Tim Altman - Primal HealthNewsNatural Treatment of Asthma
By Tim Altman 22/11/2023 Breathing Dynamics, Chronic Illness, Evolutionary Medicine, Latest News, Naturopathy, Performance, Sleep Enhancement , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What Capnometry Biofeedback Technology Looks Like and Measures

In a follow up to my last video discussing the potency of Capnometry biofeedback technology for assessing and retraining client’s breathing, I discuss what this technology measures and what you will see on the screen as you are being measured.

Firstly, Capnometry is measuring the volume of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air that you are exhaling. In hospitals it is used to monitor a patient’s breathing, especially if they are unconscious or have undergone an anaesthetic or are in a coma. The graph starts to curve upwards at the beginning of exhalation (with a slight delay) as CO2 increases, and it curves downwards as exhalation ceases (again, with a slight delay).

The technology provides 2 measurements which give us great information on breathing efficiency for assessment and training:

1. Breathing rate per minute – ideally 8-10 bpm in adults at rest.

2. End-tidal carbon dioxide (ETCO2) – ideally 40mmHg. This is a measurement of the volume of CO2 in the lungs at the end of exhalation. This ETCO2 is essential for respiratory efficiency as it acts as a reservoir of CO2 that permeates back into the blood stream to maintain ideal levels of arterial CO2, which plays a major role in allowing the passage of oxygen from the air we inhale in the lungs, to the cells of the body for energy production. This process is based on the principles of the Bohr Effect and discussed in my last video/post. However, in short, without sufficient arterial CO2 levels. this process is impaired and we produce insufficient amounts of energy, which can lead to fatigue and many other symptoms of illness, including asthma, breathing difficulties, anxiety, sinusitis, snoring & sleep apnoea, headaches & migraines, memory problems, cognitive disturbance etc.

The beauty of this technique is that not only is it fantastic as an assessment of breathing efficiency (non-diagnostic), for breathing retraining it provides in the moment feedback about the efficacy of techniques and rhythms we implement to improve a client’s breathing to ideal, or optimal levels.

As such, we are able to find the best techniques and rhythms specific to each client, and therefore provide them with a specific, individualised breathing retraining program to remove symptoms of illness, improve quality of life and sleep, give them greater energy levels and relaxation, and improve performance.

Breathing as a function, and modality of health is as important and nutrition and exercise. In fact, it is more central than both of these, so it certainly should not be ignored, neglected, or taken for granted (as most of us do).

If you’d like your breathing assessed and to work out an ideal retraining program for your breathing, contact me via me website, www.timaltman.com.au, or email tim@timaltman.com.au.

By Tim Altman 21/11/2023 Breathing Dynamics, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome CFS, Chronic Illness, Latest News, Naturopathy, Performance, Sleep Enhancement , , , , , , , , , , ,

Video: Capnometry Biofeedback Technology is Super Potent for Clinical Assessment & Training of Breathing.

After learning extensively about the science of breathing, and techniques for optimising breathing, implementing biofeedback technology called Capnometry, which us used in hospitals to monitor patients breathing, into my clinical work with breathing has seen my understanding of breathing function, and the best techniques for retraining breathing function to optimal levels skyrocket.

In clinic this technology is highly effective for assessing the efficiency of a client’s breathing based on breathing rate per minute (ideally 8-10 bpm), and end tidal carbon dioxide (ETCO2), or the amount of CO2 in the lungs at the end of exhalation (ideally at least 40mmHg).

The body regulates breathing based on arterial levels of CO2 predominantly, rather than arterial oxygen (O2). This is because the challenge with breathing is not getting enough oxygen in. We have heaps. In fact, at rest, we utilise less than one quarter of the O2 we inhale (the rest is exhaled), and we have heaps of oxygen stores in our blood stream (known as oxygen saturation levels, which are typically 97-99%).

The challenge is actually getting the oxygen we have in our blood stream, or that we inhale, into our cells for energy production (the main purpose of breathing). If we fail to do this, the consequences are fatal. CO2 plays a major role in this process. Rather than being a waste gas that we completely exhale, we store CO2 (as there’s only 0.03% in atmospheric air, so we can’t rely on this) as it is the limiting factor in determining breathing efficiency,

Based on the principles of the Bohr Effect, CO2 facilitates the passage of oxygen from our lungs to our cells for energy production. If CO2 levels are too low, we simply don’t get enough oxygen to our cells, so energy production is impaired, and survival is threatened. Conversely, if CO2 levels are too high, it upsets respiratory balance, and our body will increase breathing rate and volume to reduce levels. In order to maintain sufficient CO2 levels, our body stores CO2 in our lungs at the end of exhalation, known as end-tidal CO2, which then permeates back into the blood stream to maintain respiratory balance.

