Welcome to the Buteyko Breathing Exercises
A little back ground to Doctor Buteyko's Buteyko Method and his Buteyko Breathing Exercises with an excerpt from "CHAPTER 8 Buteyko searches for Parin. The lead-up to his Discovery" Volume 1 of the Doctor Buteyko's Discovery Trilogy by Sergey Altukhov
"...For the umpteenth time he remembered that cold October night in 1952 when he had mistaken the hypertensive patient gasping for breath for an asthmatic. The patient had been the last link in a chain of logic that he had been constructing for years.
The first link in this chain had been an unusual incident in the winter of 1949 when he was in his third year at medical school. One evening while on duty at the hospital, he had listened to the chest of a ruddy, muscular 21-year-old patient who appeared the picture of health.
“Breathe deeply,” Buteyko directed the patient, pressing the stethoscope to his broad, hairy chest. “And even deeper!”
Suddenly, something unexpected happened: the seemingly healthy patient collapsed on to the floor! Buteyko tried his best to bring him round, then rushed into the corridor to look for the assistant duty doctor. An elderly nurse was sweeping the floor.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, straightening up and rubbing her side.
“I’ve just been listening to a patient’s chest, and he fainted!”
“Don’t worry,” said the nurse, instantly understanding the situation. “You’ve just made him over-breathe.” She calmly soaked some cotton wool in ammonia and held it under the patient’s nose. “He’ll be better in a moment, it happens all the time.”
The patient was indeed back on his feet in just a few moments.
“He collapsed from over-breathing!” Buteyko told the assistant duty doctor.
“What’s so unusual about that?” asked the doctor, shrugging his thin shoulders. “He probably fainted because too much oxygen went to his brain. It sometimes happens when students listen to patients’ chests, especially heart and asthma patients’.”
Buteyko was perplexed by this explanation. It just didn’t seem right. The students were constantly lectured about the benefits of oxygen and told to use an oxygen mask to treat heart attacks, yet this young heart patient had fainted when he wasn’t having an attack or breathing pure oxygen, just breathing deeply. And the doctor had told him that this was a common phenomenon - something just wasn’t right.
Buteyko’s high grades and status as top student entitled him to use the central medical library, to which students weren’t normally allowed access. He went straight to the library after he had finished his shift and consulted a pile of books. He became convinced that his doubts were well founded. In 1949 there were already a number of publications that pointed to the dangers of deep breathing. Various researchers had noticed that deep breathing removes excessive amounts of carbon dioxide from the body, leading to a fall in blood carbon dioxide. This increases the affinity between oxygen and haemoglobin, known as the Bohr effect. As haemoglobin then releases less oxygen into the tissues, the tissues become starved of oxygen. Although it seems paradoxical, the deeper you breathe, the less oxygen your tissues receive. " Please follow this link for How to do Buteyko Breathing Exercises
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