Breathing Remedies

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  • BREATHING
    • Breathing Assessment and Buteyko course
    • How I help – About Buteyko breathing
    • Symptoms of Disordered Breathing
  • POSTURE
    • Postural alignment therapy (Egoscue): conditions treated
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    • Asthma allergies sinusitis
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    • Snoring sleep apnoea insomnia
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    • Dysfunctional Breathing
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Asthma allergies sinusitis


Asthma is extremely common, affecting more than five million people in the UK alone.
The symptoms of wheezing, breathlessness, tight chest, coughing, inability to get a good breath in can be very frightening. Asthma still kills on average 1400 people per year in the UK.
“I cannot remember having such a good night’s sleep and have not needed my reliever inhaler since doing the course” Asthma, High Peak.
Learning Buteyko helps to normalise the breathing pattern and reverse the chronic hyperventilation. Better breathing leads to better symptom control with less medication so Buteyko is a natural, drug-free treatment. When people learn to control their asthma with the simple breathing exercises, they learn not to fear asthma. Wheezing, coughing, breathlessness, tight chest become a thing of the past, or at least much more easily controlled. Learning Buteyko breathing can help you stop coughing naturally, and stop coughing at night. Medications are not very effective against cough, but breathing retraining helps get rid of cough. Breathing retraining is also very useful if you want to know how to get rid of phlegm, or how to get rid of a stuffy nose. You can unblock your nose within minutes, but it takes longer to learn to keep it unblocked!
“My daughter used to wake up coughing every morning with her asthma. This stopped a few days into her Buteyko Breathing Method course” Asthma, Handforth.
The Buteyko method is a natural asthma remedy, uses no drugs, herbs machines or gadgets, and is the only proven complementary method for natural asthma control. It has been listed in the UK Asthma guidelines since 2008 British Thoracic Society & Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN). British Guideline on the Management of Asthma. Guideline No. 101. Edinburgh:SIGN; 2008. The 2019 guideline can be found here, page 66
A new government study (National Institutes of Health) in the USA has endorsed the use of Buteyko breathing for Asthma:
Breathing Exercises and/or Retraining Techniques in the Treatment of Asthma: Comparative Effectiveness
So if you are looking for natural asthma remedies, the Butyeko Breathing method is proven to be safe and effective, and is listed in the guidelines.

Sinusitis is inflammation of the sinus cavities (with or without infection).  Symptoms can include pain, headache, swelling, excessive mucus and postnasal drip. Suffered often have disturbed sleep. Symptoms tend to become chronic and more frequent over time.
Over-breathing, or hyperventilation, lowers the carbon dioxide level within the blood and the respiratory system including the nasal/sinus passages. A low carbon dioxide environment stimulates mast cells to release greater amounts of histamine, an inflammatory agent, in response to contact with allergens. In short, the body over-reacts and the nasal and sinus regions become swollen and inflamed. Secondary infections are common in the warm moist environment.

Allergies such as hay fever (usually seasonal, grass pollen) and pet allergies, are also common. Many people have sinus problems with blocked or running noses and sneezing.
“The practical benefits include no sneezing and no hay fever symptoms even when we walk through fields of cut hay and flowering grasses” hay fever, High Peak
What people with these conditions have in common is that they breathe more air than healthy people; that is they hyperventilate.
Breathing re-training with the Buteyko method can normalise breathing and reduce symptoms. Courses are individually designed for your safety. Children and adults are usually taught in separate classes as their breathing exercises are different.
Other respiratory conditions
Conditions such as emphysema, Bronchiectasis and chronic bronchitis also have some of the same symptoms as asthma. Sometimes it is better to look at symptoms rather than the diagnosis of a condition, which could be given different diagnoses by different health care professionals. Some of symptoms in these chronic conditions respond well to Buteyko, especially if there is excess mucus/phlegm production. However, whereas the Buteyko breathing method exercises can soon be reduced for someone with asthma, people with conditions such as emphysema are likely to need to continue with their daily exercises long-term to benefit from the Buteyko breathing normalisation.

