Alternative Treatments for Asthma
It is commonly believed that the only way to treat asthma effectively is by taking medications prescribed by a doctor.
But there are alternative methods that have surprisingly effective results that many are not aware of or are wary of simply because they lie outside the realm of mainstream medical science and the more common use of inhaler steroids.
In this article, I shall take what many see as an opposite approach to the commonly followed medical/drug route of treating this condition. I'll actually look at some of the better known alternative remedies for this condition as fully working natural forms of treatment.
Taking the Natural Path
Natural forms of asthma treatment come in many guises, including several well known and in some cases highly popular home remedies for asthma symptoms.
It is worth noting that the main theme running through many of these types of symptom management are in reducing levels of stress, or better coping with those particular stressful situations that may have a tendency to cause an asthma attack to be brought on.
There are many ways to produce a self induced reversal of an asthma attack by learning how to remain calm in what untrained people would perceive as stressful situations. Meditation is a great way to learn how to control your body and your mind so that you tend to see life from a calmer perspective.
Likewise combining meditative skills with learned deep breathing exercises can produce a powerful way to beat stress. When in possession of this skill, many stressful situations that would, in the past have caused you to become anxious, now only roll off you like water off a duck's back!
Yoga
Learning Yoga is another highly effective discipline that works as a natural self-help method of learning to deal effectively with stressful situations. It incorporates the mental calming effect of meditation, while teaching you to become physically calm from within.
It is a great way of training your body to slow down its breathing rate at will. This is perfect for use in situations when you feel the first symptoms of an asthma attack beginning.
With yoga as a daily part of your life, you can learn how to recognise the onset of an asthma attack and calm your breathing before it takes hold.
Tai Chi
Another effective stress management discipline for dealing with this respiratory condition comes in the form of inner calmness training that also calms the body and teaches how to deal effectively with stress: Tai Chi. This ancient Chinese art of slow body movement, concentration and breathing techniques is perfect for dealing with asthma and its breathing related problems.
By undergoing daily exercises that teach balance and poise through slow, graceful body movements, you can learn how to remain calm in situations that would otherwise bring on an anxious response. By remaining physically calm in the face of stress, you can avert an attack and dramatically reduce our reliance on an inhaler.
Acupuncture
Much anecdotal evidence exists to suggest that acupuncture can be an effective holistic treatment for asthma. It works by bringing the body's energy fields back into alignment where they had gone out of alignment through any manner of causes.
The sessions themselves are particularly relaxing and many patients describe falling asleep during their sessions because they became so deeply relaxed. They then went away feeling really quite amazing afterwards while their symptoms were visibly reduced.
Hypnotherapy
The use of hypnosis to aid the induction of autosuggestion in patients of all manner of ailments has long been known to be among the most effective of all alternative therapies. The experience itself is deeply relaxing and results in the patient learning how such deep and penetrating relaxation is in itself highly effective at averting stress and anxiety situations that can act as the prime triggers for attacks.
It is also the power of autosuggestion in bringing the person's subconscious to bear on their situation to bring about a learned calm response to stressful situations.
There is a side of hypnotherapy known as hypno-analysis that follows psychoanalytical procedures. These seek for and uncover repressed incidents in a person's past that are responsible for behavioural problems that often express themselves in allergy based conditions such as asthma or eczema.
The precept here is that once the cause is revealed, faced and let go, the "symptoms" have no basis for existence and so they dissolve into nothingness. There are many recorded instances of asthma sufferers becoming "cured" of their symptoms following several sessions of hypno-analysis, so this is an avenue worth pursuing especially where doctors can find no medical cause for the condition.
Speleotherapy
This is a little known term that covers salt air therapy, also known as halotherapy and is covered more completely in my article on salt therapy for breathing problems and treating asthma naturally. Basically what it entails is breathing in salty air that floods the bronchial airways, cleansing and detoxifying the respiratory system from the inside out.
This can be achieved by using a salt pipe or by placing a himalayan salt lamp (or several) in a room or rooms in the home.
It can be likened to visiting the seaside for a two week holiday and breathing deep of the fresh sea air and feeling the healthfulness of that air as it circulates in your lungs. In landlocked countries where it is not so easy to get access to the seaside, visiting salt mines and spending several days in them has been a popular form of breathing treatment in many European countries for many years.
How to Cure Asthma Naturally
There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that asthmatics that moved away from their more polluted city or big town environment to a fresh air countryside location, especially one that is very close to the seaside, significantly reduced their symptoms to the point where they felt effectively "cured" of the disease.
There is also the probability that if inflammation can be reduced, then so also can the breathing symptoms. Diet plays a big part in creating inflammation in the body, so there is much good logic in avoiding foods known to cause excessive inflammation (particularly refined carbohydrates and so-called "vegetable" oils) and eating healthy foods that are organic where possible.
It is also sensible to include items in the diet that are known to help reduce inflammation, such as ginger, garlic, onions and turmeric (curcumin) for example, as well as increasing the amount of leafy green vegetables consumed each day.
No Medical Cure
In truth, there is no known medical cure, but the quality of life for a former sufferer can become so much improved that they come as close to being cured as is possible. Not only that, but often where medical science has no answer, alternative therapies can provide one.
That is not to say that all asthmatics should up sticks and move en masse to every coastal town and village in the country and they will automatically become cured. Many sufferers who move to the coast tend to enjoy a reduction in their symptoms but the condition does not go away entirely.
It really depends on what is causing the problem in the individual, as different causes bring on the condition in different people. Certainly where the major causes are identified as being airborne pollutants that are common in urban areas, moving away from those areas to places where the air is much cleaner can bring significant benefits.
In others where the triggers are mostly psychosomatic in nature, for instance anxiety and stress, moving home may not be the answer. Learning to deal with stressful situations and reducing anxiety as explained above in the sections on hypnotherapy, acupuncture, yoga and meditation may be a better route to follow.
Ultimately, the non-medical means for making major reductions in the reliance on the corticosteroid inhaler and the daily intake of prescribed medications exist and should be investigated by the individual. Only be gaining better education and knowledge about their condition will people begin to discover the alternatives that exist in treating their condition.
References:
www.asthma.org.uk "Complimentary treatments for asthma"
www.hypnosic.com/hypnotherapy/hypnosis-and-phobias-1.php "treating phobias and anxiety conditions through hypno-analysis"
www.acupuncture.org.uk "Acupuncture as a treatment for asthma"
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov "Clinical effects of yoga on asthmatic patients"
.
(Back to TOP)