of their full potential to effectively exchange oxygen with carbon dioxide. Breathing exercises enforce good habits where the full range of lung function is used. Consequently, the body gets the oxygen it needs and the chronic asthmatic feels better, with more energy.
And not only will it make the breathing process more efficient, there is evidence that breathing muscles (diaphragm and lung muscles) are strengthened. So even if breath training doesn’t directly improve lung function, eliminating bad habits will improve overall health and quality of life. And this new energy level is important in getting stronger and finding the motivation to attack asthma with a total management plan that results in symptoms being completely controlled – with very little, if any need for medications.
In addition to increased energy levels and stronger lung muscles, there is another benefit to breathing exercises –even if it doesn’t directly result in increased lung function. And that is when actually enduring an asthma attack.
Anyone who has asthma knows what it is like to struggle for breath. You can’t get enough air into your lungs and just as agonizing, you can’t seem to get any air out. Asthmatics who practice correct breathing exercises are much more likely to be able to endure, in a controlled manner, an asthma attack than those that don’t.
Controlling asthma cannot be achieved by only using one tool. Multiple tools should be used – in addition to the control and relief medications prescribed by your physician. Diet, exercise, trigger controls are all essential components; and so is a good and consistent program of breathing exercises. Using all of these tools will allow an asthmatic to completely control her disease and enjoy a symptom free lifestyle.
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Thursday, March 16th, 2006
We’ve all heard of hyperventilation, a condition linked with panic attacks, involving very fast breathing and a dramatic loss of carbon dioxide, the gas that we normally breathe out. This leads to hypocapnia (loss of carbon dioxide), and the standard treatment is to breathe into a paper bag, which gets some of the missing carbon dioxide back into the lungs.
Traditionally we understand hyperventilation as a short-term condition. But doctors and scientists are raising questions about whether abnormal breathing can have a more long-term effect on our bodies. Is how we breathe important in more ways than simply determining oxygen intake and helping our bodies to relax? Does the way we breathe cause long-term chemical and physiological effects? It’s a contentious subject. In fact, you might think that lack of carbon dioxide in your body shouldn’t be a problem; after all, breathing is about filling your lungs with oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. How can you have too little of a waste product? However, it’s well known that if you lose too much carbon dioxide from your blood by breathing too deeply or too often — ie, what most of us associate with panic attacks — you upset the acid/alkaline balance in the body and trigger harmful changes in the metabolism.
What’s controversial is whether this can cause long-term problems. Eight years ago, Dutch researchers ran some hotly debated trials, reported in the New Scientist, pooh-poohing the whole idea of hyperventilation and asserting that hyperventilation syndrome symptoms did not seem to be dependent on levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. At the same time, the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine also ran an editorial questioning whether hyperventilation syndrome existed. Since then, however, there has been research indicating that breathing out too much carbon dioxide may be responsible for longer-term disorders.
A review article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002 concluded that low carbon dioxide in the blood — hypocapnia — “appears to induce substantial adverse physiological and medical effects” in people with pneumonia and heart failure. A review from the University of Westminster last year described how the effects of hypocapnia on blood flow and oxygen in the body could cause increased joint and muscle pain. And recent authoritative trials from Australia and New Zealand have shown that a breathing technique called Buteyko — which trains people to breathe in a controlled way so that they do not become depleted of carbon dioxide — brought significant reductions in the amount of medication people with asthma had to use.
David Beales, a GP in Gloucester, believes that all this points to the importance of being able to measure over-breathing and then to prescribe treatments to bring it back into balance, such as Buteyko.
He does have an interest in its success; he is medical adviser to the American company Better Physiology Ltd, which developed the product. This autumn he gave a series of lectures and workshops to doctors at the Royal Society of Medicine on the carbondioxide issue.
Beales believes that common symptoms that many people come to GPs with, such as lack of energy, headaches and depression, can often be the result of overbreathing and the impaired blood flow to the brain that results.
“It’s standard medical textbook stuff, which most doctors forget as soon as they leave med school,” Dr Beales says, arguing that lowered carbon dioxide in the blood results in a lowering of blood pressure, which leads to less oxygen getting to brain and muscles. Once the problem has been identified, he says, people can bring their breathing back into balance.
It’s an area that is still under-researched and until large trials demonstrate a firm link between carbon-dioxide levels and health, there will remain scientific sceptics. A large $500,000 trial measuring carbon-dioxide levels in stressed Japanese schoolchildren, due to begin next spring, will provide more definitive answers on whether breathing affects how we feel.
In the meantime, Professor David Peters, of the School of Integrated Health at the University of Westminster, who specialises in treating stress disorders, believes that carbon-dioxide levels are a phenomenon and worth pursuing. “The physiology is well established,” he says. “It’s clear that people who have been stressed or traumatised don’t have to be hyperventilating to have a breathing-rhythm disorder and low carbon dioxide.”