We definitely should not fully exhale all of the air in our lungs in order to maintain respiratory balance (at rest) – the exhale is simply a recoil of the diaphragm and lungs.

Unfortunately, without realising it, the vast majority of us breathe nowhere near ideal efficiency- we breathe twice as often as we should and with far too much volume.

This adversely affects our arterial CO2 levels, and therefore the balance in our respiratory system, and ultimately energy production. The consequence of this long term is that our body starts to produce symptoms of illness as a result of the body’s attempt to compensate for this inefficiency and restore balance. These symptoms include difficulties in breathing & asthma, anxiety, sinusitis, snoring & sleep apnoea, fatigue, digestive complaints, headaches & migraines, ADHD and many more.

Therefore this biofeedback technology is fantastic for assessing respiratory efficiency, and also in implementing techniques and rhythms to retrain breathing back to ideal, or functional levels. In so doing, with regular practice, clients experience greater energy levels, relaxation, and reduced symptoms of illness.

In addition, as clients can see significant differences on a screen of their baseline breathing efficiency and when they introduce optimal breathing techniques, so compliance of clients to their at home breath training improves significantly also.

Finally, as a result of measuring and observing the breathing of thousands of clients over the years, my understanding of breathing function and ideal techniques has grown exponentially.

If you’d like to have your breathing efficiency assessed , or learn how to breathe optimally, please contact me for a one on one clinic  appointment, or inline consultation.

By Tim Altman 08/02/2023 Breathing Dynamics, Latest News, Naturopathy , , , , , , , , ,

Are You Really Suffering From Asthma, Or Is It Simply Breathing Difficulty?

 

Asthma is probably one of the world’s most over-diagnosed and over-medicated ailments.

In an article in the Asthma Update, Issue 25, September 2004, asthma researcher, Associate Professor Colin Robertson, Respiratory Physician at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, suggests that; “80 percent of children diagnosed with asthma may have symptoms induced by exercise; therefore the community at large perceives asthma in a certain way.  This can be positive in the sense that the problem can be easily recognised, however sometimes other respiratory conditions can mimic asthma.”

Professor Robertson suggests, “Doctors, relatives and enthusiastic physical education teachers can mistake a child who exercises and gets out of breath as having asthma when they are actually just unfit”.

“This gets interpreted as Exercise Induced Asthma (EIA) but it doesn’t respond to anti-asthma therapy.  What they need is breathing exercises to learn how to control it.  It is a simple effective intervention and it is important for people to know that it exists”

As such, many people who have a history of being diagnosed with asthma, and have been treated using medications to deal with this over a long period of time, may actually have just been experiencing difficulties in breathing, and have simply been using a band-aid treatment via their medications, rather than addressing the ‘root’ or ‘underlying’ cause to their situation, or symptom picture.

By not addressing this underlying cause they have limited their way of living and potential, and opened themselves up to a myriad of unwanted side-effects that come from pharmaceutical drugs.

If we take a step back to look for the underlying cause, 2 things stand out:

  1. The pathology experienced when one suffers from difficulty in breathing, or asthma, is simply that – difficulty or dysfunction in breathing. In other words, the pathology is with our breathing.
  2. Virtually all of us habitually breathe dysfunctionally – or nowhere near the way we should according to medical diagnostic norms.

We breathe far too often (twice as often as we should), and with far too much volume – in other words we over-breathe, or mildly hyperventilate all of the time.

Plus, we breathe using our chest & shoulders rather than our diaphragm, and often use our mouth in addition to, or instead of our nose.

The result is that we breathe as if we are in emergency mode all of the time (the mouth and chest & shoulders are secondary breathing mechanisms used to deal with the increased demands of emergencies, such as exercise etc.), which is far from functional or efficient, and leads to a significant imbalance in our respiratory system which decreases how we deliver inhaled oxygen to our cells for energy production.

The body sees this as a potential threat to survival, so it aims to restore balance however it can.

One of the main ways it does this is by constricting the smooth muscle that surrounds our breathing muscles, tubes, and airways resulting in symptoms such as tightness in the chest, feeling out of breath, wheezing, spasm in the airways, coughing, mucous production etc. – the exact symptoms we experience when we have an asthma attack, or we experience difficulty in breathing.

Therefore, these symptoms we experience when we have asthma or difficulties in breathing, can be argued to be an adaptation by the body to imbalance, or poor/inefficient function, rather than an ‘illness’.

