### Breathing & Vitamin D | Dr. Jim Bartley on Simple Ways to Boost Health and Wellness | Dr Ron Ehrlich
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### ๐ Episode Overview
In this insightful episode of Unstress Health, Dr. Ron Ehrlich interviews Dr. Jim Bartley, an expert in ear, nose, and throat health with over 30 years of experience. They dive deep into the breathing & vitamin D benefits, discussing simple, effective ways to boost health and wellness. Dr. Bartley shares his expert insights on the importance of proper breathing techniques and how vitamin D can enhance our overall health, improve immune function, and increase resilience against stress.
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### ๐ง What Youโll Gain
* Breathing Techniques: Dr. Jim Bartley explains how breathing properly can significantly improve both physical and mental health.
* Vitamin D & Health: Learn how vitamin D impacts the body, including its role in immunity and mental well-being.
* Practical Advice: Dr. Bartley offers actionable tips on incorporating better breathing practices and optimizing vitamin D levels.
* Improving Wellness: Discover how these simple, natural methods can promote a more balanced, healthier life.
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### ๐ก Takeaways from This Episode:
* The crucial relationship between breathing and overall health.
* How vitamin D can enhance mood, immunity, and energy levels.
* Easy, practical ways to incorporate breathing techniques into daily life.
* The importance of sunlight and supplementation for optimal vitamin D levels.
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### About Dr. Ron Ehrlich
Dr. Ron Ehrlich is a holistic health expert, author of A Life Less Stressed, and host of the Unstress Health podcast. With over 40 years of clinical experience, he empowers individuals and professionals to build resilience and improve well-being.
๐ sแดสsแดสษชสแด Here: [https://www.youtube.com/@DoctorRonEhrlich/featured?sub_confirmation=1]
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### Connect with Dr. Ron Ehrlich:
**๐ Main Hub & Resources**
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**๐ง Listen to the Podcast**
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### ๐๏ธ Podcast Guest: Dr. Jim Bartley
Dr. Jim Bartley is an ear, nose, and throat specialist with over 30 years of experience. He has published over 60 journal articles and authored two books: Breathing Matters and Healing Headaches. Dr. Bartley shares his expertise on breathing and vitamin Dโs role in health.
Learn more: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jim-Bartley]
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### ๐ Keywords List:
Breathing Techniques, Vitamin D Benefits, Immune Health, Wellness Tips, Stress Management, Breathing Exercises, Holistic Health, Vitamin D Deficiency, Mental Health, Wellness Strategies, Respiratory Health, Stress Relief Techniques, Mindful Breathing, Health Optimization, Immune System Boost, Vitamin D for Mental Health, Mental Wellness, Breathing for Stress Relief, Breathing for Better Sleep, Immune System Strengthening, Natural Wellness, Immune Function, Immune Boosting Supplements, Vitamin D Supplements, Health and Wellness Solutions, Breathwork Practices, Healing Through Breathing
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### ๐ท๏ธ Relevant Hashtags:
#BreathingTechniques #VitaminDBenefits #HolisticHealth #WellnessTips #StressManagement #UnstressHealth #BreathingExercises #ImmuneHealth #MentalWellness #MindfulBreathing #ImmuneBoosting #Breathwork #StressRelief #HealthOptimization #MentalHealthMatters #WellnessJourney #VitaminDSupplements #BreathworkForWellness
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### ๐ฌ Closing Statement & Call to Action
Thank you for watching! If you found this episode valuable, please like, share, and subscribe to Unstress Health for more insightful conversations on holistic health, wellness, and stress management. Take charge of your health and future today. Stay balanced and healthy!
