Effective Airway Clearance Techniques
If you suffer from congestion in the bronchial airways, coughing is the natural physical reaction, although not always the best way to clear the chest.
Extended periods of coughing can lead to discomfort, chest pain and a raw feeling that often hurts.
It is common to want to seek the most effective way of clearing the airways while avoiding the painful exertion of excessive cough response as much as possible. So what is the answer?
Salt Therapy: The Gentle Airway Soother
It's not exactly a big secret, but paying a visit to the seaside where the healthy sea air can get into your lungs is a common remedy for many breathing complaints.
The saltiness of sea air is what helps to clear the lungs, bronchial tubes and nasal passages but many do not know how it does that.
The answer is a fairly simple one, especially when you realise that it is the saltiness content of that healthy air that is the major contributor to the respiratory healing process.
Sodium chloride, or common table salt is naturally present in sea air as it is taken from the oceans by warm air currents that evaporate the moisture, carrying with it a small percentage of the tiniest salt particles.
This is what gives sea air its salty odour and it is the active ingredient in the moist air that acts as a gentle cleansing and disinfecting agent on the delicate membranes of the human respiratory system.
The cleansing action helps to dislodge and dissolve mucous, the bulky constituent of phlegm while killing harmful and infectious germs in those otherwise impossible to reach places.
Breathe Deep and Feel the Sea Air Do You Good
It is a common thing to hear parents tell their children when they visit the seaside on holiday,
"Breathe deep and you can feel the sea air doing you good."
Then you'll witness lots of adults standing straight with arms extended either side of them taking in great lungful after another of that healthy, salty fresh air.
What they are doing is essentially giving their respiratory systems a cleanout after what may have been many months of living and working in the more polluted and unhealthy atmosphere of the city. All the long built up pollutants and microscopic irritants are given the heave ho by the saline marine atmosphere.
Bottled Sea Air?
Many of those millions of seaside visitors over the years must have wondered how nice it would be if they could bottle up some of that fresh, healing air and take it home with them to keep them breathing better.
Well, in fact that has essentially been done in two ways:
One is to place a Himalayan salt lamp in the room that you spend a lot of time in. When turned on, the heat from the light bulb causes the lamp to give off salty air that disperses into the atmosphere of the room.
The second is in the form of the small, portable and highly effective salt therapy pipes that you can now buy at health shops and online.
One of the premier salt pipe inhalers that is currently on the market is made and marketed by Salitair, being featured on ITV's This Morning show and endorsed by Dr Chris Steele who demonstrated its use on that programme.
You can find out a lot more about this amazing device in my own review of the Salitair Salt Pipe by following that link. It costs less than you might think and is quite amazingly effective at improving respiration in sufferers of breathing conditions and helping to calm the sensations that cause all that hurtful coughing.
You don't have to buy it or even try it. But if you want to get relief from your coughing and spluttering without resorting to drugs and medications (that often carry side effects that are even worse than the condition they are prescribed to treat), you might at least want to consider it as an option.
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