Question

Dr.Partha Bose · Accepted Answer

Please join me for Habitat health talk on how to fight swine flu? at India Habitat Cente on 16th march from 7 to 8pm at Gulmohar Auditorium

Wellness. Hindu metro series. Read

Breathe Better, Fight Flu.

A vast majority of patients are asthmatic and suffer from related respiratory diseases. Swine flu has been making headlines for causing huge misery across the country.

Patients with asthma are more likely to develop lower respiratory infections, including pneumonia, morbidity and mortality. Remember the strain of HINI is the same as it was in 2009.

It means we all have developed innate immunity against it but still there are patients suffering from this disease.

When Suniti, a 37-year-old working professional developed symptoms of the H1N1 swine flu in December, her condition quickly deteriorated. She recalls, ?I went to bed on a Tuesday night feeling fine. I woke up the next morning and felt terrible. I was dizzy, weak, feverish and simply in a fog.?

Taking a combination of antiviral and asthma medications finally eased her symptoms, but not all asthmatic patients with H1N1 swine flu are so fortunate. In fact, research has found that asthma is the leading medical condition found among H1N1 patients requiring hospitalisation. Nearly 30 per cent of both child and adult patients hospitalised for swine flu have asthma. There are steps and methods to prevent swine flu. You have to see how best you breathe daily?

Just breathe more per breath and feel better, sleep better and avoid virus by taking a diet rich in protein, citrus rich fruits and engaging in outdoor physical activity can prevent major respiratory infections. Deep breathing exercises improve your oxygen delivery to tissues and help you to remove toxins.

Oxygen is, by far, the most vital component humans need to live. We can go weeks without food, days without water, but only a few minutes without air. To get the most out of oxygen, it?s imperative our lungs are functioning properly.

Every cell in the human body requires oxygen and although it seems like an autonomous function we may not give much thought to, deep breathing exercises can be done to help clear out toxins that may have built up in the lungs. This will help to improve lung performance and clear airways.

Deep breathing gets more nourishing oxygen into your body. Blood that is rich in oxygen will help you feel better and give you more energy.

Deep breathing also reaches the deepest depths of your lungs, and helps to expel and break up residue. Deep breathing exercises help in expanding the lungs maximally. Normally we all take small breaths and most of our efforts get wasted due to increase dead space ventilation.

By deep breathing exercises you breathe more per breath. If you breathe more per breath you expand your lungs more, you receive more oxygen. You will feel more energetic and also save your breaths. For example, if you breathe 250 ml per breath and your requirement is 5 litres then you need 20 breaths per minute.

If you breathe more breath say double i.E. 500ml then you will require only ten breaths. So by breathing deep you breathe less and you feel better and conserve energy.

STEPS

1. Find a relaxing and quiet place to sit down and feel your breath.

2. Close your eyes and begin by breathing in deeply through your nose from your belly up depths of your lungs to inflate all the alveoli and break up any toxins and pollutants that may have accumulated. Hold your breath for several seconds and then exhale over the course.

3. Now practise breathing out by tonic and clonic contraction of diaphragm. The diaphragmatic contraction will squeeze the lung and in turn increase the volume of breath in next breaths. Do sixty breath outs per minute.

4. Relax, close your eyes and watch your breath for the next one minute.

5. Repeat. Maybe, you could chant too.

(The writer is founder, SAANS Foundation)

Swine Flu Tips