โ P E A C E โฅ L O V E โบ H E A L T H
hello and welcome to unstress my name is dr ron early i’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which i am recording this podcast the category people of the ura nation and pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging [Music] well today we’re going to continue our exploration of medical specialists with a very holistic approach to health and i think i’m really excited about showcasing and introducing you to this type of medicine because it is after all a form of medicine that takes into account anatomy physiology biochemistry pathology it uses nutritional and environmental medicine which are the drivers nutritional environmental problems are what drives the vast majority of diseases in our modern world and also incorporates pharmaceuticals into their mix i think the alternative approach to medicine focuses on two subjects pathology and pharmacology and it’s for that reason that the pharmaceutical industry has a revenues of 1.2 trillion dollars a year and if you are a person who don’t doesn’t think that any of these things are important you probably wouldn’t be listening to this podcast in the first place but you have definitely an industry waiting to greet you with open arms but we continue our exploration and my guest today is someone who his knowledge is far and wide he is dr jim bartley is a um a specialist he knows and throat specialist for over 30 years he is honorary associate professor in surgery at the university of auckland he’s based in new zealand he’s written over 60 articles in referee journals he’s contributed chapters to 17 books and written two books himself breathing matters and healing headaches i hope you enjoy this conversation i had with dr jim bartley welcome to the show jim thanks very much ron it’s nice to talk to you it’s been very interesting hearing some of your other talks and uh all i can say is this is a little bit new for me as uh doing a podcast i’ve only done one before well um i’m looking forward to talking to you because we have had an opportunity to have a chat before we’ve recorded and here we are but i just thought we’d start because there’s so much you know you’re an ent specialist you’ve written so many book you’ve written two books you’ve been involved in so many uh published papers but i wondered if you might just share with us your journey and you know i know there are a few aha moments that occur in one’s professional life but how did you have you got to this point in your career well i’ll start with my journey in a few of the aha moments when i had finished my household engine years as a junior doctor i didn’t know what i wanted to do and i saw a job advertised up on the east coast of the north island and i thought going up there for the summer would be very good so i went to to a place called tupuya springs which is an hour and a half north of gisborne and the moment i arrived the only other doctor there took off leaving me in charge of medicine on the east coast and it was very interesting because when i was there i had to do my own obstetrics i was doing some of my own setting of fractures and the other thing i also was doing was i was giving patients the choice did you want to go down to gisborne to have your tooth pulled out pull your tooth out up up here so i’d actually practiced on lists in nelson hospital before i went up there so i was also pulling pulling out a few teeth wow this is character building and when you’re working in an indigenous population because 90 of the population up there is new zealand maori um then all i was seeing up there was problem ears and so i thought this is really interesting and then i decided i’d go back to hospital training and become a ear nose and throat specialist and i was going to focus largely on on my outer years so i did my training and then i went over to london and when i was there endoscopic sinus surgery was coming out and so i went to a course there and i also went and visited a surgeon over there who was doing endoscopic sinus surgery so i came back to new zealand and my job at rotorua had fallen through so i started doing endoscopic sinus surgery and the problem with endoscopic sinus surgery it was totally new and considered a waste of time this is the passing of a camera using a camera to guide you you stick a telescope up the nose and you have instruments going up the nose and it dramatically changed sinus surgery because it meant you didn’t have to have a whole lot of cuts on the outside of the nose wow revolutionary and it was at that stage but one of the things that happened was the textbooks had taught that if you had a pain in your sinus like your frontal sinuses up here or your maxillary sinuses if you went and opened that sinus up the pain would go away and the problem was the new technology showed that the pain did not go away and so all of a sudden i had to try and work out what was going on with these patients and one of the things i started reading around was trigger points and so i then started looking at trigger points in the neck and shoulder muscles i started exploring things like acupuncture and i also started looking at the psychological issues in relationship to pain and all of a sudden i’d started a clinic where i was with physiotherapists where we were working on treating neck and shoulder pain with with physiotherapy and a bit of breathing and relaxation work and the next aha moment was what then happened was i got invited to work at the pain clinic because i was seeing all these difficult facial pain patients and one of the things that happened when i was there i had a patient come in and what also then happened was the patient came in and i’d heard something on the radio about vitamin d and fibromyalgia and this lady was an african american lady and she had uncontrollable pain she couldn’t use her hand because of the pain and i’d been asked to adjust her narcotics and i did a vitamin d level on her and it was 18 and so i then rang up the registrar how do you prescribe vitamin d so i gave her some vitamin d and she came back six weeks later she was forgetting to use the