How Konstatin Buteyko discovered the root cause of chronic diseases

When technical genius and compassion collaborate, a mighty force against suffering arises” -  K.P.  Buteyko

1923 – Buteyko is born

Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko was born on the 27th January 1923, into the small farming community of Ivanitsa (about 150km from Kiev). Inheriting his fathers enthusiasm for machines, Konstantin was enrolled into the Kiev Polytechnic Institute until his studies were interrupted by World War II when Buteyko joined his country’s armed forces. After his War experiences, Buteyko felt compelled to study what he called “the most complicated piece of machinery of all” – the human organism.

1946 – Buteyko enrols in medical school

In 1946, he enrolled into the First Medical Institute in Moscow. In his third year he started working in the clinical therapy group under the departmental head, academician Evgeniy Mikhailovitch Tareiev. For his practical assignment he monitored critically ill patients’ breathing. He spent hundreds of hours sitting by patients’ bedsides, recording their breathing patterns before they died. He noticed a strong, uniform deepening in patients’ breathing as they neared death. By recording these increases, Buteyko was soon able to predict how many days or hours each patient had left to live.

1952 – he finds deep breathing causes dizziness and wheezing

In 1952, having graduated from the Institute with Honours, Buteyko continued his experiments independently. He asked healthy subjects to breathe deeply for a set time. They became dizzy and nauseous, developed asphyxia symptoms such as wheeziness and coughing, and eventually fainted. This (he had been told) was due to too much oxygen reaching their brain.

During his second month of independent work,  Buteyko wondered if certain diseases might develop as a result of deep breathing. He wondered if deep breathing was causing his own high blood pressure. He measured his body’s carbon dioxide levels. It was on the low side. Overbreathing lowers carbon dioxide levels in the body. So he theorised that if over-breathing was causing his low CO2 levels, then he might cure his high blood pressure by reducing his breathing.

He began experimenting on himself. He trained himself to breathe more shallowly. And that alleviated his headache and rapid heartbeat.  But the symptoms came back when he breathed more deeply again.  He devised a program to quickly measure breathing and then recondition it. Through these techniques he reversed hs own high blood pressure.

Buteyko checked and rechecked his theory on other people. he proved that people with asthma, angina and other diseases were all hyperventilating too. Once again by correcting these patients’ breathing Buteyko could normalise their carbon dioxide shortfall and stop their attacks dead. When patieants were asked to return to their previous breathing patterns, their attacks resumed.

He had stumbled on a very important discovery. A global discovery. Medical thinking was upside down.

Are symptoms just the body’s defence against loss of CO2?

Buteyko laid down the theoretical foundation for this idea

1. Hyperventilation causes a depletion of carbon dioxide
2. Low carbon dioxide levels cause blood vessels to spasm (high blood pressure) and starve the tissues of oxygen.
3. “Defence mechanisms” kick in –  previously mislabelled as diseases.  For example the vessel spasming in:
   • stenocardia (angina pectoris)
   • myocardial infarction (heart attack)
   • end arteritis – inflammation of the innermost coat of an artery, usually occurring in legs
   • ulcerative stomach disease.

Buteyko researched his theory at the Central and Lenin Medical Libraries . Had no-one else in medicine shared the same thought as him, he wondered? Just the opposite. For centuries, most people had taught their children to breathe deeply – thinking this would get more oxygen to the tissues. Noone, even for a moment, tried to reduce breathing. During his research, Buteyko was lucky to learn of a few experiments supporting his thinking

• Bohr
• Holden
• Priestly
• Henderson
• De Kosta

He shared his thoughts with his teachers, but none were interested.

Health heresy – surgeons took 50 years to wash their hands

Many important medical discoveries get dismissed and suppressed, at first - only to become accepted practice years later. Buteyko recalled the story of sepsis in 1846.

A doctor friend of surgeon Zemelweise had cut his finger during an autopsy on a woman who had died of sepsis. Sepsis was known as “puerperal fever” then. Three days later, the doctor also contracted the “puerperal fever”. Zemelweise concluded that “something” had been passed from the corpse into the doctor’s cut.

Noone knew about microbes yet. But Zemelweise began washing his hands before operating. He disinfected them with a chloride of lime solution. And he suggested his assistants also follow this routine. In those times, about one third of all new mothers and surgical patients died of sepsis. But after three months, Zemelweise’s had lost no patients. He informed the society of surgeons and suggested they follow his example. But they declared him to be mentally disturbed.

A similar destiny befell Professor Lister, an Englishman, who in 1856  also called for surgeons to disinfect their  hands before operating. When the news got out, hordes of patients’ relatives started to turn up at operations demanding to know if the surgeons had washed their hands first. Only then did surgeons accept hand washing as procedure. That was a full 50 years after Zemelweise’s original discovery.

Knowing this, Buteyko decided to organise an experimental laboratory . He had to gather evidence, develop it, and only then, announce the basis of his ideas.

Later that year Buteyko became a clinical therapy intern under Academic Tareiev again. Here he was given his chance to establish a functional diagnostics laboratory, This project failed due to lack of funds, personnel and equipment. An attempt to establish the laboratory under the auspices of the Ministry of Health in Moscow was also unsuccessful – for lack of scientific staff.

