Asthma is beatable. Once and for all, done, finished.

Gather 100 people in a poorly ventilated room with major air pollution and only a few would become wheezing, gasping or "asthmatic".
Gather another 100 group together with poor diet and still only only a few would become wheezing, gasping or "asthmatic".
Gather 100 people with poor breathing mechanics and internal coordination and many more will have shortness of breath symptoms than in the food or air group.
Gather 100 with poor breathing coordination, poor air and poor diet and you would have most of the group wheezing gasping or "asthmatic".

The underlying cause of asthma is often not air or food, it is the way they are breathing in the first place.

Mike,
I have been receiving your newsletters for awhile now. I have a history of asthma, and it is not unusual for me to have bronchitis every winter. I currently have chronic bronchitis, a sinus infection, and fluid in my lungs, which the doctor said he doesn't know where it is from. I am scheduled to see a pulmonary specialist about this. Be careful with that

It is absolutely necessary that we find safe alternatives to steroids and bronchodilators. We need to utilize available CURES for asthma and airway constriction, not just symptomatic treatment.

Furthermore, I believe there is a strong possibility that when our youth is raised with such a preponderance of the idea of drugs for health that this can re-enforce the curiosity of drugs for recreation.

I believe there are three major causes of asthma:

1. Physical/mechanical constriction and poor breathing coordination
2. Air borne allergy or pollutants
3. Food based allergy

A fourth, but very tricky to monitor is prescription drugs side affects that cause shortness of breath. So I will leave it out of this example, for now.

Too much emphasis is on number #2 & #3, none on #1 and very little on #3.

EXAMPLE
Gather 100 people in a poorly ventilated room with major air pollution and only a few would become wheezing, gasping or "asthmatic".
Gather another 100 group together with poor diet and still only only a few would become wheezing, gasping or "asthmatic".
Gather 100 people with poor breathing mechanics and internal coordination and many more will have shortness of breath symptoms than in the food or air group.
Gather 100 with poor breathing coordination, poor air and poor diet and you would have most of the group wheezing gasping or "asthmatic".

The underlying cause is not air or food, it is the way they are breathing in the first place.

The Optimal Natural Breathing System continuously reduces or eliminates the need for asthma medications.

The 1,2,3 punch to knock out asthma in children AND adults.

1. Develop optimal breathing.

2. Eliminate allergies

See the lungs below and notice how they are mostly in the sides and back and not very much on the front.

Because allergies cause inhibited healthy breathing volume and coordination development, the older a person gets, the more the actual breathing function becomes a major factor. Then breathing function becomes the primary source of trouble and food allergy most often becomes secondary.

Sadly, most health practitioners are presently focusing on the allergenic and environmental aspects and overlooking the mechanical breathing volume and coordination aspects.

It has been my experience that the first five - ten years of life, breathing coordination and volume are mostly senior to food allergy and environment. Almost every time.

I recommend you eliminate the major causes of worsening asthma by finding techniques to clean your breathing air in your home or work area and eliminating dairy products as you retrain yourselves and or children to breathe without drugs or steroids.

ASTHMA
Learning to breathe under the guidance of Mike White has not only saved my life but profoundly altered its quality.
I the first training session, Mike address my restricted breathing, which was steadily becoming worse, despite the inhalers I was using three and four times a day. He taught me the Leg Lift and shhhh breath, a deceptively simple and powerfully effective breath which stopped within days my chronic coughing, and began to clear and relieve lungs and bronchial tubes desperate for air.
He also used carefully controlled hand pressure and other techniques to "wring out and soften hard and atrophies lung tissue. This "re-birthing" of my lungs has affected my entire being. The relief from asthma turned out to be only an introduction into fuller and more vibrant participation in life. In the process of learning to breathe more deeply and easily, old fears and insecurities are beginning to dissolve. I am discovering the joyful calm that supports life at its base.
Michael Grant White's work with the breath is a critically
important contribution to an area of scientific research still in its infancy.
M.D. California.

Our Self Help Program

BOLDED RESPONSES BY MIKE

PROS AND CONS
Dear Mike,
I am looking forward to talking at the Breath Conference and meeting you, and that all-star cast, in person. I did think this particular issue to the list needs a little editorial cleaning up. Some sections of the original were dropped, so it reads less well and less clearly than your usual postings. I worked for several years as a drug effects epidemiologist with the Boston Collaborative Drug Research Program, and it's clear to me that the relationship between the patient, the disease condition and the drug used is very complex. Side effects and environmental conditions are routinely undervalued by our medical system, so you do a great service in pointing that out. I'm not sure that listing all side effect w/o reference to specific drugs is very helpful. It creates fear about a whole class of medications that vary greatly in the frequency of prescription and severity of the condition for which they're used, and the particular patients who receive them. I was married to a person with asthma for 20 years and studied all the interactions among all the factors, including alternative therapies, very closely. I am sure breathing is good, and training in breath techniques is useful for most anyone with asthma. Many docs do that now to a degree. A VERY SMALL DEGREE from my experience. It is a bit of a mistake, I believe for you to make sweeping generalizations about universal solutions to multifactorial diseases like asthma, which are still not well understood (by you) ( A friend told me of reading of a recent asthma study in Mexico that seemed to show that hookworm infestation reduces asthma symptoms in kids, for example) My question is how we can get well funded and valid research into breathing and asthma, as an adjunct to and as a replacement for medication and environmental manipulation. If that research could be funded at a level that got publication on it past the editors at JAMA or NEJM Nature we'd really change the prevailing paradigm (depending on the results.) I think I know what the results will be, but as one of my profs said "In most fields of research, investigator confidence in a predicted outcome is not highly correlated with the measured outcomes.