narcotics because the pain was so much better and the day before she’d been out water blasting her path and the other aha moment i had was i’d be seeing patients coming along complaining that their noses were blocked and that had three or four operations and i’d look in their noses and i couldn’t find anything wrong and i thought hmm if the structure looks okay how are they using their nose and i noticed that many of these patients are actually hyperventilating and as soon as i started treating them to breathe in a relaxed diaphragmatic fashion their nasal obstruction got better and then a whole lot of other conditions that they had also got better and so i then wrote a paper on this and i also ended up writing a book called breathing matters because what happened was every all my colleagues said this is complete not a rubbish where’s the science so i wrote a book saying look here is the science and it’s been that way at least for the last 40 or 50 years and many of my colleagues have taken it on board but many of my colleagues also say this is complete and utter rubbish i know a lot of a lot of professionals feel that’s a better way of dealing with new knowledge rather than exploring it i mean i i yeah anyway but you’ve said so much here jim my god we could stop and talk about trigger points and remind or just tell our listener what in fact a trigger point is because the kind of headache the trigger points give us refer is so often described as a as a sinus headache because it’s over the sinuses isn’t it you’re exactly right and part of the problem you’ve then got to do is you’ve actually got to try and persuade your patient that they haven’t got sinus pain because their gp has told them and all sorts of other doctors have told them and i normally go through a a video a video presentation but one of the trigger points as we were talking about the other day were first described by a lady called janet travell who was john f kennedy’s personal physician and basically when i see a patient who’s got bad headache i’ll find that i’ve usually got a trigger point in the mid part of their shoulder where they’re really sore i’ll normally find that they really saw all down this muscle here called the sternocleidomastoid muscle down the side of the neck for our listener yeah it’s a bit difficult to palpate that and the other thing that happens is that often their heads will be way forward and the tender and the muscles at the junction of the skull and the base of the neck and it reaches a stage where the patients are saying how do you know is going to be is going to be sore there and and that look they’re also saw in um in down the down at the upper part of what’s called the scapula or the bone at the back and they’re often got low back pain um and they’ve also often got pain in their forearm and the chinese have described all this for two or three thousand years because many of these trigger points that janet travell described also correlate with traditional chinese acupuncture spots i mean what a thing for an ent you knows and threat specialists to i mean be aware of i mean that would you would think that would be basic training in your specialty as a differential diagnosis you said well well i do i do give that as a in the registrar training now but one of the problems also is is that if i give a talk on this at a conference i’ll probably only get two or three people because people aren’t interested in that they’re more interested in new surgical techniques and ideas and the other problem i i also have as soon as i got interested in facial pain and difficult facial pain patients all of a sudden my colleagues didn’t want to deal with them they they completely dumped them on me and usually these patients have what’s called the thick file syndrome there’s a great big thick file going on and the other interesting thing that fits in with you ron is when i was working at the pain clinic i’d also get sent all the difficult dental pain patients sometimes dental pain can be very difficult and you’d see patients who had every tooth removed in their upper jaw trying to get rid of the pain and the pain was no better yeah and i can i can talk a little bit about as you know there’s a lot of theories about dental pain some of them have sort of come come and gone but i can only say that trying to work out dental pain can also be extremely difficult as you know as well yes well we might do a whole podcast on that one because there are no it really is and i mean sometimes if someone comes in with a pain and they’ve got a big hole in their tooth it’s often not always often very obvious but often it’s not obvious but but continuing on this on this path sinus headache let’s just talk for a moment about what is the defining symptoms of a sinus headache i’ve always thought it was involving posture is that a part of it if you bent over or postural changes well what defines a sinus headache well they a real scientist where it’s related to sinus or just pain over the side where it’s related to sinus well they do have strip there are strict criteria that have been laid down um by by the american academy of otolaryngology and basically to have strict sinus headache you’ve you’ve got to have a loss there are a major criteria and minor criteria a loss of sense of smell nasal obstruction infected nasal discharge you’ve got to be able to see evidence of infection when you actually look into the sign look into the nose with an endoscope or you’ve got to be able to see it when you on the ct scan if you get a ct scan and facial pain or facial discomfort is very much right down as a minor as one of the minor criteria and two minor criteria make a major criteria but one of the things that is is absolutely definite in my book because when this all happened to me years ago when i was trying to work out facial pain and sinuses i went away and i read all the textbooks going back into the 1920s about sinus pain where they tried to research it but if you’ve got a sinus infection in the sphenoid sinus that is very very much associated with with facial pain and sinus pain for some reason the sinus is a lot more