1958 - surgeons feel threatened by results

In 1958 the director at the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Science invited Buteyko to join him there. Professor Meshalkin invited Buteyko to the Institute of Experimental Biology and Medicine. Once again Buteyko started to set up a laboratory of functional diagnostics. This project was completed in 1960.

In 1958 – 1959 Buteyko did clinical studies on nearly 200 healthy and sick people. All the first data confirmed the correctness of his discovery.

On 11 January 1960, he presented his work to the Scientific Forum at the Institute and tried to explain  his thinking. He told the audience of the experiments, which showed the objective linear relationship between the depth of breathing, the content of carbon dioxide in the body and vessel spasm and degrees of illness.

Buteyko’s colleagues were stunned. Surgeons took the studies as some dirty trick, because Buteyko offered to treat such diseases as asthma, hypertension, angina, without a knife. Invasive surgery never cured these diseases anyway. Everybody knew that. And mortality was high. But the Buteyko method gave a quick, almost 100% recovery. Quite naturally, Buteyko had expected the surgeons to be delighted but their reaction was quite the opposite. Nevertheless, he did received temporary approval from Professor Meshalkin who chaired the Forum. Meshalkin said he understood the perspective and wanted the research continued.

1958 – 1968 – Buteyko’s lab trains 200 medics

Over the next decade, Buteyko and his team used a legion of over 40 lab instruments to test almost all basic human  functions – in sickness and in health. These machines churned out about 100,000 results an hour. Computers analysed the results, correlating physiological measurements against the body’s processses.

Some 200 medical specialists worked in the laboratory. Most of them had treated their own conditions using the method. Soon they were all treating other patients using the Buteyko method. Official statistics showed that as at 1 January 1967 the lab had helped more than 1000 patients recover from asthma, hypertension or angina.

Despite this, Meshalkin categorically refused Buteyko’s request to conduct a trial at the Institute’s medial clinic. Shortly afterwards,  Meshalkin confiscated Buteyko’s equipment, banned his team from publishing their findings, and reprimanded them for making any public appearances or speeches on the subject.

In 1963 Professor Meshalkin had also clamped down on a few other challenging ideas about surgery. As a result of these draconian management practices, his Institute was disbanded.This disbandment may have saved Buteyko’s laboratory.

In 1963 to 1968,  Buteyko’s laboratory got reassigned to the Institute of Cytology and Genetics at the Academy of Science. He kept a third of all the instruments and staff on at the same premises. Meanwhile his opressor Professor Meshalkin’s clinic moved to the Russian Ministry of Health. Buteyko’s repeated requests to accredit his method had been rebuffed.

1968 -  Clinical trial shows 95% success in toughest cases

In January 1968, after  the local and foreign press defended  Buteyko’s discoveries, he finally got permission to carry out a clinical trial. The trial was in Leningrad, at the Institute of Pulmonology, under Academician Uglov.

Shortly before the trial, the Minister of Health  visited Buteyko’s clinic.  Academician Petrovskya promised Buteyko a 5- bed clinic to continue his clinical work if he could prove it worked on at least 80% of the patients, And the method would become standard medical practice, Petrovsky promised. There was only one condition. Buteyko had to take on the most serious cases, that conventional methods could not treat.

The trial results were:

• 44 of the 46 patients (95%) were officially recognised as cured.
• Only 2 from the 46 had a smaller positive effect.
• Some of the patients had up to 20 conditions each.
• One of the female asthma patients had been recommended a mastectomy, for the beginnings of a cancer.  But she had refused the operation. She recovered  from her asthma and from the malignant tumour.
• the 2 patients counted as failures did relieve their diseases after further treatment. They wrote to tell the Minister afterwards. If you include their results, the overall sucess rate was 100%.

Lab closed and findings falsified

The health ministry monitored the trial and sent its conclusions to the Health Minister, academician Petrovsky. The findings were kept from Buteyko and his bosses at the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Science. Petrovsky later told Buteyko’s boss – the chairman of the Siberian Branch, academician Lavrentiev – that the trial had failed. Only two out of the 46 patients had been cured, the Minister claimed. Buteyko’s laboratory was closed down on the basis of htis lie. On 14 August 1968, all scientists were dismissed without any offers of alternative employment, and all of the equipment was confiscated or pilfered.

Even against the odds, the method survived. Although not one official clinic in Moscow was using the method, the original team of doctors continued to treat patients. The Buteyko method was being used in Harkov, Chernigov, Kahovka, Leningrad, Krasnoyarsk, Khabarovsk and Sverdlovsk,.

1980 – second official trial – 100% success approved

Success after success forced the Government to revisit the method. The second official trial was conducted at the First Moscow Institute of Paediatric Diseases in April 1980 at the direction of the Government Committee for Science and Technology of the Soviet Ministry of USSR. The study confirmed the findings of the earlier Leningrad trial: 100% success rate. This time the results won official recognition.

Whilst the Russian trials tended to focus on asthma, Butekyo works very well for a whole range of disorders such as allergies, rhinitis, bronchitis, sleeping disorders (such as sleep apnoea), breathing problems, etc.