Asthma doesn't have to control your life!

What is Asthma?
Looking at asthma from a different perspective
Medication
My relevant experience
Doctors and Buteyko
A Nurse's Viewpoint
Adults
Children
Buteyko - a miracle cure?
Side effects of the Buteyko Breathing Method
What you can expect when you do a course
Other benefits of the Buteyko Breathing Method
Snoring and Sleep Apnoea
Eczema
Sporting Performance
Cautionary Tale
New Wonder Drug!
Contacts and charges
Links
Read my Book

Eczema

Eczema is often linked to asthma and like asthma, nobody really knows the cause and there is no known cure.

Here's a picture that I really hate. I took it to show my skin specialist in 2002. I was extremely lucky because, although my entire body was covered, my face was spared so I could go out and about and appeared normal.

It did mean however, that I couldn't go swimming and when the summer came, I had to wear boring long sleeves and long trousers.

My specialist prescribed a steroid cream and informed me that I would need to use it every day for the rest of my life. He told me I had been born with the problem and all I could do was treat it.

I followed his advice and used the cream. It did help but as it cleared up one patch another would turn up somewhere else. It was very depressing and debilitating.

Here's a picture I'm very pleased with. It's of the same arms taken 5 years later.

What happened?

Although I had done my Buteyko breathing exercises religiously until my asthma symptoms disappeared, it did not occur to me that if I continued it might help my eczema too.

In 2003, when I went to Glasgow to begin my training, as part of the course I increased the number of exercises I did each day, doing them whenever the opportunity arose.

By the end of a month there was a noticeable improvement. Gradually, as the patches cleared up I noticed that the new ones were much smaller. Finally, there were no new patches at all and, like my asthma, my eczema became a thing of the past.

Now, although I regularly use a moisturiser, I haven't used the steroid cream for about three years.