sphenoid sinus right at the back of the head is more sensitive you do see a minor degree of pain with the frontal sinuses but the sinuses underneath our eyes our maxillary sinuses are relatively pain insensitive interesting and if you think about it what there was no rational or technological role for the sinuses to actually get strictly innovative or highly innovative with with pain fibers but you can actually show that there are certain pressures where the sinuses do become painful but you’re looking at 80 or 90 millimeters of mercury so you’ve got to get a very very high pressure before that you’ll get a pain because as you know some of us when we’ve gone flying with people patients have had problems with their sinuses well i’ve seen divers who’ve had problems with their sons when they’ve actually gone diving and i’ve actually written i’ve got a number of divers back to work by just simply opening up their sinuses properly and and i think it’s worth also noting that the molar teeth and the premolar teeth are so intimately related to the sinus that this is where diagnosis of dental infections which is still pretty common very common in fact and i i personally we’ve noted in our practice the use of 3d x-rays have been absolutely um it’s been a revelation to us oh you know i always check out the thief on this on the on the ct scans and if the radiologists get very upset with me because every now and then i point out that they’ve actually missed an apical abscess going going on there but well we could talk apical abscesses is another totally different uh picture oh yeah which which for our listener is just infection at the tip of the root when a nerve in a tooth has died and and that can be painful or it can be not painful but it’s it’s an infection um the other one is fibromyalgia which you mentioned and you mentioned responded so well to vitamin d but fibromyalgia is another one of those very frustrating they’re the ones that come in with a pile of a history of many many pages tell us a bit about fibromyalgia well it’s not quite my area of expertise okay okay but the issue is is that no vitamin d doesn’t have a relationship to it the one of the things that that i did talk to a group the fibromyalgia society that i found really useful interestingly enough is actually working on breathing and relaxation the fibromyalgia group that i have spoken to years ago said of many interventions that was the most useful the other thing which is is is low-dose naltrexone can also be useful naltrexone is an opioid antagonist and stanford university has shown that that can be useful in some of the fibromyalgia patients and there is there is a we get into another very controversial area and that is the role of diet and there are certainly a group of patients who find that if they go on to a ketogenic diet where they get improved improved energy supply to this mitochondria they do find an improvement but we are still struggling to help many of the patients with fibromyalgia the other thing you mentioned too was people who have a blocked nose who are hyperventilating and you look in their nose and there’s no obstruction but there’s a biochemical thing going on there or what’s going on there what what what happened and i i’ve got the ground i have got a graph to show if people have a look at it is the mayo clinic about 20 years ago showed that nasal resistance was inversely related to expired carbon dioxide levels so the slower you breathe the higher your expired carbon dioxide levels and the more your nose becomes unblocked so if you can train people to breathe slowly then their noses will unblock there’s also a relationship to expired carbon dioxide levels and you can show that if you’ve got higher expired carbon dioxide levels you’re less likely to have allergy or allergic symptoms going on in the nose and you can show that different groups of the population have different settings for their carbon dioxide levels so there are some people who are very anxious and if they’re really anxious and breathing rapidly their carbon dioxide level is say at around 35 or so millimeters of mercury and they can’t hold their breaths for very long whereas if you’ve got buddhist monks and say people who practice underwater hockey they’ve set their carbon dioxide receptors to about 44 45 where the normal is about 40. and so there is a breathing technique out there called the buteyko breathing technique where people are taught to breathe slowly through their noses diaphragmatically and they’re also taught to practice breath holding to try and reset their carbon dioxide receptors and there is one paper out there where they have shown that this is published in the conventional literature that if you get people to practice the buteyko breathing technique then that actually makes a big difference to their to their asthma to the asthma control and a whole lot of other symptoms so holding your breath and there’s a book out there called the oxygen advantage that’s why the guy actually argues that if you want to improve your performance on the sports field then you should practice holding your breath because when you do that you means that you’ve got more of it more of an acid in your blood which means there’s something called the bore effect your delivery of oxygen to the muscles and everything else like that is significantly improved because people think of breathing as all being all about oxygen but actually the key is our carbon dioxide level in our lungs which you’ve mentioned the various levels of being 35 40 or 45 or 44 and uh and that kind of has a really important effect on on acid alkaline it is in fact what balances out acid alkaline in the body isn’t it that’s exactly right and basically sort of the slightly more acidic your blood for for everyday use the better oxygen supply you will get to all the tissues around the body including including the brain and things like that and you can once again you can show not just the tissue delivery but your delivery of the oxygen to the brain the the artery to the brain opens up directly in relationship to the carbon dioxide levels in the blood so