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About me, Buteyko breathing educator

Janet Winter breathing and posture educator (Buteyko and Egoscue)

Dr Janet Winter (PhD)

Hello, I am Janet,  a  Breathing educator (Buteyko), and Posture specialist (Egoscue): better breathing and better posture lead to better health. I teach natural health control with no drugs, gadgets or manipulation. You can sign up to my newsletter here.

I help people recover from asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety, sleep problems, headaches, IBS chronic fatigue (ME/CFS) and more. How? By improving their dysfunctional breathing.

Listen to Suzy Glaskie’s (functional medicine health coach at Peppermint Wellness) 15 minute podcast on how Learning Buteyko helped her.

Phone me 01663 743055 (Dr Janet Winter) or contact me here.

What I do

Breathing education (Buteyko method) gently retrains a disordered breathing pattern and helps people naturally recover from breathing-related health problems. Listed in the UK Asthma Guideline since 2008. I am a member of the Buteyko Breathing Educators Association (BBEA).

Postural alignment  (Egoscue institute certified). Good posture is essential for good breathing and proper function in general.

I am fully insured (Holistic Insurance)

My background

I was involved in healthcare/biomedical research for 30 years although previously in a very different role. Before training as a Breathing educator, I spent 20 years in drug discovery. My focus was on novel painkillers for a major pharmaceutical company based in a London Institute.
I worked as a neuroscientist and cell biologist, directing a team of bench scientists. (So I am not a medical doctor but I have a PhD in Neuroscience) I authored or co-authored more than 50 journal articles and reviews on my research.  My professional profile can be seen here on LINKEDIN.

Why I became a breathing educator

If you are reading this because you have CFS/ME, I know what you are going through. I know what it is like to hold onto a job by my fingernails. I worried about how we would feed the family if I lost my job. I would come home and eat and sleep and spend my weekend recovering. My social life was non-existent.

I was lucky to quickly get to a consultant who diagnosed me with candidiasis.  Anti-fungals and a yeast and sugar-free diet helped a lot, but not enough.

I felt “written off” and had nothing to offer. I was a mum, partner and employee with massively reduced physical and mental output compared with previously.
After trying many different avenues, cranial osteopathy, chiropractic, mercury amalgam filling removal and more – I became a “fat-folder patient”.

How I got sick

I suspected my symptoms were “stress related”. But they did not ease when I left my stressful job and moved out of London to the countryside.

Looking back on my history I can clearly see my own physical and emotional stresses accumulating. Starting with a very traumatic bereavement, on-going work and family stresses, then a really bad summer respiratory infection/ cough. This cough was not shifted by two different antibiotics.  However, the antibiotics probably contributed to unbalancing my gut flora, hence the fungal overgrowth/candidiasis.

A cough seems to be one of the best ways to mess up your breathing pattern.  Many of my clients tell me “I was fine until I had that cough/chest infection, and I never really got my health back!!”

The breathing centre in the brain gets to think that big volume breathing is normal. Unless you know about it, it is sometimes hard to recover. Luckily you CAN retrain your breathing by learning Buteyko and you CAN have hope of better health.

My recovery

Changing my breathing back to a more normal pattern really helped me. It was a big missing piece of my health puzzle, and one I had frankly never considered. One definition of stress is “anything that makes you breathe more”. And I know now that breathing too much can actually deplete the body of oxygen. And stress can be emotional or physical.

So that is why I do what I do and why I am passionate about it.  I found a way to improve my chronic fatigue by better breathing and I trained as a breathing educator so I could help others with this devastating disease. There is so little help out there for them (you?).

Then chronic backache made good breathing impossible, and I discovered postural alignment therapy (Egoscue) to help with that. And I am still amazed at the progress I am making. It’s wonderful to have decreased pain and increased function when I had accepted decline at my age was inevitable. It’s not!


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