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Most people think that to get more oxygen we must breathe more. What is not understood is that overbreathing will actually decrease the oxygen that is available to essential body tissues such as the brain, vital organs and muscles. This is because the body’s ability to use the oxygen is dependent on the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood. Overbreathing causes blood carbon dioxide levels to plummet. This creates spasm in the airways and a decrease in oxygen available to body tissues, which results in a feeling of tightness in the chest and breathlessness – otherwise known as asthma.
Any good medical student will tell you that a lack of carbon dioxide prevents red blood cells from ‘letting go’ of oxygen, which causes oxygen starvation. This physiological principle is known as the Verigo-Bohr effect and was not discovered by Butyeko.
Buteyko’s brilliance is that he linked low carbon dioxide to many of our so-called civilisation diseases. Over the past fifty years Buteyko has checked and re-checked his theory with thousands of patients. He has measured the breathing patterns of not just asthmatics but also sufferers of stenocardia (angina) and other diseases and discovered that all of these patients were overbreathing too. Correcting their breathing to normal levels stopped symptoms immediately. Conversely, when they were asked to return to previous breathing patterns their symptoms returned.
During the past decade Buteyko’s theory has been expanded in the West, not least by LIFESource, into a more comprehensive and compassionate understanding of how asthma can heal – and why it doesn’t.
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