December 21, 2007
Improve Your Asthma By Learning To Relax
Almost every asthmatic knows from personal experience that anxiety, stress, and panic play important roles in asthma. Feeling their lungs tighten, many asthmatics become anxious and set in motion the vicious cycle of increasing anxiety and worsening symptoms.
Making the transformation from panic to calm can take months or years. How you make this transition is a matter of choice, as there are many paths to choose from. Known as complementary therapies, these paths encompass a wide range of non-pharmacological treatment options, from acupuncture to yoga. These therapies fall into three, often interrelated categories: breathing exercises, relaxation therapy, and analysis. Ideally, you can choose one that encompasses aspects of all three.
- Breathing therapies concentrate on breath control and are found in disciplines such as yoga and Buteyko breathing.
- Relaxation therapies include massage, chiropractic, biofeedback, and listening to music.
- Analysis involves thinking rationally about asthma and realizing that asthma can be controlled. While exercising, eating right, and making other lifestyle changes are critical to healing asthma, it's equally important to think about how emotions impact your life. You can ponder these thoughts while walking the beach or rock climbing, or with the aid of a therapist—it's up to you.
It's probably going to take some trial and error to find which techniques work best for you, but that's half the fun. Which technique you choose is not as important as making a choice, since choosing forces you to pay attention to the mind as well as the body. Paying attention to your feelings will not only help alleviate your asthma but also heal old wounds and rid your mind of negative emotional baggage. Each of us deserves to live a good life and be happy with who we are.
The Placebo Effect
Before we look at individual therapies, let's examine an area of potential confusion, a problem frequently encountered in research studies on complementary therapies: the "placebo effect." The placebo effect occurs when study subjects receive a placebo (an inert treatment or substance) and nonetheless report improvement because they believe the treatment is helping them. This is a common phenomenon in many placebo-controlled trials.
Scientists expect the placebo effect and use statistics to determine when outcome differences between treatment and placebo groups become important or "statistically significant." In other words, what researchers look for is an outcome difference between treatment and placebo groups that demonstrates that the treatment provides a measurable benefit beyond what would be expected from the placebo effect alone. By demonstrating this "statistically significant" difference, scientists can assert that the treatment actually works. Sometimes the outcome difference between placebo and treatment groups is so small as to be statistically insignificant; that is, the treatment offers no benefit beyond what would be expected from the placebo effect.
Not surprisingly, there is a substantial body of literature affirming that the placebo effect is a potent part of many therapies and that believing something will work can actually influence the outcome. Perhaps one of the best examples of this mind/ body phenomenon relates to the immune system: several studies have documented that suggestion under hypnosis can influence immune function in certain individuals.
Studies have also shown that a physician's attitude toward a particular therapy can influence the efficacy of that therapy. One study compared a group of patients who were offered a treatment by a physician who presented the information in a "positive manner" against another group who received the information in a "non-positive manner." The treatment itself was the same in both groups. After two weeks, there was a significant difference in patient satisfaction between the positive and negative groups, as "64 percent of those receiving a positive consultation got better, compared to 39 percent of those who received a negative consultation."
The placebo effect represents the healing power of your mind and may be one of the reasons why the treatments discussed in this chapter can help people with asthma. What does this mean for you?. Remember, what works for one person may not work for another. The only time you should abandon a therapy is if it may cause more harm than good. Bottom line: If the therapy works for you, use it.
