HISTORY OF THE BUTEYKO BREATHING METHOD

Background to the Method

The Buteyko Method was developed by Russian Doctor Konstantin Buteyko in 1952. Over the following decades he refined and applied his program. He died on May 2, 2003.

As a medical student and new doctor, Buteyko's work involved sitting for hours at his sick patients bedsides to monitor their progress. He noted that as patients improved, their breathing became gentler and quieter. With terminally ill patients, as their health deteriorated, their breathing became deeper. This was in complete contraction to what he had been led to believe – that deep breathing was good for us. This was the beginning of his life-long research into healthy breathing.

After experimenting with breathing less, Dr Buteyko was able to recover from hypertension and headaches. This inspired him to instruct patients to become aware of their breathing, and learn how to also breathe less. He began to observe that his patients got better quite quickly with some of them completely recovering from their conditions.

Buteyko is one of the first people in the world to recognize and apply correct breathing volume as a way to help ones health. His method is unique in that it is the only breathing technique developed which measures relative breathing volume.

Many people breathe too much (clinically known as chronic hyperventilation). The difficulty in diagnosing chronic over-breathing is that while the breathing volume can be double what is healthy, we do not notice this until we are breathing three times more than we should. Typical characteristics of an over-breather include mouth breathing, frequent sighing, large breaths prior to talking, breathing quickly, deeply or noisily at rest.