It's
Enough to Make You Gasp
by Sally Magnusson,
The Herald, Glasgow, 7 October 1997
The research establishment won't fund it. The medical establishment
won't countenance it. In GP surgeries up and down the land it's
been dismissed as irrelevant. But among the people, among those
patients who - despite the best efforts of the cleverest people
in the medical profession - still can't breathe properly and are
frittering away their health on increasingly noxious asthma drugs,
the Buteyko method is not so easily patronised. Now at last these
people have a champion. Dr Gerald Spence, a 43 year old GP in the
East End of Glasgow, has spent the last year considering the claims
of the Russian Professor Konstantin Buteyko that Western medicine
has got the approach to asthma all wrong. He has become increasingly
convinced that. Buteyko is right to see asthma as a breathing disorder
which can be corrected by retraining our breathing .
When The Herald first brought the claimed successes of the Buteyko
method to public attention more than a year ago, Dr Spence - virtually
alone among his profession - was concerned enough at his own impotence
in treating asthma effectively to attend a Buteyko workshop and
see what was going on.
At Shettleston Health centre we spend £100,000 a year on
asthma treatment - that's a tenth of the whole budget." he
says "But it's not working. Constantly we have to increase
the potency of the medication, and it's very distressing to see
patient's intake go up and up, without them getting any better."
What he found at the Buteyko workshops was asthmatics of every
shape, size, age and degree of severity, all but a few declaring
themselves hugely better and able within days to reduce the sometimes
vast amounts of medication previously needed to control their asthma
symptoms. He was interested, but profoundly sceptical. Nobody teaches
Buteyko's theories in this country's medical schools. The Siberian
born physician, whom the medical committee of the Russian Parliament
is currently considering for nomination for a Nobel Prize in Medicine,
argues that all our ideas about deep breathing being good for us
are fatally flawed. He argues that the more you breathe, the less
oxygen actually gets to the cells of your body. This is because
the air around you contains a much smaller proportion of carbon
dioxide than your own body. Carbon dioxide is essential for the
body's uptake of oxygen. Breathing too much results in a deficit
of carbon dioxide, which reduces the level of oxygen in the blood
and tissues.
According to this theory, asthmatics are breathing two, three,
sometimes even four times as much as they should, and constriction
of the airways is the body's defence. The body is asking to be given
less air, not more. Reliever drugs to open the airways will, therefore,
give temporary relief, but will soon force the body into stronger
defences, which leads to more drugs, and so on, in an increasingly
vicious spiral.
Barely able to believe that the answer to asthma could be that
simple, Dr Spence was nevertheless spurred on by the results he
was seeing. He decided to follow the progress of 60 asthmatics who
had paid £290 to learn how to retrain their breathing. Of
the 41 who responded to his survey over a six month period (27 females
and 15 males aged from six to 77 years) 34 had continued with the
exercises and reported significant reductions in asthma medication;
indeed 12 people no longer used preventer or reliever at all. A
further two had stopped the exercises but concentrated on breathing
through their nose; both had stopped their reliever inhaler and
one the preventer. Five people had abandoned the breathing method
and described their asthma as unchanged.
"I am amazed at how well people have done" says Dr Spence.
"I didn't expect these results. People were writing huge screeds
on the back of the questionnaires, saying they had never felt better
in their lives. I don't need fancy statistical techniques to see
their is something very important going on."
In the letter he sent with the latest part of his survey he wrote,
"Although this questionnaire does not have the rigour of a
clinical trial, I feel that it provides very strong evidence that
Buteyko breathing exercises, if continued, can control the symptoms
of asthma and that medication can be reduced and in many cases stopped
without apparent harm.
*Boosted by the results of the survey, Dr Spence has begun teaching
his own asthma patients the Buteyko principles. When I joined him
on his afternoon off he was sitting in a room in the surgery with
a group from his asthma list, discussing how they were progressing
after five days of breath-holding exercises and shallow breathing.
All were enthusiastic. Mary Lafferty, so disabled by asthma that
she can't take a job and is hooked up permanently to a drip which
she carries in a pouch round her waist, was telling him she was
amazed at how much better she felt. She spend s her time in and
out of hospital. "I've been dead about 10 times"- and
said this week had seen a great improvement in her condition. "I
want to get rid of this bag" she said. "That's the first
step"
Dr Spence nodded. "If Buteyko is correct she'll be off that
bag before long", he said "because what we are trying
to do here is make medication redundant. With asthma., you go by
symptoms. If a patient is feeling better, you begin carefully to
reduce the medication. A doctor doesn't need double-blind trials
to see whether a patient has improved or not."
Therese Donaldson, 23, an administration officer from Barlinnie,
said her asthma had become agonisingly bad over the past few months.
But this week had been "amazingly helpful", and in consultation
with Dr Spence she had already been able to reduce the high doses
of medication. Rita Nimmo, a marketing distribution manager, said
"It's been a definite help in five days. I couldn't believe
it. I had all the girls in my department helping me with the exercises,
because it's hard to hold your breath for long periods. I'll certainly
continue because I feel in control of my asthma for the first time"
Leslie Gibbons, a police support officer, talked of shallow breathing
being a "tremendous help". Support worker Kevin Patterson
was delighted with the start he had made.
Dr Spence himself was surprised at how quickly they had all managed
to reduce their breathing. As a group they were well motivated -
so scunnered by the increasing amounts of medication needed to control
their asthma that they were ready to work hard at self-help. He
realises that other patients may not yield such good results, but
has seen enough now to be convinced that Buteyko has got it right
and his own profession's indifference is a dangerous misjudgement.
"We doctors check patient's weight, blood pressure, all sorts
of things. What we never check is how much they are breathing or
how fast they are breathing. The trouble is that hyperventilation,
or overbreathing, is taught at medical school as an acute condition.
The effects of chronic hyperventilation are never studied, as far
as I can recall .
"Doctors ignore breathing and concentrate on the amount of
stuff they can get into the asthmatic chest. Buteyko says the opposite
- that only by reducing the drugs that open the airways, and by
reducing the air, will asthma go away.
"There's a staggering amount of research money around. It's
time some of it went into researching this theory. Their reluctance
to take it seriously brings into disrepute the whole research establishment.
As doctors we tend to be influenced by individual things that happen
to our patients, not by fancy medical trials. I have seen this work,
therefore I am going to promote it".
At his surgery in a part of Glasgow where there is much deprivation
and where asthma is on the rise as it is everywhere - partly, he
believes, through over prescription of drugs - Gerald Spence is
now preparing for battle. With nobody in the UK apparently prepared
to do the rigorous trials that would settle the matter conclusively,
he has only one small weapon: he has seen it work.
He is depressed by the continuing indifference of his fellow health
professionals, although some may respond to an invitation from Buteyko
practitioner Christopher Drake to watch the method being taught
to asthmatics every evening this week at a workshop in the Health
and Stress Clinic in Glasgow's Clarkston Road. Dr Spence now believes
with some passion that doctors who want the best for asthmatic patients
should consider the Buteyko insights on shallow breathing.
"Any GP surgery could do what I'm doing" he says. "Any
asthma nurse. And in the long run this would not be a job for doctors
at all, but for nursery nurses and gym teachers, parents and everyone.
They should be saying all the time "Mouth shut". All that
'Take a deep breath, fill your lungs with air' - it's a load of
rubbish."
He knows there is a great deal of hostility to Buteyko, especially
among hospital doctors. "I feel despondent at the thought of
the battle that's ahead ," he says, "but I'm ready. The
man who came up with the theory that germs caused ulcers was laughed
at once."
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