“Prior to learning the Buteyko Method, I had been suffering from hideous sinus allergy attacks for several years. The doctors kept giving me progressively stronger types of anti-histamines which I took on a regular basis. After only a couple of days of doing Buteyko, my sinus allergies were gone and my medicine intake was completely eliminated. I couldn’t believe it. I now have a lower pulse rate, need less sleep and am in generally better health.”...
“I got a tremendous amount out of the sessions. Apart from the tangible benefits of reducing ventolin intake, better sleep and an improved sense of well being, I came away with something much more valuable. This is a sense of being back in control, and not being on an inevitable downhill slide to inactivity and difficulty over the next 20 years or so. As someone who has suffered from asthma since he was seven and basically seen everyone about it, and been in hospital 4 times with serious attacks, Buteyko is the only thing that has made sense intuitively, and offered a hope of medication reduction.”...
This is my long overdue testimonial about the Buteyko method. I have been an asthmatic ever since I was in Preschool. This pretty much hampered my athletic activities when I was a kid because I could only do so much before I wore out from breathlessness and exhaustion. This went on through college; I had to take a minimum of 3 doses of my inhaler daily…even more if I had to engage in physical activities. A little bit of vehicle exhaust or smoke would trigger an attack. Then, I discovered the Buteyko method and attended the Ateneo sessions way back in 2001. Though unconventional and drug free, the science makes sense and I followed through the steps diligently through the sessions. My asthma lessened the weeks thereafter and eventually I had weaned myself away from the inhaler. A year after I would only have my inhaler for emergency purposes. And 10 years after, I am still asthma free and now engage heavily in sports and body building – worry free. …and I am guilty of not continuing with the actual breathing exercise routines after the first year! But my consciousness has changed….. Thanks Buteyko and Jac!...
Hundreds of asthma sufferers claim the Buteyko method has changed their lives. So why does the medical establishment seem suspicious of it? Every four minutes a child is admitted to hospital with a severe asthma attack. Over the next few months the figure is likely to be even higher as pollen counts rise and the weather stays unsettled. We are in the middle of a mysterious asthma epidemic – the number of cases is increasing yearly and there is no cure. The medical response has been to develop more drugs and get people on to them sooner – annual sales of inhalers now top 18 million. A recent pilot project in Kent looking for asthma among children found that for every one known case there was another undiagnosed. All of the children were put on drugs. Many parents are not happy with this approach, but there is no alternative. Or rather there is, but it is being firmly ignored. Last year a couple of newspaper stories described a radical new treatment for asthma which simply involved learning a new breathing pattern. Scores of patients reported that they no longer needed to use drugs and had much better control over their symptoms. One satisfied customer was the MP Jonathan Aitken, who says it reduced his symptoms and made drugs unnecessary. Another was Dr John Stanley of the National Public Health Laboratory, who said, ‘It changed my life. Before, I could barely walk up stairs now I can manage a 10-mile hike. I was using my puffer four times a day as well as steroids and now I’m off all drugs.’ You might think that such results would be welcomed by the National Asthma Campaign – motto: ‘getting your health back’. After all, they are dedicated to relieving the plight of asthmatics and most sufferers worry about the quantity of drugs they have to take. But the campaign’s response to any queries about the Buteyko method, as it is known, is the following statement: ‘We would strongly advise people with asthma not to pay several hundred pounds to be taught a method of treatment that is of unproven benefit.’ The reason they give is that they are not aware of any scientifically validated trials of the method. This claim makes Chris Drake, a Buteyko practitioner, furious. ‘Why do they say it has not been adequately researched when there has been a double-blind clinical trial in Australia and the interim results have been written up in an Australian medical journal? They were the best in terms of help for asthmatics ever published.’ The Buteyko method – it was developed by the Russian physiologist Professor Konstantin Buteyko – involves no mystical concepts, it is firmly based in Western physiology and yet getting it taken seriously by a medical establishment rooted in the drug culture has proved extraordinarily difficult. The technique does make one revolutionary claim: that the problem asthmatics have is that they breathe too much. The reasoning is this. We all know that we breathe in oxygen, which passes through the lungs into the blood stream, and breathe out the waste gas carbon dioxide (CO2). What is not so familiar, although it is in all the physiology text books as the Verigo- Bohr effect, is that we actually need CO2 in the lungs for the oxygen to pass efficiently into the blood. The body needs a concentration of about 6 per cent CO2 and the amount in the air is only about 0.03 per cent. The body’s solution has been for the alveoli – the tiny air sacs in the lungs – to act as CO2 accumulators. But because CO2 is a very light gas, heavy breathing has the effect of diluting the CO2 stored in the air sacs. Professor Buteyko tested thousands of asthmatics and found that all of them were over-breathing. The optimum amount is around 5 litres per minute, but asthmatics were breathing two, three or even four times that amount. The result is that the CO2 levels go down and the body responds by constricting the airwaves – its way of saying, ‘Stop breathing so much!’ The essence of the Buteyko method is that by reducing the level of breathing, the CO2 levels rise and the airways open. It is an interesting theory and would seem easy enough to test. But it hasn’t quite turned out like that. Five years ago a Russian Buteyko trainer, Alexander Stalmatsky began teaching in Australia, which has one of the highest proportions of asthma sufferers in the world. Since he started, some 6,000 people have learnt the technique, including former Australian squash champion Karen Clonda, and media interest has been considerable. One of the most thorough TV programmes was made by Peter Wilkinson, an investigative journalist with his own slot, A Current Affair, for Channel 9. ‘I’m a pretty sceptical bloke,’ says Wilkinson, ‘but this technique really seemed to work.’ His team followed two classes of 30 people each for about three months and found the majority enjoyed considerable benefit. They also contacted 100 patients from the Buteyko centre’s records. About 60 to 70 per cent told the researchers they were much improved. ‘But when we put all of this to the official asthma people they refused to budge an inch.’ The interest generated by media coverage led to the setting up of a trial, which was run by Professor Charles Mitchell of Queensland University. Forty middle-aged, chronic asthmatics, who had had asthma for an average of 23 years, were divided into two groups. The control group – average age, 43 – were given physiotherapy, taught standard breathing techniques and given instruction on drug use. The others – average age, 48 – were taught the Buteyko method. Six weeks after the trial the Australian Doctor ran a story entitled ‘Doctors Gasp at Buteyko Success’. The preliminary findings were that while there was no change in the control group, the Buteyko group had reduced their use of beta agonists (bronchodilators) by 90 per cent and reported an improvement in their symptoms. Eight months later the improvement not only continued, they had also reduced their steroid intake. The method seemed to be vindicated. In fact it was only the beginning of a bitter debate that is still going on, even between the authors of the study. Professor Mitchell describes the results as impressive, but only superficially. The crux of the matter for him was that the trial provided no objective proof that the patients were better. Even though they took fewer drugs and said they felt better, the FEV1 test, a routine test to assess the severity of asthma, showed no change. What’s more, the claims about CO2 didn’t stand up either. ‘We measured CO2 levels,’ says Professor Mitchell, ‘and found no correlation between the patients whose CO2 levels had gone up the most and the ones who improved the most. So it looks as though CO2 is not the relevant factor here.’ All of which is a gross misrepresentation of what actually happened at the trial, according to Tess Graham, co-author of an as yet unpublished paper and the trainer for the Buteyko group. ‘It is such rubbish to say the drug reduction was due to some psychological effect,’ she says, ‘I must be an absolute genius if I can persuade people who have been taking a drug for more than 20 years to stay off them just because I say so.’Graham, a physiotherapist who first became involved when her own asthmatic children lost all their symptoms after learning the technique, has now trained more than 700 patients. She was furious that Mitchell failed to mention anything about the over-breathing results. ‘They weren’t even going to test for hidden hyperventilation to begin with,’ she says, ‘even though it is the central point of the Buteyko method. We measured the patients in both groups and found they were all breathing, on average, 14 litres per minute, three times the healthy amount.’ Afterwards the Buteyko group was down to an average of 9.6 litres while the others had not changed. ‘What’s most important, though, is that those who reduced their breathing the most also reduced their drugs the most. This shows that there’s a logical link between the Buteyko method and a reduction in drug use. Nobody is telling the asthma foundations that.’ The asthma establishment does not even consider over-breathing to be a factor in asthma. The British National Asthma Campaign says, ‘there is no evidence that a person with stable asthma is over-breathing’. This finding, if it is replicated, suggests they are wrong. Given their share of positive results from the trial and the mound of anecdotal reports of success, it hardly surprising that the Buteyko supporters believe they are being ignored and the results played down. ‘The Asthma Foundation is happy to support research into anything that may contribute to asthma – dust mites, dog hairs, fish oil, lack of lipid acids,’ says Chris Drake, ‘but their basic principle is that asthma is incomprehensible and incurable. Come up with a cure and they get worried. On the day our first results came out in Australia the Asthma Foundation put out a story about how a new study had shown margarine might be a factor. Margarine! If we are right a lot of research projects will go down the tube.’...
