Ashma

Conventional asthma treatments can increase your risk of heart disease and osteoporosis. Fortunately, there are safe, natural strategies you can use instead that can virtually eliminate your need for dangerous drug treatments.

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

Asthma has increasingly become a very common affliction. In fact, it now affects some 20 million Americans, as it has increased by more than 300 percent over the last 20 years.

  

Asthma is an inflammatory condition, typically of your upper airways, that can cause: 

• Chest tightness 

• Shortness of breath 

• Wheezing 

• Coughing 

Coughing is frequently overlooked, however it is one of the hidden symptoms, so if you suffer from unexplained bouts of coughing, you should consider getting yourself checked for asthma.

 

The Dangers of Conventional Asthma Treatments

 

The conventional asthma treatment typically consists of a non-steroidal bronchodilator – an anti-inflammatory agent that you inhale. It causes the smooth muscle cells in your lungs to relax, which opens up your airways.

If that doesn’t t work, the next level is typically an inhaled steroid, which is a very potent anti-inflammatory agent. The reason these aggressive types of intervention are performed is because asthma is indeed a serious condition. It can be fatal, so you need to be serious about treating it.

  

Unfortunately, the conventional approaches are not without side effects.

 

In addition to local side effects, the most common side effect -- which is typically not appreciated -- is that non-steroidal bronchodilators will double your risk of a heart attack.

 

And steroids, even though they can help reduce the inflammation in your lungs, are fraught with serious side effects, including: 

• Cardiovascular disease 

• Impaired growth of your body and internal organs (including your brain) 

• Infections 

• Cataracts 

• Osteoporosis 

• Diabetes 

• Weight gain 

• High blood pressure, and a variety of other disease conditions 

These aggressive drug approaches clearly do not treat the cause of your asthma, and they can be quite dangerous, even lethal.

  

Clearly you’ll want to avoid having to resort to such measures. Fortunately there are simple strategies you can use that will virtually eliminate your need for these medications.

  

Safe and Effective Strategies to Treat Your Asthma 

Although asthma is a serious disease, safely treating your asthma is not a complicated affair. Here are some basic, simple strategies that can help treat the root of your problem: 

 

Optimize your vitamin D levels – We now know that there’s a very strong connection between vitamin D levels and asthma, as vitamin D can be a very powerful immune modulator. However, I don’t suggest just taking the recommended daily allowance, which is a mere 400 units a day. You really need to make sure you’re getting therapeutic levels.

  

This is ideally obtained from exposing a significant amount of your skin -- not just your hands and face -- to appropriate amounts of sunlight.

  

What is an appropriate amount of sun exposure? 

Enough, from either the sun or a safe tanning bed, to turn your skin the very lightest shade of pink. Once you reach that shade of pink, your body is not going to produce any more vitamin D. In fact, you’re only going to cause damage to your skin if you increase your exposure past that point.

  

You can actually produce up to 20,000 units of vitamin D per day through this kind of exposure. However, you don’t need to be concerned with how much you’re producing, as your skin has a feedback loop that will shut down the production of vitamin D past a certain point. As you get sufficient levels in your body you’ll automatically produce less accordingly, so there’s never any risk of overdosing when getting your vitamin D from the sun.

 

When you swallow vitamin D however, this feedback loop does not exist so you need to be careful if you chose to take an oral vitamin D supplement as overdosing can be just as bad as being severely deficient.

  

I do recommend oral supplements if you don’t have regular access to the sun or a safe tanning bed.  But if you do, make sure you  monitor your blood with an accurate test .  The one caution here in the US is to be certain your test is performed at a lab like Labcorp, that uses the gold standard Diasorin test for checking vitamin D levels. Due to information published by the New York Times about Quest labs, where they admitted to inaccurate results, I no longer recommend using them.  

If you get your levels to about 60 ng/ml, there’s a strong likelihood -- especially if you combine it with exercise and balancing out your omega 3 and omega 6 fats as described below -- that you will not experience the symptoms of asthma anymore.

