The blessings of Buteyko

I've been a Buteyko fan for six years, and have benefitted from doing the now deceased Russian professor's exercises on a regular basis. Together with traditional Chinese herbal medicine, his breathing exercises have got me off steroids - drugs that had the most debilitating effect on my dad and mum-in-law before they died.

It's all about stopping mouth-breathing and hyperventilation. But the secret of my success with it has been taping my mouth at night. Yes, as scary and claustrophobic as it might sound, taping my mouth with a large swathe of microporous tape...

This is not on the Buteyko tin as far as I can gather, but was recommended at the course I attended.

Why I raise it now is that last night I went to bed with a cold and taped my mouth with a four to five inch strip of one inch wide tape. Because mouth breathing was not an option, my brain had to keep my nose unblocked and I had a good night's sleep - with little ambient snoring according to my wife. And today the cold is gone.

I can remember waking after a night of mouth-breathing because of a blocked up nose, and it felt like my mouth had been scoured with wire wool.

The point of all this is that Prof Buteyko has bought the science of breathing into the western healing arena and I owe him a big thank you!