as soon as you start hyperventilating you can actually you start constricting the arteries uh to the brain and people start start feeling faint and i had that experience myself where i was climbing kilimanjaro and i was going around something called the barranco wall and i must have started to hyperventilate because my oxygen was already a bit low at 80. and and all of a sudden my head was completely completely swimming oh wow and i don’t know you’re a schoolboy we used to have this trick in the when you’re a young schoolboy where you’d hyperventilate and then you’d hold your tummy so that you prevented oxygen from getting to the brain and then you’d faint in the playground now that was something we used to do as a fun thing i don’t know how do you treat we’ve done that as a party trick and there’s also something i’ll tell you another story then shallow water blackout because what happens is if you if you um hyperventilate and then go down diving you’ve by hyperventilating you’ve actually constricted the arteries to your brain and then all of a sudden the oxygen the carbon dioxide levels go up and you black out and we were diving once and with a friend and there was a it was a friend’s anchor down the bottom and it was stuck and i sort of said to the sky well i’ll go down and get it so i started hyperventilating to get down there and the guy said don’t do that you’ll get shallow water blackout so i went down i retrieved the anchor and the next i could see the bubbles on the surface and the next moment a friend of was giving me a mouth-to-mouth responsibility on the surface because obviously he said i got to the surface and then i started dropping and he thought he didn’t wear the card i was having him on or not all over picked me up and started giving me mouth to mouth resuscitation yeah god now um you know that whole thing about hyperventilating and people pass out or they put a paper bag over their mouth to re-breathe their cut this is all about that carbon dioxide balance but there’s another one that comes with nasal breathing too which is not just carbon dioxide level but there’s another gas that we need to be or compound that we need to be familiar with which is nitric oxide too that’s an important one as well isn’t it nitric oxide is a very interesting gas and most of the nitric oxide that we inhale comes from our noses and when we inhale nitric oxide it goes down into the lungs and it improves ventilation perfusion that’s the the gas going to the blood and if you’ve got nitric oxide actually in your bloodstream when the capillaries or little blood vessels get to the final part they then the nitric oxide comes off and then dilates the dilate dilates the blood vessels and of course one of the very popular medications viagra is a a nitric nitric oxide inhibitor so it improves the nitric oxide supply uh to the male genitalia and we get a corresponding result also a very interesting uh relationship between what we’re eating and if we have sort of a beetroot for example we increase the amount of nitric oxide that the body gets and that is said to improve athletic performance and if you go out to the sports uh drink places there’s a lot of night beetroot drinks to improve nitric oxide performance go on no no go and there’s also another interesting thing that happens is that when you hum the sinuses somehow vibrate and actually improve nitric oxide delivery into the nose so if you’re actually humming um you’re improving nitric oxide delivery and there is one study published a couple of years ago where they got yogic people to actually hum and when they were and people with chronic sinusitis if they hummed they got dramatically better with their symptoms score with respect to sinusitis so no one’s ever looked at any further but going around humming could be an important treatment for chronic sinus disease i also read that after the sars ii virus sars one virus there was an article in the journal of virology which which was amazing it made the statement that nitric oxide disrupts the reproductive cycle of the sars one virus so it’s also antimicrobial it’s not antimicrobial no they i never followed it up but they were they were looking at it as a treatment for for covert um and it doesn’t get applied in adults but for neonates they’ll actually add nitric oxide to the ventilators to improve the the the ventilation and reduce the atelectasis young so it is recognized as a as a treatment but one of the problems we do have is that if it’s too high a dose then you can get side effects from it being being being too high and and people with asthma some of them actually produce because of the inflammation do produce high levels of nitric oxide and so on the other side of things it is it is used as a marker of of asthma inflammation or inflammation in the lungs of asthmatic patients all right okay interesting another area well hey while i’m consulting with the ent specialist another area that’s often interesting is tinnitus and i’d love to hear your your you know your view on tinnitus because it’s a frustrating problem for many people and practitioners well one of the problems with tinnitus is a bit like facial pain is that people people run a mile because unfortunately there aren’t any quick and simple answers i i saw something advertised the other day but i did i didn’t look at it i’ve i’ve looked at all sorts of options um and certainly if you’ve got a hearing loss if you’ve got a hearing loss in about 50 percent of patients benefit from from hearing aids when i had trained one of the treatments was actually breathing and relaxation work as an effective treatment and one of the other options is quick options is trigger points or tender spots particularly in the sternocleidomastoid muscle but more in the masseter muscle here with tinnitus and i have had only a few patients where we have looked at trying to work on their breathing in their posture and reducing the tension in their muscles and the tinnitus has got better now the other thing that’s also happened is that the audiologists have got into cognitive behavioral therapy where they play sounds to patients in their