Peace, DD

Dear Daniel: Thank you so much for your input.

Unless you are changing - expanding - the definition of asthma from what it began as, upper chest constriction associated with anxiety & shortness of breath. I simply do not believe that properly assessed asthma, is AT ITS CORE core, anything but poor un-balanced breathing. That is because every asthma case I have worked with has drastically cut back the drug usage and gone on to a drugless state.

Toxins, cleansing, herbs, nutrition, bad air, unresolved emotions and the triggers mentioned above all play a possible part. Shortness of breath can be compounded by other things but if it were only the environment or the food, or anxiety, or hookworms, or extreme emotions, one's abusive parents, or combinations of all of them then EVERYONE in the same environment, or eating the same food or being anxious etc. would have asthma and that is not even close to the case. I believe wholeheartedly that the common denominator, the deepest core of asthma is dysfunctional breathing.

"Anything you can breathe through will lose its grip on you" is one of my favorite quotes from Gay Hendricks. It has served me well. Clearly asthma is also an emotional issue , but underneath the emotions is the breathing. The emotions are driven by our thoughts, postures, and the way we breathe. This is largely why some transformational breath sessions can reduce or eliminate some forms of asthma. But that is still missing the core issue, which is mechanical breathing function. Change the mechanics and you change the asthma.......... period. That should come first, not "maybe" or "last".

My friend, I am a health educator, not a drug educator. I counsel people to keep their asthma drugs handy and to carefully but systematically learn to live without them.

Perhaps my articles would be better clarified if I referred to Sheldon Hendler, MD Ph.D when he says that "Breathing is the first place not the last one would investigate when any evidence of disordered energy presents itself". From my experience the approach to the breath by the general allopathic medical community is invaluable as an emergency approach but sorely lacking in insight and depth. Just ask a health professional "what is healthy breathing" and see what you get.

Hookworms and other parasites may exacerbate shortness of breath, but to my knowledge they do not routinely cause the classical form of asthma. Is the definition of asthma being slowly changed to fit the needs of the drug industry?

Breathing needs to looked at much closer than it has. As Dr. Len Saputo reminds us. "

It seems prudent to me to explore this safe, non-invasive, and easily taught approach, to patients who are willing to invest a minimum of money and time especially when the potential for a negative effect with selected approaches is zero. When conventional therapies have little or nothing to offer, searching for additional possibilities becomes our responsibility."

I am addressing mechanical breathing function. Nothing else. I often add nutrition, cleansing, and environmental controls to my suggestions or refer them out to other health practitioners. Bring the woman to the conference and I will show you what I am talking about. Her breathing will improve dramatically. Right then.

Daniel, we are looking for enlightened people such as yourself to join us in our quest for worldwide breathing consciousness. I encourage you to take our self help courses sold on the net, and classes in North Carolina, Hawaii and California and begin to support us in teaching healthy optimal conscious breathing.

Our Self Help Program

Rapid Breathing Improvement Group and Private Intensives

PREGNANCY and ASTHMA
"Underestimation of asthma severity and under-treatment of exacerbations are two common errors that may lead to negative maternal or fetal results?" Breathe Right Now page 243.

Tightness across the chest, shallow breathing, reverse breathing are but a few causes of asthma.

It is estimated that asthma affects 14 million people in the United States and it is responsible for nearly 200,000 hospitalizations yearly. Moreover, the death rate from asthma is increasing from 13.4 deaths per million population in 1982 to 18.8 deaths per million in 1992. In addition to the human cost, the economic impact of asthma in the United States has been estimated to be approximately 5.8 billion dollars.

The key to the treatment of asthma is prevention of an acute attack which may lead to an Emergency Department visit, or worse yet, to hospitalization. Have you ever wondered much it costs to treat an asthmatic attack?

In the July 1999 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Dr. Richard Stanford and colleagues report the results of a study conducted between October 1, 1996 and September 30, 1997 in 27 hospitals across the United States. A total of 3,223 adult patients with asthma were identified, of which 1,074 required hospitalization (33%). For those successfully treated in the Emergency Department, the visit cost was $234. For hospitalized patients the average length of stay in the hospital was 3.8 days and the cost of treatment was $3,103.

The following medications have been linked to causing airway narrowing and should be used cautiously for patients with asthma.

For a better understanding about what to look for when your breathing is deteriorating, take our tests at http://www.breathing.com/tests.htm