MOUTH BREATHING

 This is another advantage of nasal breathing over mouth breathing. The thin layer of mucus moves as a long carpet from sinuses, bronchi and other internal surfaces towards the stomach. Therefore, these objects, trapped by the mucus, are discharged into the stomach where GI enzymes and hydrochloric acid make bacteria, viruses and fungi either dead or weak. Later, along the digestive conveyor, some of these pathogens (dead or weak) can penetrate from the small intestine into the blood (the intestinal permeability effect). Since these pathogens are either dead or weakened, they could not do much harm (no infections). Moreover, they can provide a lesson for the immune system. This is exactly how natural auto-immunization can work with success. Medical doctors and nurses inject vaccines with dead or weakened bacteria or viruses so that to teach and strengthen our immune response to these pathogens. Therefore, nasal breathing creates conditions for natural autoimmunization.

Practically, when a household member is sick (flu or cold), the still healthy people could breathe either through their nose, teaching the own immune system how to deal with the pathogenic bacteria or viruses, or through their mouth, as for mouth breathing, allowing these pathogens to gain access, settle and reproduce themselves in various parts of the body causing the infection.

Which medical therapy provides techniques and methods to get rid of mouth breathing?

It is the key goal of the Buteyko breathing method to stop mouth breathing and ensure nose breathing 24/7 to prevent all these mouth breathing effects.

For many mouth breathers and sick people quick health improvement (the initial stage of breathing normalization) is accomplished by one change only: learning how to breathe through the nose 24/7. Just this step alone can make a big difference in health of many people so that the main symptoms are reduced and less medication is required.

Dr. Buteyko, while studying respiration during physical activity, observed that breathing through the nose made a big difference in the after-effects of physical exercise. Moreover, physical activity with oral breathing often led to lower CPs and CO2 later, whereas nose breathing during walking and other physical activities was beneficial.

Most medical doctors do not know when and how sick people should exercise. It is known that exercise can be useful, but sick people often die or experience heart attacks, exercise-induced asthma attacks, and other exacerbations or acute states of their diseases during or after physical exercise. However, when physical exercise is done with avoidance of any mouth breathing, physical activity is 100% safe even for severely sick people. (They would not be able to have intensive exercise and will rely on lighter activities, like walking. We are going to learn more about rules and types of beneficial exercise later.)

Since many patients and sick people open their mouth and breathe through the mouth during sleep at night, in the 1960s Dr. Buteyko’s patients invented a technique (mouth taping) is described in "Learn here" Section of this website.

Permanent solution for mouth breathing problems

Use your will power to stop mouth breathing. If a mouth breather suffers from stuffy, or blocked, or running nose and sinusitis, they can exist or appear only in conditions of abnormal breathing. In order for these problems to exist, you should breathe at least 2 times more air at rest than the medical norm. As a result, you have 2 times less body oxygen than the medical norm. Check you body oxygen level (special breath holding time test) and see the truth. The norm is 40 seconds. Hence, there is a simple relationship between the blocked nose and this simple DIY health test:
– If your body oxygen level is less than 20 s, your nose can easily get blocked due to hyperventilation;
– If your body oxygen is more than 20 s, you can avoid mouth breathing.

Conclusion. If you have problems with mouth breathing, your goal is to slow down your automatic or unconscious breathing pattern so that to have over 20 of body oxygen 24/7. "Learn" Section provides numerous breathing techniques and methods to improve body oxygen levels.