By Jean West, The Big Issue in Scotland, March 25-31, 1999
All her life, Jean West has suffered from asthma - a condition which kills around 40 people a week. That's why she jumped at the chance to try a brand new cure...even if taping up her mouth did seem a little extreme!
She nose it works: Jean(left, with Wendy Haddock) used to end up in hospital after visiting friends with cats or dogs - but found that simple breathing exercises made a big difference to her asthma.
Taping your mouth closed at bedtime sounds like an odd solution to asthma. Not only is it something of a passion killer, but the idea of blocking one of the major routes oxygen takes to the lungs doesn't initially fill you with confidence.
Yet it's exactly what I've started doing - despite many raised eye-brows - after attending a series of breathing reconditioning classes in Edinburgh which promised to relieve me of a lifelong dependency on medication.
Why? Well, after more than thirty years as an asthmatic - despite the advent of a number of miracle drugs that have helped control the debilitating disease - it became clear that the condition wasn't going to go away.
Since I was a child in the 1970's, incidences of the condition in children have doubled. Today one in eight children is an asthmatic, and over the last 30 years asthma in the U.K. has increased by 30 times. There are now three million asthmatics in this country, and every week around 40 people will die from it. Quite simply, modern medicine isn't providing the answers.
But over the last year I began to hear a number of positive reports about Buteyko - a breathing technique developed in communist Russia by Professor Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko that has confounded traditional medicine with it's success rates.
Wendy Haddock, a Dumfries based physiotherapist, became interested in the treatment after watching a BBC documentary on the subject. Her 74 year old mother had been crippled with asthma, and a cocktail of drugs including powerful steroids was doing little to help.
"As a physiotherapist with 25 years experience, I couldn't bear to watch my mum becoming increasingly disabled and drug dependent," says Wendy. That's why she decided to take her mother to a workshop in Glasgow with Alexander "Sasha" Stalmatski - himself a pupil of Buteyko.
"Since the workshop, mum has only used her Ventolin inhaler once - and that was in the early days," says Wendy. "She was eventually able to give up her steroids - and she lost 1.5 stones in weight. She has experienced a big improvement in her health."
Wendy was so impressed that she decided to train as a practitioner with Stalmatski. "I've seen many other people undergo the same process, sustain major improvement and get off drugs which have been recognized as harmful with long term use," she says.
When I first went to the workshop I was shocked at just how bad some of Wendy's patients were. What I had to do was learn to breathe less to maximise my carbon dioxide levels - and first of all that meant checking the various devices my body had been using to hyperventilate. Yawning, coughing, sighing, humming - all of these had to stop. I also had to make a conscious effort to keep my mouth closed and breathe through my nose at all times - which was decidedly tricky for the chatterbox in me!
The mouth is a huge orifice that pulls in much more oxygen than we need - but, all the same, the idea of sleeping with my mouth taped up was terrifying. What if my nose became blocked and I suffocated? What if I was sick? Wendy, however, assured us it was safe - and after a few nights I felt fine.
My asthma diminished to the point that I no longer needed my Ventolin, although Wendy made it clear that we should still carry our medication around with us. And if I became wheezy then I could feel fine simply by practising my exercises.
As the weeks went by I found that a hitherto unknown energy was dragging me out of bed in the morning. This is because hyperventilating can also rob the body of vigour - so it's not surprising that Buteyko has been used to treat ME. Indeed, some 200 diseases have been linked to dysfunctional breathing and could benefit from the method.
One of the bonuses for me was the elimination of the severe migraine headaches I have been suffering over the last few years - which I discovered were associated with the brain spasms caused by low carbon dioxide levels. Even staying with my sister, whose dogs have sent me into near respiratory failure, posed no problem at all.
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