The best remedy for treatment asthma

Why you have asthma

You have asthma because you have been habitually breathing more air than your body requires.

This holds for all asthmatics, no matter what "type" of asthma they have. It was in Russia that this discovery was made by medical doctor and scientist, Professor Konstantin Buteyko.

Naturally it surprises many asthmatics who feel they are not getting enough air and may even be suffering from severe airway obstruction. In fact, the health problems resulting from breathing too much are vast and varied and have been described in the medical literature for the whole of the last century.

Every part of your body, every organ and every system is affected by over breathing. This disorder has been given many names, but Chronic Hyperventilation Syndrome (CHVS) describes best the huge complex of symptoms to which it gives rise. What is still puzzling those doctors familiar with CHVS is why this elementary piece of medical science has remained hidden in the medical journals.

The two major components of asthma are bronchospasm and inflammation of the airways

Bronchospasm

The bronchioles are the tiny end branches of the respiratory tract. These little tubes carry air into the sac-like alveoli where the gas exchange between air and blood takes place. The alveoli are very tiny, a pair of lungs containing some 500 billion of them. In the walls of the bronchioles you find the smooth muscle standing guard at the entrance to the alveoli. Its function is to regulate the amount of air going into the alveoli in order to even out ventilation throughout the lungs. In asthmatics the baseline shortage of carbon dioxide pushes the bronchioles near to a state of closure, making them twitchy and quick to react to any further momentary increase in breathing.

A stressful thought, a stressful allergen or even a hearty laugh can push them over the edge. So when your doctor asks you to take a deep breath and blow into a spirometer or peak flow meter, you shouldn’t be surprised if you end up with an asthma attack. In fact, the instrument is really measuring your lungs’ ability to respond to over breathing. The lungs of asthmatics have bronchioles that are particularly good at doing their job. For this reason, according to the Buteyko theory, these tests are not considered useful indicators of disease.

Inflammation of the airways

Professor Buteyko tells us that allergic inflammation of the lungs is the result of a malfunctioning immune system. This is the consequence of the biochemical disturbances caused by an abnormally low level of carbon dioxide. Your immune system is a finely tuned biochemical warfare mechanism designed to seek out invaders and destroy them. It has to distinguish between invaders that will cause you harm and the harmless material you get in your blood after a meal, or some pollens you may have inhaled. The immune system cannot function properly if its biochemical building blocks are disturbed.

People who have abnormal allergic reactions have an immune system which is failing to perform its functions correctly.

In the case of arthritis, the disorder causes the body’s immune system to turn on itself.

In asthmatics the immune system has trouble differentiating between serious and harmless foreign material. That’s why harmless pollens can cause inflammation of the airways, triggering hay fever or even asthma in people who breathe too much.

How does Buteyko Therapy help?

In the same way that overbreathing for too long becomes a habit, so Buteyko therapy reverses this process. By learning to breathe less over a long time you can restore CO2 back to a healthy level. The effect of this is that hyperventilation disorders, such as asthma, disappear as your CO2 level is raised.