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Carbon dioxide is essential to body function. They just knew that it worked for easing an asthma attack.ĭr Butyeko and others have explained scientifically that carbon dioxide is not just a waste product to be exhaled. These wise women had no scientific knowledge and no special training. My grandmother was taught this breathing technique by her mother and grandmother, reaching back to the 1820s. I watched the programme and can assert that his teaching was much the same as that which my grandmother taught me 60 years ago, and that it will work if correctly carried out. The asthma attack subsided.Ī few years ago there was a television programme about a Russian doctor named Butyeko who was teaching a new method of breathing to control asthma. Then she would increase the counts to 12, 15, 20, 30 before she allowed me to breathe in again. "Breathe in, then out, and do not breathe again whilst I count to ten." While I was getting my breathing under control my grandmother would massage the back of my neck (more of massage later). Had I not done so, I think I would have been an asthmatic cripple by now. Those who have never considered the breath control required to sing accurately the most rudimentary aria of Bach or Handel would do well to contemplate the difficulty and strive to match it! I have sung all my life.
DOES BREATHING STEAM HELP ASTHMA HOW TO
But for the best one-to-one instruction in how to breathe correctly, no one, in my opinion, can touch a good classical singing teacher. The Alexander Technique teaches correct breathing, and so do yoga and some oriental therapies. If the muscles of the upper chest, shoulders and throat are used for breathing, it will make an asthma attack worse. The diaphragm, which will draw air into the lower lobes, must do all the work. Most people breathe into the upper lobes of the lungs only, leaving the lower lobes of the lungs unused. However, it does not come naturally to most people, and has to be learned. This method of breathing, called abdominal or diaphragmatic breathing, is the first secret of how to cope with asthma.
DOES BREATHING STEAM HELP ASTHMA PLUS
The steady breathing, plus my grandmother's competent and reassuring voice, would instantly allay any panic that I might have experienced, and I never remember any feelings of fear during an asthma attack, even though they were sometimes very severe, and today would justify hospitalization. Breathlessness is inclined to induce panic, which makes asthma worse. Nasal breathing is also slower that mouth breathing. She would pause for a few seconds, then continue:īreathing through the nose is very important, because the nasal passages are a filter, and warm the air before it enters the lungs. Keep it slow, and don't breathe in till I tell you to." Breathing out is the hardest part of all.
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Just breathe in slowly down as far as my hands. "Now breathe slowly in through your nose, down to my hands. She would place her hands over the small of my back, below the ribcage, and say: When I had an asthma attack she would sit me on a hard chair leaning on a table and instruct me in breathing control – leaning forwards is important. No small child would mess around with grandma. Strong willed, commanding, sometimes peevish, in her tiny frame she housed a will of iron, and she ruled her family with undisputed control.
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My grandmother was a formidable old lady. This article is an attempt to reconstruct these old and natural remedies for a condition that has reached epidemic proportions in the last 30-40 years, in the hope that some of them may be helpful to those who do not want to fill themselves or their children with powerful drugs. Thus I have inherited a family knowledge of living and coping with asthma which dates back at least 160 years, and probably longer. I learned how to cope from my mother (born 1914) and grandmother (born 1875), who had learned from her mother (born 1840). In 1935, the year I was born, an asthmatic child from an asthmatic family, there were none of the modern drugs for controlling asthma.
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