ears and they try and get them to relax and get their brain to actually adapt to to the tinnitus so it’s less stressful but one of the things that happens is that in a very very quiet room if there’s no sound coming in 80 percent of people will get tinnitus so sounds coming in turn the sort of the volume control down in in the brain so one of the things we often tell people to do if they’re having tinnitus and having difficulty going to sleep just a little bit of soft music will actually turn their in the background as they’re going to sleep will actually turn their tinnitus down yeah because i know uh whenever i’ve been dealing with people with headache neck jaw ache and tinnitus i always say in order of easiness you know getting rid of the headache neck and jaw ache i think we could get a quicker result tinnitus is frustrating but it’s interesting to hear you say that as well vitamin d now you know to hear you be so focused on vitamin d and i know you’ve written on it in various journals it’s such an interesting one and i was really impressed by by how widely you’ve explored this how do you mention that one woman who had a level of 18 what is an ideal level of of uh vitamin d how common are deficiencies well if you start it depends on how you start defining deficiencies but but one of the things that happens is if you go and look at animals in the wild so look at chimpanzees and monkeys and things like that they have vitamin d levels about 140 nano miles per liter and if you start looking at traditional tribesmen in the jungle they have levels of about 120 nanomoles per liter and if you look at the it there is has been discussion about what is an optimal level but the books talk about a level of 50 nanomoles per liter and one of the interesting interesting things is you can show if you graph it out that you start getting benefits around sort of 75 even up to a hundred nanomoles per liter if with a variety of health conditions and that includes a reduction in in cancer mainly sort of breast and colon cancer you can show that walking time improves vitamin d has a role in muscle strength and you can also actually show if you look at gum retraction that vitamin d also influences gum retraction up to about 80 to 90 nanomoles per liter one of the fascinating things is is that we’ve known for over a hundred years that vitamin d prevents tooth decay and these were studies done in the late 1920s in boys homes in new york where they gave some some group vitamin d and the other they didn’t get vitamin d2 and they had exactly the same diet everything else was the same and there was a dramatic reduction in tooth decay and you can actually also do just graphs going down the states and you can show the further north you go the higher instance of tooth decay and the closer you are to the equator in the states you have you have less tooth decay so there are numerous studies out there showing that taking vitamin d prevents tooth decay and we hear absolutely nothing about it the other interesting one is there is a study out there showing that if you take if your vitamin d levels are relatively high and that is actually only about 50 nanomoles per liter and this was a study out of israel and they you can show that people with covet often have low vitamin d levels but it will cause was that is that an effect of the covert virus and so they looked at vitamin d levels three months and earlier and basically three months in earlier if you had a vitamin d level of greater than 50 your risk of severe covert was about three percent if your level was 50 nanomoles per liter your risk of severe covered was 24 so there is a dramatic improvement if you can get your vitamin d levels up sensibly and a petition went to the british parliament saying look let’s look at vitamin d supplementation for covert and they br this was over 100 respected doctors and it was completely uh turned down by the time then turned down by the british government yeah now we had the same story here in australia and and most recently there was a government uh forum on treatment of covert um 26 months after the beginning of the pandemic it came a bit late but vitamin d levels are just it’s too simple it’s too cheap it’s not promoted by the pharmaceutical industry so it is of no interest to the majority of the medical profession sadly very sadly it’s a topic we’ve covered a few times on this podcast jim bree you he i know this sounds obvious too you’re an ent specialist and of course you would be interested in breathing but but no it’s much more nuanced than that you’ve written a book on it breathing matters what to tell it just remind us what breathing well is how do we define it well we we breathe according to different situations situations that we’re in and if we if we are meeting a situation of stress brief stress one of the things that we would do is that we would breathe rapidly in our upper chest and what that does is that would make make our bodies alkalotic and and when when our bodies uh became um alkalotic then our nerves our muscles would react faster and also our brain would react more quickly but if we do that on a long term basis we can run it into problems now if you actually inject bicarbonate into horses and athletes you can make them alkalotic and you can show that if you inject athletes or horses at the beginning of a race they will actually perform actually better but as one horse trainer said to me it’s not the beginning of the race that is that’s important but the end and you still need to be a front in front at the end that’s the pretty cool point your tears horses take off with the bicarbonate in and i’m not totally up with it but it’s actually it’s not it’s not allowed to be done as part of horse doping but when we’re designed to to breathe to breathe and relax and that’s when our immune system takes over and when we’re sort of looking at body recovery then we just we are designed to breathe in a relaxed fashion diaphragmatically and that involves our abdomens sort of breathing moving and when it moves we actually get a circumference circumferential expansion of the abdomen when i start