VOXY: New Zealand’s Alarming Asthma Rate Due To Bad Breathing Say Authors

NEW ZEALAND’S ALARMING ASTHMA RATE DUE TO BAD BREATHING SAY AUTHORS

Monday, 4 May, 2009

With Asthma Awareness Week beginning today, two internationally recognised breathing experts have called for the promotion of drug-free alternatives to asthma treatments to help the more than 600,000 New Zealanders with a respiratory illness.

Dinah Bradley and Tania Clifton-Smith, authors of Dynamic Breathing, believe current treatment and management plans for asthma, which often promote drugs and inhalers and neglect the importance of breathing techniques, have lead to worsening outcomes for asthma sufferers.

New Zealand hospital admission rates due to asthma have more than doubled in the past 30 years and the Asthma and Respiratory Foundation estimates that currently one in five New Zealanders have asthma, costing the New Zealand economy more than $800 million a year.

“Curiously, since the advent of user-friendly inhalers 30-odd years ago and newer asthma ‘wonder drugs’, less attention has been paid by the medical profession to the business of breathing itself”, says Bradley and Clifton-Smith.

“Dependency on asthma medication is regarded as the norm, and there is little encouragement for people with asthma to try alternative methods to control their breathing.”

It is estimated that 70% of people with asthma breathe with difficulty and without using their full breathing potential.

“Knowing how to breathe properly and efficiently by employing physical coping skills enhances drug therapies, and in many instances helps people reduce medications” says Bradley and Clifton-Smith.

Bradley and Clifton-Smith, New Zealand trained physiotherapists, are internationally recognised experts in the field of breathing pattern disorders who have developed their own breathing technique, the BradCliff Method.

Their BradCliff, Method of breathing retraining, which is detailed in Dynamic Breathing, adds value to basic asthma education, by looking at the mechanics of breathing patterns and the muscles involved, not just the airways and medication use.

Bradley and Clifton-Smith joined forces in 1999 to establish Breathing Works, their unique specialist physiotherapy clinic, which caters to people with breathing pattern disorders and chronic hyperventilation problems.

Due to the reputation of the BradCliff technique and the astounding results they achieve, Bradley and Clifton-Smith have clients from all over the world wanting to learn their unique method.

www.voxy.co.nz