Tuesday May 16, 1996 New breathing technique aims to replace drugs. After being warned by the government to stay at home to avoid the recent bad air pollution, Britain’s 3 million asthma sufferers will be eager to hear of a treatment that has just started in this country. The Buteyko method teaches asthmatics to control their symptoms using a breathing technique, rather than conventional drugs. Among the first British patients was Jonathan Aitken, Treasury Chief Secretary, who was treated by the method’s senior practitioner, Christopher Drake. Mr Drake has bought the Buteyko Breath Reconditioning Technique from Australia, where it is undergoing the first clinical trials. A late-onset asthmatic, Mr Aitken had for the past 5 years suffered typical asthma symptoms, including attacks of coughing and breathlessness. Since he started practising the Buteyko method three months ago, his symptoms have become minimal and he no longer uses any reliever medication. ‘I have tried plenty of treatments, but this is the only one that has really worked,’ he says. ‘I think it is a remarkable one that could help many people’. One in 20 British adults suffers from asthma, a chronic and incurable disease affecting the airways. Its prevalence is increasing worldwide, and in the UK it causes 7 million days off work and kills someone every four hours. The primary cause is unknown, but once the condition develops – which can be at any age – symptoms can be triggered be secondary factors such as cold air, exercise, allergens and stress, which cause the airways to contract. Most asthmatics rely on conventional medicine to control symptoms. Preventive corticosteroids act slowly to reduce inflammation, and bronchodilators, such as Ventolin, open the airways and bring instant relief during an attack. Severe asthmatics may be prescribed steroid tablets. Asthma prescriptions cost the NHS (UK pounds) 350m a year (a figure which has doubled over the past decade), yet many specialists and organisations such as the National Asthma Campaign believe there is no real alternative. Mr. Drake, however, is critical of conventional drugs because they treat the symptoms and not the cause. The Buteyko method is based on the findings of a Russian scientist 40 years ago, that asthma is caused by a simple but fundamental and unrecognised disorder: long-term over-breathing. ‘Asthmatics are chronically hyperventilating all the time’ says Mr Drake. Imagine if our body temperature was five times what it should be:we’d be dead. Well, some asthmatics breathe five times more than they should.’ This, he explains, has wide repercussions within the body, the most significant being a loss of carbon dioxide, the bodys own bronchodilator, which ultimately leads to the symptoms of asthma. The Buteyko method uses shallow breathing to reverse the condition. Carbon dioxide levels are restored and the symptoms disappear. The method is simple but it takes commitment to change the breathing habits of a lifetime. ‘Generally, after a couple of days people can learn to control their asthma attacks without bronchodilators.’ says Mr. Drake. ‘After a few more days, attacks are reduced and, if the technique is maintained, patients can become asymptomatic.’ Mr Drake stresses that the method is quite safe as medication is only reduced as peoples symptoms improve. ‘The breathing technique acts like Ventolin, as a bronchodilator. You only take headache tablets if you have a headache; if you don’t have a bronchospasm, why take a bronchodilator?’ Five-year-old Ben Lord-Smith, who lives in Canberra, Australia, was classed as a chronic asthmatic and put on an ever-increasing regimen of preventative drugs after his first life-threatening attack at 18 months. They failed to control the condition: he needed nebulisers day and night and had repeated hospital stays. Yet within 3 days of trying the Buteyko method, Ben was off bronchodilators, and after seven months his GP was able to take him off all asthma medication. ‘To have that threat of death taken away is wonderful’, says his mother Sharon. ‘The drugs worried me – and why would you want to feed children drugs if you’ve got some other way? Now, if he gets occasional symptoms he does the Buteyko technique.’ It was anecdotal evidence like this that prompted the Australian Asthma Foundation to fund the first controlled clinical trial in Brisbane. The preliminary results, reported last month to the Australian Thoracic Society, showed that after 6 weeks, patients using the Buteyko method felt substantially better and had fewer symptoms and had been able to reduce their reliever medication by 90 percent. Although the treatment has aroused some controversy in Australia, Jonathan Aitken said he was surprised. ‘There’s nothing subversive or dangerous about it. It’s just a different breathing method. I dare say it will ruffle the feathers of drug manufacturers and those very set in their ways, but the acid test is: “Does it work or not?” Well, it did for me.’...
