Why It Works

Breathing is controlled by the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2)in the blood (not by the amount of oxygen). Normally, when the amount of CO2 in your blood rises, you breathe. This replaces some of the CO2 with oxygen, and so lowers the CO2 level back to normal.

During an asthma attack, people panic and breath too quickly. They actually overbreathe because they are breathing so rapidly, i.e. they are breathing in a far greater volume of air than normal.

This causes the amount of CO2 in the blood to fall, thinking it has too much Oxygen. The body reacts by causing the airways in the lungs to narrow and reduce the amount of air inhaled in each breath... which panics the patient into trying to breath even harder...

This technique will break this "negative feedback" cycle by teaching you to

• breathe more shallowly, i.e. decreasing the volume of air reaching the lungs with each breath.
• tolerate a higher concentration of C02 in your blood.

With only a little effort, you can make a big difference to your breathing in only a little time. According to the Buteyko theory, modern asthma drugs ("brown" preventers and "blue" inhalers) actually make the problem worse, by masking the body's self defensive behaviour. By stopping the 'breathe less' response, they only make the body try harder next time, that is, have a stronger asthma attack.

Think of it like this, if you put your hand in a fire it hurts. Modern asthma drugs are like pain killers, they only stop your hand from hurting, i.e. they address the symptom, not the cause of the problem. The symptom is the asthma attack, the cause is breathing in too much oxygen and having too little CO2 in the blood.

There are probably several root causes of the symptom that we call asthma. Some of these causes respond very well to this breathing technique, some do not.

Hence, if you follow this technique, there is a very good chance than your asthma will greatly improve, but there is a chance it will not. However, its easy to try, its free, and its not surgical and doesn't involve taking any drugs