Feel the burn or just learn to breathe...

In Russia, apparently every doctor learns how to teach their asthma patients how to breathe away their breathlessness with the Buteyko Method.

Here in England, and in the USA and Canada, the London Daily Mail reported on Tuesday, that doctors are recommending their patients undergo a bronchial thermoplasty, a technique that burns away extra-thick muscle tissue which constricts the airways with “harmless” radiofrequency waves.

Recent patients have reported receiving relief from their chronic asthma.

Doctors, though, are not so sure what the long-term effects of thermoplasty will be. Perhaps airways will be become dangerously weakened by the procedure.

My point is not whether the surgery is good or bad, but that we are designed to breathe and we can re-educate ourselves to inhale and exhale breathlessness away. Buteyko trials result in reduction of medication use by over 75 per cent..

Doctors need to start understanding more about how we breathe, and how to breathe correctly instead of looking for high tech solutions or, worse still, prescribing drugs that lock their patients into life-long dependency. What is so difficult about trying a series of breathing exercises that take about just over half an hour in the morning and in the evening. Perhaps, it is a love of overcomplicating things - looking for solutions outside ourselves....

Apparently asthma was not a killer disease until the new drug regimes were initiated. Now 2,000 people a year in the UK die an agonising death from the disease.

I’m a long-time sufferer, now hopefully in total remission thanks to Professor Buteyko’s method. I know the fear and anxiety that not being able to breathe triggers…and the on-going insecurity that it entails, being reliant on blue and brown inhalers, and oral steroids in difficult times.

Of course, I have a measure of sympathy for any fellow sufferer who submits to thermoplasty, which requires three outpatient treatments.

But I really can’t help feeling really, really sorry for the 150 human guinea pigs participating in a clinical trial to test the efficacy of thermoplasty, because they will undergo only a phoney procedure not the real thing.

I can only hope the placebo effect comes to their rescue.