A Hacking cough echoed throughout the service in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. I apologised for my son’s ashtmatic wheezing to MP Johnathon Aitken, who was sitting in the pew in front. An asthma sufferer himself, Mr. Aitken took a sympathetic view. He recommended me to Christopher Drake of London’s Hale Clinic, where he learned the breathing exercises which enabled him to give up his inhaler. My son and myself (also an asthmatic) will be checking in there this week. The former Treasury Minister has, it seems, persuaded a number of asthma sufferers to try the Buteyko Method. “I read about Jonathon Aitken’s asthma about a year ago,” says Inrgid Beale, who used to run a decorating business in Suffolk until asthma forced her to give it up. “I was on Becotide and Ventolin inhalers and steroids. Despite all this medication, or perhaps because of it, I still had sleepless nights.” But after attending Dr. Drakes clinic in London, Mrs. Beale’s life has been transformed. “I can walk and swim and do things I couldn’t do before. When I take a breath it’s so fresh it’s unbelievable.” And since last August, Mrs Beale has used no medication at all. Despite having helped thousands of sufferers, the Buteyko method is still criticised by the medical authorities and the National Asthma Campaign. When the Hale Clinic wrote to former Health Minister Edwina Currie, who also suffers from asthma, she wrote back saying: “I have all the help I need.” Drake says: “The official line is that there is no known cure. They are always looking for environmental causes, never physiological ones. A lot of people would be very embarrassed if the Buteyko Method is proved correct.”...
Forcing your lungs to breathe less when you are gasping requires discipline. Professor Buteyko was brutal, taping patients’ mouths shut so they had to breathe through their noses. That’s how they did things in Soviet Russia. At the Hale Clinic near Harley St., Chris Drake, who learned the Buteyko method in Russia and practised it in Australia, tells patients to breathe through their noses whenever possible. and to tape their mouths up at night. He advises a minimum of exercise, to avoid heavy breathing, and moderate eating and drinking – large meals make asthmatics breathless. TV Presenter and mother-of-five Sally Magnusson, who went on the 290 (UK pounds) week’s Buteyko course with her eight-year-old son Siggy, said: “It has been very encouraging so far but time will tell.” You start with some shallow breathing. “It’s not easy or relaxing, it’s difficult, horrible,” says Drake. “If it’s joyful, you’re doing it wrong.” Worse is to follow. It is called the pause. You breathe out gently, then hold your breath. You should be able to do this for a minute or more. In our group of nine. Kevin ,the Rastafarian poet managed 10 seconds, and a three-year-old boy couldn’t manage to do it at all. I did 25 seconds, not good enough for Drake. “You are breathing for four people,” he said. “You don’t need so much oxygen. We breathe 10 times more oxygen than we need, and 200 times too little carbon dioxide.” On the second day pauses were getting longer, pulses slower. Blood vessels had expanded, Drake explained, and appetites had diminished. The routine is 4 maximum pauses and 2 medium ones, separated by 3 minute intervals of shallow breathing, doing this 4 times a day. The purpose is to retrain the respiratory centre, the part of the brain which controls breathing. On the third day the father of the small boy complained that Drake had disrupted his entire family’s sleeping pattern. He took his wife and son away and didn’t come back. “That boy is being condemned to a life on drugs”. Drake protested. Valerie, a psychotherapist fellow sufferer, and I were doing pauses of more than a minute by this time, holding our noses, pacing the room to distract ourselves from the pain and had given up symptomatic medication, Serevent in her case. Ventolin in mine. Kevin managed half a minute and was using 3 puffs of ventolin a day instead of 10. On the 5th day Kevin who was sceptical and still hadn’t taped his mouth shut at night, confessed he felt much better. “It’s been a success. This is usually a bad time of year for me. I often end up in hospital it gets so bad.” Valerie was much better, but rather nervous of going back to see her doctor. “It’s been a big success. I expected to be very wheezy when I gave up all the drugs but I’m not.” Sally Magnusson adds: “As a sceptical journalist I feel there must be a catch but I can’t see it yet. Siggy is feeling much better, using fewer inhalers.”...