Buteyko breathing will significantly reduce hyperventilation, thus increasing quality of life. Asthma Free Naturally and Close Your Mouth by Patrick McKeown are good intriductions to the method. These books are available form most good bookstores or from www.buteyko.ie/books.html
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Thursday, March 16th, 2006
DOING HER DUTY: Nurse Jill McGowan is spreading the Buteyko word. A NURSE who treated New York’s 9/11 firefighters with a revolutionary no-medicine approach has been using her skills to help Inverclyde’s asthma sufferers.Jill McGowan, 51, a former nursing lecturer at
Inverclyde Nursing College, used her expertise in a breathing technique called Buteyko to treat New York firefighters whose lungs were damaged in the Twin Towers blaze.Her mastery of Buteyko is now being taught to a group of Inverclyde’s asthma sufferers.
Jill says the skills she teaches can transform the lives of sufferers, helping people with asthma and other chronic breathing problems cope with their condition without the use of drugs.
Jill has asthma herself and sees it as her duty to teach as many people as she can about Buteyko.
She said: “I’ve got no funding at all. I don’t get paid for doing this, but to me it’s political, there are people who need Buteyko.
“I’m a nurse. I’ve got a code of conduct which says if I know of anything that’s available to assist someone I should make it available.
“When you see a human being recovering it makes the hairs on your arms stand on end.”
Jill is so committed to getting Buteyko recognised and accepted by the NHS that she sold her house and car to fund her own clinical trial to prove it works.
At the moment she provides the service to the NHS free of charge, so patients don’t have to foot the bill.
She thinks the only thing that prevents Buteyko being adopted by the NHS are drug companies who have an interest in keeping asthma sufferers on medication.
Jill’s hope is her clinical trial and other studies in Australia and New Zealand could soon turn the tide and see Buteyko accepted by UK health chiefs.
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Thursday, March 16th, 2006
They say you are what you eat, but it could also well be that your health is influenced by the way you breathe. If you suffer from sleep apnoea, asthma, hypertension, or panic attacks, read on. By Carla Oates.
We breathe more times per week, per day, per minute, than we do anything else. So it makes perfect sense that if we’re doing it incorrectly, our health will inevitably suffer.
In the 50s, Russian professor Konstantin Pavlovich Butekyo cured himself of life-threatening hypertension simply by changing the way he inhaled air.
In his studies, Butekyo discovered that over-breathing (taking in too much oxygen) triggers an imbalance in the body’s metabolism, causing various symptoms from bronchospasm (spasming of the air tubes), heart vessel spasm, digestive tract spasms and increased blood pressure. Over the long term, this dysfunction, he believed, would lead to chronic illness.
Butekyo practitioner Roger Price says carbon dioxide is important as it helps release oxygen into our blood. “If we over-breathe we lose carbon dioxide. The tissues then become starved of oxygen and then our body’s systems start to spasm -it’s then that we run into all sorts of health problems.”
Like many alternative treatments, it has taken many years for the Butekyo method to gain recognition from the health authorities. However, on March 3 this year the Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, mailed 20,000 packages to Australian GPs detailing the Asthma 2005 management program.
In it, 40 complementary therapies were examined and the Butekyo technique came out as the most effective, safest and side-effect-free method of reducing symptoms and medication.
When it comes to over-breathing, Price says asthma sufferers, for example, are chronic over-breathers. “Their bronchial tubes go into spasm and the sufferer finds it difficult to breathe. They panic and try to take in more air. This makes the problem worse and they end up having a full-blown attack.”
He adds, “By increasing their carbon dioxide levels through restraining their breath, the air tubes open again. Sufferers often compare the experience to having a puff of Ventolin.” But the beauty is that it’s natural -there’s no medication involved.
Price says most people don’t realise they over-breathe because they’ve been doing it for most of their lives.
“We call it hidden over-breathing,” he says. “If you breathe through your mouth, you over-breathe. Normal breathing is defined as a gentle wave of eight to 10 breaths per minute, in and out, through the nose using the diaphragm and not the upper chest”.
He adds: “The beauty of breathing through the nose (besides being a much calmer way of breathing) is that it filters out pollutants and allergens. When you breathe through your mouth, you breathe in everything - there is no protection”.
Price says that we’re the only animals that don’t naturally breathe through our noses “Somewhere in our early childhood, our bodies became overloaded with stress and we began to breathe through our mouths,” says Price. “As babies we were all nose breathers - if we weren’t, breastfeeding would be a very messy affair,” he laughs.
The key, Price says, is to restore normal breathing by reducing the number of breaths per minute as well as the volume of air per breath. This is contrary to the Western “model” of deep breathing and exhaling great gusts of air through the mouth.
“It’s commonly perceived that breathing deeply is good, but if you observe top athletes and swimmers - they have the slowest pulse and the most gentle, shallow breathing in the population,” he says.
Musician Milica Stefanovic, 26, had suffered from asthma since childhood and was fed up with being dependent on medication. She enrolled in the Butekyo course two-and-a-half years ago and hasn’t taken regular reliever or preventer medication since.
“I’d already seen a naturopath and that hadn’t really helped. When I started the Butekyo course I was a little sceptical and was shocked at how effective it was. I haven’t been to hospital since the course and my quality of life has greatly improved. I only need my Ventolin very occasionally (they still encourage you to take it with you wherever you go - just in case).