So treating the symptoms as such by dealing with the ‘root cause’ and correcting imbalance in the body, rather than masking them with drugs, provides a long term solution that can open the person to a much freer, or less limited lifestyle (rather than living in fear of symptoms), as well as to reduce or potentially free them from a reliance on drugs.

In addition, it doesn’t necessarily matter what the diagnosis is; whether it is asthma or difficulty in breathing that the person is experiencing, the approach to addressing the underlying cause, and eliminating respiratory imbalance is the same.

We do this by retraining the body, over time to breathe more slowly and gently mostly through the nose, and using predominantly the diaphragm to drive breathing. It takes practice initially, but not that much time, and it doesn’t take long for the practice to start to restore balance in the body, and you experience less symptoms.

This approach is not limited to treatment of dysfunctional breathing. It is far more potent and effective in preventing the likelihood of symptoms appearing in the first place.

As such, we are not necessarily treating asthma, or suggesting you throw away your medications – we are correcting breathing dysfunction, and imbalance in the respiratory system, and therefore reducing or eliminating the reliance on drugs, and dramatically increasing the person’s physical and mental freedom.

Click on this link to enrol in, or gather more information on the ‘Breathing Dynamics Solutions to Asthma’ online breathing retraining course – https://timaltman.com.au/lp-courses/

Breathing Dynamics for Anxiety

By Tim Altman 16/02/2017 Breathing Dynamics, Chronic Illness, Naturopathy, Sleep Enhancement , , , , , , , ,

Asthma is a Breathing Issue. And Breathing Retraining is BY FAR the Best Solution for Asthma

Breathing Dynamics for Prevention & Treatment of Asthma

Asthma is defined by the Global Initiative for Asthma as “a chronic inflammatory disorder of the airways in which many cells and cellular elements play a role. The chronic inflammation is associated with airway hyper-responsiveness that leads to recurrent episodes of wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness and coughing particularly at night or in the early morning. These episodes are usually associated with widespread, but variable airflow obstruction within the lung that is often reversible either spontaneously or with treatment”.

Asthma is clinically classified according to the frequency of symptoms, forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1), and peak expiratory flow rate. Asthma may also be classified as atopic (extrinsic) or non-atopic (intrinsic), based on whether symptoms are precipitated by allergens (atopic) or not (non-atopic).
Asthma is caused by environmental and genetic factors. These factors influence how severe asthma is and how well it responds to medication. The interaction is complex and not fully understood.

Studying the prevalence of asthma and related diseases such as eczema and hay fever have yielded important clues about some key risk factors. The strongest risk factor for developing asthma is a history of atopic disease (hypersensitivity or allergic diseases – eczema or atopic dermatitis, hay fever or allergic rhinitis; atopic conjunctivitis). This increases one’s risk of hay fever by up to 5× and the risk of asthma by 3-4×. In children between the ages of 3-14, a positive skin test for allergies and an increase in immunoglobulin E increases the chance of having asthma. In adults, the more allergens one reacts positively to in a skin test, the higher the odds of having asthma.

Research is also beginning to show a strong correlation between the development of asthma and obesity.

Asthma is probably one of the world’s most over-diagnosed and over-medicated ailments.

According to Associate Professor Colin Robertson, Respiratory Physician at the Royal Children’s Hospital, 80 percent of children diagnosed with asthma may have symptoms induced by exercise; therefore the community at large perceives asthma in a certain way. This can be positive in the sense that the problem can be easily recognised, however sometimes other respiratory conditions can mimic asthma.

Professor Robertson suggests, “Doctors, relatives and enthusiastic physical education teachers can mistake a child who exercises and gets out of breath as having asthma when they are actually just unfit”.

“This gets interpreted as Exercise Induced Asthma (EIA) but it doesn’t respond to anti-asthma therapy. What they need is breathing exercises to learn how to control it. It is a simple effective intervention and it is important for people to know that it exists”

Medications for Asthma

Medications used to treat asthma are divided into two general classes: relievers or quick-relief medications used to treat acute symptoms; and preventers or long-term control medications used to prevent further exacerbation.

Relievers which include Ventolin, Bricanyl and Spiriva are recommend to be used only for relief or tightness or breathlessness. They are adrenaline based so they increase heart rate and over use can be dangerous, or even fatal. Those who use relievers more than 3 times per week are considered being at risk and are recommended to cut back dosage.

As a result of these dangers, long acting steroid preventers were produced to suppress the immune reaction or inflammation and hypersensitivity in the body, and therefore reduce reliever usage. These medications are usually inhaled gluco-corticoid steroids and include Flixotide, Pulmicort and Alvesco.