off teaching people to breathe and i don’t know what you want me to stand up no no it’s okay because this is audio too so you just describe it what happens is that they just push their abdomens in and out um and so and that’s what we have to do to start and i’ve already had a cena patient today um and she could not breathe in a relaxed diaphragmatic fashion lying down relaxed and in that situation we then look at other ways to try and encourage relaxed diaphragmatic breathing and that involves bending the the knees up to relax the abdomen if you put your hands behind the head it also helps just relax the shoulders a wee bit and i learned this about six months ago when i get people to do that i will often get them to try and breathe through their noses with their tongue up against their hard palate but if you’re really desperate if you start getting people to breathe through their mouths that can be a start of trying to get them breathing in a relaxed diaphragmatic fashion so if you can breathe in a relaxed diaphragmatic fashion you can show that the amount of oxygen that is delivered to the blood is increased and the and this is just once again jb west’s respiratory physiology which is a fundamental respiratory physiology textbook so as if you can breathe in a relaxed diaphragmatic fashion it takes three to four percent of your body energy yet if you’re hyperventilating up here it takes up to 30 wow of the energy in your body well just working on your breathing is a great way to actually promote to promote conservation of of energy and that might be one of the reasons why fibromyalgia patients possibly have found it so useful wow and of course this mouth breathing nasal breathing thing which is you know very common is another aspect to this whole picture as well isn’t it well as we’ve talked about we’ve got nitric oxide um but basically we were designed to actually breathe through our noses most of the time and if we start breathing through our mouths then we actually changed the overall resistance in the body and there is there was an interesting study out which was published in the lancet about 15 years ago where they saw people who had fractured jaws and so what they then did is they measured their oxygen levels and their lung functions and then they their jaws all got wired up for six weeks while their jaws healed and then they measured their lung function tests and their oxygen levels uh before they took the the uh the wires off for their fractured jaws and i find this really hard to believe but the oxygen concentrations in the blood went up four or five percent and the all the functions of lung function improved total lung capacity improved by five percent um and you can also show this is what they do in the laboratory if they get athletes and they get them to breathe solely through their noses or solely through their mouths by putting clamps on that the oxygen extraction improves with nose breathing and the carbon dioxide excretion improves with nose breathing as opposed to to mouth breathing so basically physiologically if we breathe through our noses we improve oxygen delivery and carbon dioxide extraction from our body look the more i hear about the breathing the more amazing i think it is and particularly the diaphragm jim i had an integrative uh gastroenterologist dr pranyoga nathanon when i asked him about um acid reflux you know a big big seller of protein pump inhibitors and antacids he said it was a function of he felt in the majority of cases it was a function of diaphragmatic sarcopenia or underdevelopment of the diaphragm and i thought that was really interesting well once again that’s all been published for about what published about six or seven years ago there was a paper in the american journal of gastroenterology right they did is they got people with reflux and they put a ph meter in their lower esophagus and then got them to change their breathing whether they breathed in their upper chest or whether they breathe diaphragmatically and as soon as you started breathing in your upper chest you showed acid going up into the lower esophagus and what they then did is they got patients these reflux patients to go away and practice relaxed diaphragmatic breathing and worked on it and three months later the use of antacids and proton pump inhibitors had gone down 70 percent in those patients who were able to practice good relaxed diaphragmatic breathing wow it’s not quite my area of expertise but i do see patients with reflux because quite often if you get reflux you can get acid coming up here and they come along complaining of lumps in the throat and throat discomfort and i’ve only got a handful of patients but i’ve had a number of patients who’ve gone away they’ve worked on relaxed diaphragmatic breathing for their reflux and it’s made a dramatic difference the other uh podcast i’m mentioning it to you because i know you’re going to might come up with us an interesting perspective on it we did one on men’s health and when he said diaphragmatic breathing improved pelvic floor tone which is particularly important as we all get older but women also after they’ve had a child um that was interesting too i mean the benefits of diaphragmatic breathing run through the whole body don’t they well once again yeah the the pelvic floor becomes important because that gets stimulated once again by by the diaphragmatic movement i don’t have a lot of knowledge of it but you know that respiratory physiotherapists when dealing with people with pelvic floor problems do work on relaxed diaphragmatic breathing to try and help patients with with pelvic floor tone the only other comment i’ll make is if you’re a top class female athlete you’ve actually got really really good pelvic floor tone and these top-class athletes sometimes have difficulty when it comes to delivering babies because their pelvic floor tone is so high interesting interesting now listen if you were going to leave our listener with a few hints on on improving their health in general or breathing in particular what would be some of the things you’d recommend to people well a very very simple