The Health Secretary, Stephen Dorrell, has announced a five-year, 5 million (UK pound) research programme to identify the cause of asthma. “There is no cure for asthma,” says a spokesman for the National Asthma Campaign. “One thing is certain: the outlook for asthma research has never looked so good. Yes, asthma research is doing well – it has a rosy future. But, sadly, asthmatics do not. Once, asthma scarcely existed; now treating it is a lucrative with more and more sufferers dependent on expensive drugs. God preserve asthmatics from the pharmaceutical industry. When it was announced recently that Third World countries had fewer asthmatics than developed countries, the irony was missed by experts who said that it was modern life was too clean. Other specialists say asthma is caused by pollution. The truth is western doctors haven’t got a clue. In Soviet Russia, which was spared the grip of the pharmaceutical lobby, Professor Konstantin Buteyko devised a system of breathing exercises which combat asthma and hay fever effectively. The basis of Buteyko is that we need carbon dioxide in our lungs to process oxygen into the bloodstream.This is a physiological fact, not mumbo-jumbo. Carbon dioxide is known to be connected with the function of the nervous system. When asthmatics become tight-chested, their bodies are trying to tell them to slow down, to take less oxygen and more CO2. Now they are treated with bronchodilators which have the reverse effect, opening up the airways to allow more oxygen in and expelling CO2. Because these inhalers are addictive, they become ever more insidious.. For the pharmaceutical industry, Buteyko’s method is bad news. It requires no drugs at all. GPs are happy to hear about it but they will not recommend it. And there is little incentive in the pharmaceutical industry to cure the disease. I have had prescriptions for Becotide (2 puffs twice a day), Ventolin (for use in a crisis) and Intal (occasionally) for 17 years, and I’ve had 3 serious asthma attacks. Once I was taken unconscious to hospital, where I was put on a drip and kept in for a week. Now, after a one-week Buteyko course, I’ve given up all drugs. I find I’m able to fight off an asthma or hay fever attack. My 11-year-old son Andrew, who has never had an asthma attack but often has an asthmatic cough, has been prescribed even more powerful drugs. Children are often given even more powerful drugs than adults because they can’t be relied on to use inhalers accurately. Yet the NAC says it cannot recommend Buteyko because “it has not undergone properly controlled clinical trials which have been published in a reputable medical journal”. It is this attitude which causes this epidemic....