A third group of asthma medications have now been developed that combine the reliever and preventer medications. These include Seretide (the most widely prescribed asthma drug in the world) and Symbicort. These combination drugs were produced as a result of dangers caused by the development of high-potency, long acting reliever medication which, as people were getting longer lasting relief, they often discontinued use of their preventer. After several hundred deaths (due to over-exposure to adrenalin), a solution was devised to combine preventer medication with reliever to prevent patients.

The problem with the combination drugs is that each puff of Seretide or Symbicort contains around 4-6 puffs of Ventolin. Given steroid preventers were developed in the first place to prevent patients using more than 3 puffs of reliever weekly (remember that more than 3 puffs per week were considered risky), these combination drugs actually increase the dosage of Ventolin to up to 24 puffs per day!!!

The irony of the medical approach to asthma and breathing difficulties is that, whilst these medications relieve symptoms in the short term, they can exacerbate or cause asthma and breathing difficulties in the long term.

For example, adrenaline based reliever medication opens the airways and relaxes smooth muscle which eases symptoms in the short term. But, adrenaline causes the breathing rate to rise which, over time leads to over-breathing.

And, steroid based preventer medication reduces inflammation in the lungs, reduces breathing rate on a short term basis and suppresses the immune system response, which results in less asthma symptoms in the short term. But, the suppressed immune system response leads to more colds and flus, and chest and lung infections – which, ultimately, result in over-breathing.

As we will see now, over-breathing plays a major role in creation of asthma and breathing difficulty symptoms, and correction of over-breathing is fundamental to reduction in symptoms and reliance of pharmaceutical drugs.

The Breathing Dynamics Approach

Note it is recommended you read many of the blogs on ‘Breathing Dynamics’ or ‘Respiratory Therapy’ on this website prior to reading this section, as the following is a simplified summary based on a knowledge of this theory.
The Breathing Dynamics approach to dealing with asthma is to look for the ‘root cause’ of asthma. It is not a disease as such – more a condition that can be managed.

Based on “The Bohr Effect” we know that low arterial blood levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) will lead to haemoglobin having a higher affinity for oxygen, and therefore O2 is not released into tissues for energy production. As a result of lower CO2 levels, the body will cause restriction in smooth muscle to prevent CO2 loss (and as a result reduced release of O2 into cells).

In asthma, this constriction of smooth muscle occurs in the airways and alveoli in the lungs resulting in inflammation and spasm in the respiratory system, and ultimately, breathing difficulties such as wheezing and shortness of breath.

We know also that over-breathing results in reduced arterial blood levels of CO2. So, it can be logically deduced, that over-breathing plays a significant role in the pathology seen in asthma.

Also, generally those who over-breathe tend to be sympathetic nervous system dominant (see general breathing notes), which produces the ‘fight or flight’ reaction in the body. This reaction causes a surge of adrenaline in the system and leads to a cascade of other reactions in the body including elevated heart rate, breathing rate and, amongst other things, elevated histamine levels.

Elevated histamine levels will promote or increase immune system hypersensitivity associated with asthma.

Therefore, in dealing with asthma via breathing retraining, we aim to correct over-breathing in order to:

  1. Elevate arterial CO2 levels – reducing smooth muscle constriction and spasm in the airways and alveoli.
  2. Balance the autonomic nervous system – (between sympathetic and parasympathetic enervation) to reduce adrenaline and histamine levels.

This is achieved by a number of techniques aimed at:

  1. Breathing through the nose at all times – including at night and during low level exercise (and even higher levels over time with training).
  2. Increasing brain tolerance to elevated plasma CO2 levels (via breath hold and breathing rhythm techniques) to allow the body to be comfortable with lowered breathing rates and volumes.
  3. Developing breathing rhythms using CapnoTrainer biofeedback technology aimed at maintaining elevated plasma CO2 levels and keeping the airways nice and open – therefore preventing the likelihood of constriction and inflammation in the airways and reducing elevated histamine and adrenaline.

Once developed, all of these techniques can be replicated long term, turned into one’s habitual breathing pattern, and offer not only prevention of breathing difficulties and asthma, but also allow optimal respiratory function. And once trained, the practice is free!!

There is now an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting the use of breathing retraining in the management of respiratory disorders such as asthma.

One study published in 2006 in ‘Thorax’ a highly respected International Journal of Respiratory Medicine, found that in a 30 month, double blind randomized trial of two different breathing techniques in the management of asthma, confirmed that both groups achieved an 86% reduction in bronchodilator reliever medication and a 50% reduction in the dosage of inhaled cortisone medication.

My clinical experiences in treating asthma using Breathing Dynamics or breathing retraining have certainly echoed these results.

To book in for a consultation to see Tim regarding the use of Breathing Dynamics to prevent or treat asthma, email Tim or call 0425 739 918.