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Doctor
Konstantin Buteyko (1923-2003) was a Soviet (Russian) medical doctor and
clinical physician who devoted his life to the study of respiration. When he was
an Honors student of the First Moscow Medical Institute in the early 1950s, he
observed that severely sick people usually had heavy breathing and that their
breathing got even heavier when death approached. (You can visit any hospital to
observe this simple fact.) The breath holding time of terminally ill people
gradually decreased: 5 s, 4, 3, 2, 1, and 0, when death occurred.
For several years in the 1960’s, Dr. Buteyko was heading a project funded by the Ministry of Aviation and Space Research as a part of the program for launching first manned spaceships in the outer space. So, Dr. Buteyko was given a respiratory laboratory in Novosibirsk for this purpose. However, since he was also interested in diseases, he conducted many other studies.
Buteyko discovered that many health problems are always accompanied by abnormal breathing, usually chronic hyperventilation (over-breathing). He also found that restoration of normal breathing parameters eliminated hypoxia, symptoms of the disease, and need for medication and improved quality of life. Normal breathing, apart from other parameters, means breathing about 4-6 liters of air per minute with a breathing frequency about 8-12 times per minute. In order to achieve normal breathing, he developed and, together with other Russian medical professionals, refined the Buteyko breathing method.
In 1985, the Soviet Health Ministry officially approved the Buteyko breathing method. It has been used by family doctors (or GPs) and breathing practitioners in Russia for more than 100,000 asthmatics, over 30,000 people with cardiovascular problems and many other patients. The Buteyko breathing method has saved the lives of thousands of people in the Soviet Union who were officially diagnosed as terminally ill.
The method has had several successful clinical trials (England, Australia, New Zealand, Ukraine, USSR). Practice shows that normalization of breathing for most people means to become disease-free. It is still unclear, due to our limited knowledge, which health problems can be treated and what the success rates for various health conditions are. In the meantime, let us consider these trials in more detail.
Biographies of Doctor K.P. Buteyko and his interviews can be found in the Resources.