Waiting to Exhale
Did you know we're all mildly hyperventilating? Phil Cornwel-Smith learns from the Buteyko method how breathing less can cure asthma, allergies, stress and even snoring.
"You don't need to wear a mask in Bangkok if you know how to breathe"
"Though some results are miraculous, they're in fact earned, logical and physiologically based."
Who Breathes the Buteyko Way?
Russian cosmonauts, to conserve air in space.
World Champion and Olympic bronze medallist kayaker Ramon Andersson.
Olympic athletes, including rower Emmily Snook and swimmer Matthew Dunn.
10,000 sufferers of respiratory ailments in Australian and New Zealand alone.
Patients in Russia's health system, where it's been an integrated treatment since 1981.
"Take a deep breath." Sound advice when you're under stress you'd assume and a common response around the world, but not according to Jac Vidgen, an Australian practitioner of Buteyko, a self-corrective method of breathing. He urges you to "breathe less"!
"What they're really saying is control your breathing," he explains. "It's only very recently as upright creatures that we've experienced stress the way we do. Our heart rate and breathing increase and chemical changes occur. Now, that's appropriate for a hunter or fighter, [but not] for someone sitting behind a desk or in traffic. Our respiratory centre, part of that bank of computers in the rear of the brain that controls the body's automatic processes, has been reprogrammed by the culture we live in."
Don't be alarmed - you can change it back! "In the 1950s, Russian respiratory physician Dr Constantin Pavlovich Buteyko, found that by re-training incorrect breathing habits, chronic patients significantly improved in a whole range of breathing related conditions, such as allergies, sinusitis, hayfever, anxiety, sleep apnoeia, emphysema and chronic fatigue syndrome, but the easiest [to improve] is asthma."
"I was trained five years ago by a Russian protégé of Buteyko, Alexander Stalmatsky, who'd been brought to Australia [where 10% of the population is asthmatic], then New Zealand, where in the two countries we've had more than 10,000 patients and 30 practitioners," says Vidgen.
ISSUE No: 48 July 1998 SECTION: Features WRITER: Phil Cornwel-Smith