  

Increase your intake of animal-based omega 3 fats – I can’t emphasize enough the importance of getting sufficient amounts of high quality animal-based omega 3 fats in your diet.

  

Because although I strongly believe we all need plant-based omega 3 fats (and I consume some virtually every day myself, like hemp seed or flax seed), the difference is that most of us do not possess the metabolic machinery to rapidly convert the ALA in these plants to the higher order fats DHA and EPA, which are potent anti-inflammatories.

  

Although I still recommend fish oil in some instances, I believe krill oil is an even better source of omega 3 fats for most people.

 

Reduce your intake of omega 6 fats – In addition to adding omega 3 fats to your diet, you also want to reduce the amount of omega 6 fats you consume because the ratio between these two fats is very important.

  

Many don’t realize that about a century ago, people only consumed 1-2 pounds of plant-based omega 6 fats per year. Today, the average American is consuming about 75-80 pounds a year of these vegetable oils, such as corn oil, soy- and safflower oil.

 

When you eat lots of them, which you will if you use a lot of processed foods, the balance between omega 3 and omega 6 fats will become distorted, which can cause the type of inflammation that leads to asthma.

 

Consider the hygiene hypothesis – There’s a tendency in our modern culture to be obsessive about cleanliness, especially in children. However, this may not be as healthy as initially thought. It appears that being exposed to common bacterial and viral infections as a child can be instrumental in providing the stimulus to your immune system to prevent asthma naturally.

 

Get regular exercise – Exercise (especially out in fresh air if you’re an asthmatic) is actually crucial as it helps to moderate your insulin levels. It increases your insulin receptor sensitivity, and as a result your body produces less insulin, which tends to optimize it. Research has also shown that asthmatics who exercise tend to show improvement in:

• Maximum ventilation 

• Maximal oxygen uptake 

• Work capacity, and 

• Maximum heart rate 

You can also use allergy testing to build up your immune system.  My experience is that conventional testing does not work very effectively and there is a fair amount of risk. A far better intradermal skin test would be provocation neutralization testing.

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) has a list of physicians who are trained in this highly effective technique.

 

Conclusion 

Don’t you agree it’s a safer and wiser strategy to address the cause of your disease, rather than treating the symptoms with expensive, potentially dangerous drugs?  If you follow these simple strategies mentioned above, you can virtually eliminate your need for bronchodilators and steroid drugs.

Asthma Relief Without Medications 

By Christine Wheeler, MA

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is a popular new asthma treatment (no drugs required) that often works where nothing else will. The discovery behind the method is that anxiety and other emotional issues are often at the root of the illness. Resolve the emotional causes (which EFT can usually do quite rapidly) and the wheezing and congestion typically fade. 

Interestingly, the medical literature largely ignores fear, guilt, anger & trauma as a cause of asthma attacks. Note, for example, these explanations given at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) Web site:

Causes of an Asthma Attack: Environmental exposures, such as house dust mites and environmental tobacco smoke, are important triggers of an attack. [Note that emotions are not included as a cause.]

How Asthma is Treated: You can control your asthma and avoid an attack by taking your medicine as prescribed and avoiding the triggers that can cause an attack. It's just as important that you remove the triggers in your environment that you know make your asthma worse. [Also note that emotional relief is not included in the treatment.]

Medical doctors often agree, however, that emotional factors such as stress can aggravate or even trigger asthma attacks. But that is not the same as considering unresolved emotional factors as a cause. Interestingly, EFT approaches asthma strictly from the emotional point of view and EFT clients usually report impressive relief. This offers eye-opening possibilities for physicians and their patients.

While EFT is not perfect, its clinical results should command the attention of any objective observer. In about 80 percent of the EFT cases, wheezing and congestion in the chest noticeably subsides within moments. Sometimes people get complete relief from an attack in as little as three minutes. And, again, this is done without the use of the medications or inhalers.

EFT borrows from the much-heralded discoveries of Albert Einstein (i.e. everything, including your body, is composed of energy) ... AND ... from the ancient wisdom of Chinese acupuncture.  