BUTEYKO breathing hyperventilation exercises in patients with asthma reduced beta agonist use by 90% and improved symptoms, according to preliminary results of a randomised, controlled trial in Brisbane. However, there were no changes in major physiological parameters such as peak flow rate or FEV1 in people using Buteyko breathing. The study was reported at a meeting of the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand in Hobart last week by Dr Simon Bowler, a respiratory physician at Mater Hospital in Brisbane. Dr Bowler said there were no obvious explanations for the apparent short-term benefits of Buteyko breathing. “We were surprised at the results, as we didn’t expect any significant changes,” he told Australian Doctor. Proponents of the technique claimed that hyperventilation and the subsequent increase in carbon dioxide levels could relieve the symptoms of bronchospasm and favourably affect the long- term course of asthma. The study was prompted by publicity about Buteyko breathing and the number of inquirie to asthma foundations and requests for advice from other health professionals it had generated. The study was funded by the Australian Association of Asthma Foundations. Forty patients with well-documented asthma and significant daily use of bronchodilators were recruited and randomised to a Buteyko or control group – 39 remained in the study. The Buteyko group received classes from a Buteyko practitioner for 90 minutes a day for seven days and the classes included direct encouragement to minimise beta agonist use. The control patients received a similar regimen of physiotherapy classes which included standard asthma education, breathing exercises (excluding any hyperventilation) and relaxation techniques. Both groups were carefully instructed to use bronchodilators only as required and not on a routine basis. “We would expect education to influence the patients’ asthma management, but wouldn’t normally expect the other techniques to have any major effect on medication use or respiratory function,” Dr Bowler said. “After six weeks there was a 90% reduction in beta agonist use in the Buteyko group, compared to only a 5% reduction in the control group.” “There was also a signficant difference in quality of life and improvement in symptom scores in the Buteyko group.” “These changes occurred in the absence of any improvement in airflow” Dr. Bowler said. “In this study, there appears to be some short-term benefit from Buteyko techniques in terms of reduced beta agonist use, without obvious cost in terms of worsening symptom scores.” The trial continued for another six weeks to investigate the effect of reducing inhaled corticosteroid use, but the data are yet to be analysed....
Asthma, as we all know, is a disease that prevents people getting enough air into their lungs, because the passageways close up. The trouble is we have got it completely wrong. Actually, asthma is the body’s way of saying: “You are breathing too deeply”. Learn to breathe more shallowly and the asthma will disappear. This apparently ridiculous idea is at the heart of a revolutionary new cure for this often chronic and crippling disease which affects one in 20 adults in this country and kills more than 2,000 a year. Traditional treatment aims to force the constricted air passages open with steroids and “broncho-dilator” drugs. However, Australian Christopher Drake, who runs group sessions in the Buteyko Breathing Reconditioning Technique at the Hale clinic in London, believes this is profoundly mistaken. “Within a week we can get 97 per cent of patients off most of their drugs and able to control attacks. “All we use are specific breathing techniques”. Among his successful cases is Jonathon Aitken MP, who had asthma for 5 years before doing the course. “It’s the only thing that has worked for me,” he says. “I think it is remarkable.” Another supporter is Dr. John Stanley, a medical microbiologist at the Central Public Health Laboratory who, although he wants to wait three months before making a final assessment, says that he has not felt so well in years. “I’d had asthma for nine years, and it was gradually getting worse.” The technique was developed in Russia by Professor Konstantin Buteyko. Drake first encountered it in Australia about five years ago, and now an estimated 8,000 Australians have been treated with it. One clinical trial written up in the Medical Journal of Australia, describes the results as showing “unprecedented broad-spectrum improvement”. What makes Buteyko approach so controversial is that it turns our idea of what happens during breathing on its head. In the authorised version, what we all need is oxygen. The job of the lungs is to transfer oxygen into the blood making it bright red and healthy and to breathe out carbon dioxide -the waste product. In the Buteyko version, it is carbon dioxide that gets the lead role. Drake points out, and physiologists would not disagree, that CO2 is vital for control of the major body systems, such as the immune system, the digestion and the heart.Certainly the transference of oxygen to the blood from the lungs depends on the right amount of CO2 being available. “Now it is text-book stuff, but not widely known that for the exchange to work most efficiently you need in your lungs about 6 per cent CO2 and 2 per cent oxygen,” says Drake. “This means that the focus of everyone’s breathing is not, as we all think, getting enough oxygen – there’s lots of it around, 20 per cent in every breath – the problem is getting enough CO2, as each breath contains only.035 per cent. The key role of the lungs is to act as a CO2 reservoir”. The storage tanks are the alveoli – millions of tiny sacs in the lungs where CO2 is transferred into the blood. “When someone constantly takes in too much air,” says Drake, “these reservoirs get diluted with other gases. The asthmatic spasm is a dramatic message from the body that screams ‘Slow down, CO2 reserves running low.’ Literally, the last thing you need at this point is a drug to force your airways open.” It might have remained yet another eccentric personal theory, were it not for the results. “You have to be pretty well motivated,” says Dr. Stanley. “The exercises aren’t easy. They are the opposite of what you have been doing all those years. But within just a few days you get back a control of something as basic as your breathing. And that’s amazing.” ...