“It’s a very holistic practice - by changing your breathing, you feel calmer and more relaxed - it makes you very aware of your stress levels,” says Stefanovic.
Two years ago, salesman Reno Russo, 50, was told by his specialist that if he didn’t get a C-pap machine for his sleep apnoea he could die.
He did the Butekyo course and never had to order the C-pap machine.
“A friend recommended I talk to Roger Price. I spoke with him for an hour about the course. I’m from a scientific background and it all made so much sense.
He told me to tape my mouth up that night to force me to breath through my nose. I slept through the night, woke up free of a headache, a runny nose and had boundless energy,” says Russo.
“It appeared to cure me. I then did the course and it has been life-changing. The only time my sleep apnoea relapses is whenI don’t tape up my mouth. Also, if ever I get breathless during the day, I do the Butekyo breathing exercises and I’m right.”
More and more studies are proving that the way we breathe could be the biggest asset or liability in terms of our health.
Although the treatment sounds simple, says Price, the breathing exercises take time, effort and commitment.
“We’re changing a lifelong pattern. We also ask you to reassess your lifestyle - in the course we look at certain things that may put more stress on the body pushing you to over-breathe,” he says.
“Good posture, less stress and a balanced diet are all-important in helping to balance the body so it can assist the body in breathing normally. It is life-changing for people because not only are they often relieved of their ailments but they learn about balancing their lives at the same time.”
Want to take a breather?
• Try reading Close Your Mouth or Asthma Free Naturally by Patrick McKeown .
• A Buteyko course involves 8 hours over 3 days. It costs between €245 (£200) for a 12-month program, includes unlimited refreshers during the following 12 months plus follow-ups. For more information, Freephone 1800 931 935.
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Wednesday, March 15th, 2006
by Michelle McDonagh Connaught Tribune 21st May 2004 Part of article- Richards story Fourteen years old Richard Moran has been a chronic asthmatic since the age of eleven months. His condition was so bad that he was almost constantly on antibiotics and had to be hospitalised at least six times a year. However, his father Peter says that since Richard started Buteyko Breathing last September, he has become a different person- he has had only one asthma attack since then and has been able to significantly reduce his medication
The week before Richard first went to one of Patrick McKeown’s clinics in Dublin, his father had to carry him up an incline behind their house because he could not walk up the hill himself. He could’nt play football outside with his brother for more than ten minutes without having to go inside and use his nebuliser machine. Peter explains: “Richard can now play football and run and he does not need his machine anymore. The difference is unbelieveable, he feels a million dollars.” Richard practices his breathing exercises every day, breathes through his nose constantly and covers his mouth with paper tape to ensure that he does not revert to mouth breathing in his sleep. We can’t believe the difference in our child and its all down to changing his breathing. I would not hesitate to recommend this method to anybody,” says Peter.
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Wednesday, March 15th, 2006
The pioneering study of a Russian Professor into reducing the effects of Asthma on suffers over forty years ago is launched this weekend in Belfast.The first Buteyko breathing workshop for Northern Ireland suffers takes place this Friday and Saturday at the Beachlawn Hotel, Belfast. Galway therapist Patrick McKeown and Dungannon practitioner Tom Herron jointly run the sessions.Patrick came across this therapy whilst suffering from chronic asthma and being literally at his wits end to stop the endless increasing of his medication. He researched the Buteyko method extensively and trained in Russia in the founding Buteyko Clinic of Moscow under Dr. Andrey Novozhilov (Professor Buteyko’s Son) and Dr. Ludmilla Buteyko (Professor Buteyko’s wife).Over four decades Russian Professor Konstantin Buteyko developed this programme of breathing to significantly reverse symptoms in a number of respiratory disorders including asthma. The Buteyko Clinic Method is taught according to the standards and method of the Buteyko Clinic of Moscow. His method is recognised by the Russian government since 1983 and forms part of medical training at Russian Universities.
Currently, there are 150,000 people with asthma living in Northern Ireland - 99,000 adults and 51,000 children. (Oct 2004)
Asthma inflicts greater social and economic damage in the Western World than either TB or HIV, according to the World Health Organisation’s April 2002 report on the links of ill health in children and the deteriorating environment. According to the 1998 International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood, the countries with the highest 12-month incidence of asthma were the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the Republic of Ireland.
Speaking today Patrick McKeown said: “Asthma is not discriminatory and affects all walks of life. In fact some of the most influential people of our time were asthmatic including Che Guevara, Russian Tzar Peter the Great, Elizabeth Taylor, John F. Kennedy and Theodore Rossevelt.”
He added, “The social costs of asthma include not least numerous days missed at work and school due to asthma attacks, persistent chest infections and a low immune system. It prevents children and adults from participating in sports, especially severe asthmatics and can be debilitating due to the side effects of consuming inhalers and steroids on a daily basis.”
“The financial costs of asthma include regular trips to the GP, regular purchasing of steroids and replacing inhalers and sometimes hospital admissions due to attacks. The costs would be from 1000 pounds for a mild asthmatic, and it would increase for a severe asthmatic.”
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