In essence, EFT is an emotional version of acupuncture except that needles are not necessary.  Instead, certain release points are stimulated by tapping them with the fingertips. Further, the basics of EFT can be learned by anyone and can be self-applied (usually in minutes).

Here is a synopsis of an actual case using EFT for asthma, which can be read in its entirety at the EFT Web site:

Dr. Ed Leshin, a chiropractor and acupuncturist, used EFT to give immediate relief in a severe asthma case.

Carol came into Dr. Leshin's office in the midst of an asthma attack. She had used her inhaler three hours earlier but was still experiencing difficulty breathing. She was pale and sweating and quite frightened by her struggle to breathe. No matter how many asthma attacks one gets, it is still a scary experience. Some people say it is like trying to breathe through a straw ... while an elephant sits on your chest.

Dr. Leshin listened to Carol's lungs and noted considerable wheezing and congestion. Carol was becoming increasingly stressed by the attack and Dr. Leshin suggested EFT to relieve the anxiety related to her asthma attack. They focused on doing EFT for about 15 minutes and Carol's anxiety calmed considerably. She indicated that her initial symptoms had been close to the maximum ... on a scale of 1-10, they were a 12! After they did EFT the symptoms abated by about 50 percent. Dr. Leshin then reported:

"I listened to her lungs again, and they sounded 50% better.

 In fact there were no wheezing sounds anymore!"

Even though the symptoms of her asthma attack did not completely leave, Dr. Leshin believes that EFT allowed her to avert a trip to the emergency room.

Please note that, in addition to improving asthma with EFT, it has been a consistently effective healing tool for hundreds of other physical, mental and emotional ailments.

  

While a complete description of EFT is beyond the scope of this article, you can learn all the basics from the free EFT Get Started Package, including a free download of the 79-page EFT Manual (it includes all the basics). Those wishing to save time and dive right in can get the very affordable training DVDs.

Please consult qualified health professionals before putting EFT into practice for yourself or others. 

A Natural Treatment For Asthma 

Even though exercise can trigger asthma attacks, a review of studies on the subject shows that asthmatics benefit from exercise on the whole, as it improves their cardiopulmonary fitness.

Asthmatics who exercised regularly showed improvement in:

• Maximum ventilation 

• Maximal oxygen uptake 

• Work capacity, and 

• Maximum heart rate.

Exercise showed no significant effect in other measures such as expiratory air-flow rate, expiratory volume, and days of wheezing. There was no evidence suggesting that regular exercise worsens asthmatic symptoms.

The review examined 13 studies, involving more that 450 total participants. It may be advisable for asthmatics to seek counseling on ways to prevent and treat exercise-induced asthma.

Sources:    Center for the Advancement of Health October 21, 2005

Dr. Mercola's Comments: 

Just no way around it, exercise is vital to your long-term health program. We simply all need to exercise and if we don't we are asking for trouble. Exercise affects just about every area of your life and can radically improve conditions you had no idea it would influence, like cancer and as this study shows, asthma.

This study illustates another important characteristic of exercise in that it is best viewed like a drug that needs to be precisely prescribed to achieve maximum benefits. Most people believe, however, if they merely invest some time, somehow exercise will magically give them all the benefits they're seeking.

To achieve the incredible benefits exercise has to offer, it needs to provide a significant cardiovascular stress to induce biochemical changes, like increasing mitochondria in the muscle to burn fat while one is sleeping.

It is also possible to overexcise and this Saturday I am running an article that clearly demonstrates that.

In addition to exercise there are a number of simple and highly effective lifestyle modifications that should radically improve the quality of breathing in those who have asthma.

• Increase fish or cod liver oil and reduce your intake of regular vegetable oils. This maybe the single most important nutritional intervention you can make as it will radically the inflammation associated with asthma, and won't damage your bones like prednisone. 

• Consider using Vitamin E 

• Tomatoes have high amounts of lycopene that should help asthma 

• Avoid using Tylenol as that may worsen athma 

• Write about your worries. This simple act has a profound positive benefit on improving asthma.