one a very very simple one is actually thinking about sensible sun exposure and taking a little bit of vitamin d now you can show and this is a meta-analysis in the british medical journal that if you take regular low-dose vitamin d and i take sort of two or three thousand iu a day over the winter then that dramatically reduces your risk of respiratory infection and it’s twice as effective as the flu vaccine that’s looking at protective data public the flu vaccine data i’m quoting comes from the cochrane database which is the most rigorous uh source of evidential based medicine and the study i’m talking about has been published in the in the british medical journal so if you really want to have a good winter and i haven’t i’ve never had a day off work being sick i’ve broken a few bones but never off sick and then taking a little bit of low dose vitamin d uh two to three thousand iu a day or going out in the middle of the sun and seeing a little bit of sun because that will also help your melatonin and your sleep and the next one it’s a bit harder to actually talk about and that is thinking about your breathing and where you’re breathing and certainly what does happen is some people go away and they practice their breathing but it takes eight to ten weeks to change everything and certain that can help you with their sleep and their sleep quality and if if you’re a meditator relaxed diaphragmatic breathing is one of the prime things that you do when you’re actually breathing and that also makes a whole lot of difference to other electrical activity in the body you can certainly show that it changes something called heart rate variability which relates to the contraction of your heart and there also some very interesting studies which i haven’t been able to find again whereas if you’re breathing in a relaxed start phragmatic fashion you can actually show that your brain wave activity starts becomes synchronous with your with your uh with your breathing pattern so there may be a degree of of sort of synchrony between the heart rate variability that is being generated by your breathing pattern and your brain wave activity now i just wanted to pause at this point and this is a for the you you’re watching this on youtube and when we were doing the podcast jim included uh his screen share and showed some really interesting slides which i wanted to share with you so this is just an additional part to our podcast where jim shares some very interesting insights this is a gentleman in the 1700s and he was a tailor and he spent all time with inside working and his bones got very soft because he spit all simon’s side and um he got he got um osteomalacia so that was one of the earliest cases of uh of described of osteomalacia wow i mean he looks like a rag doll yeah so the next person i’ve got here is a chap called neil finsen and he won the nobel prize in 1903 and he was curing people with ultraviolet light and that’s a picture of tuberculosis of the skin before and after treatment with ultraviolet radiation i show this because this was why we had all the tuberculosis sanatorium up in the hills and in the mountains where you’d get more vitamin d because there’s this filtering ozone and you could show before the drugs came in that 70 percent of people with tuberculosis got better practicing regular sun exposure in these sanatoria up in the mountains and up in the hills and we’re seeing there a whole bunch of kids sitting out on a balcony with their swimming costumes on or barely actually to get as much sun on their skin as they possibly can and if you actually looked at some of the older hospitals they all had balconies around them where the people got wheeled out in the middle of the day to try and help promote their recovery and once again you could show that um people interestingly you’ve had a heart attack and if you’re by a window then you’re you’re less likely to have problems with your heart than if you’re in an enclosed environment and florence nightingale in the crimea war all the all the people’s wounds had to be exposed to the sun and also um in the first world war if you had a bad injury once again your wound got exposed to the sun to help recovery yep amazing amazing and we’ve just talked about all sorts of things in relationship to vitamin d um we’ve already mentioned muscle strength and if you’re a top class athlete then you actually try and get your vitamin d levels up if you know black black black american because you’re less likely to have muscle injury and you can show that the further north you go if your mother’s vitamin d deficient in um in canada you’re more likely to have a schizophrenic baby we’ve known for years that multiple sclerosis is more common the further away you are from the equator i also got interested in this partially because if i see an indian patient i’ll often ask them if i’ve got low back pain and as soon as i give them vitamin d their low back pain will actually get better so if you see a dark-skinned person with low back pain giving them vitamin d will often help people with with low back pain and we’ve mentioned this graph before and if you’ve if you’re a primate you’ve got a blood level of vitamin d of 160 if you’re living out in the wild you’ve got a vitamin d level 120 and if you’re a canadian living indoors in winter you’ve got a vitamin d level of about 40. gosh yeah and here’s another graph looking at vitamin d levels and you can look at there’s colon cancer looking at warp time um fracture risk and you can basically show that if you look at that up to sort of a hundred you seem to get gradual improvements in your reduction in colon cancer and attachment loss yeah it’s your tooth gum retraction on the teeth your fracture risk also decreases and your risk of colon cancer also goes down up to about a hundred and once again that was published 15 years ago in the conventional literature isn’t it interesting though jim about um how this slip in australia we have the slip slop slap you know to can i see parents down at the beach with good kid got their kids in rash tops from head to toe and a hat and zinc cream on their face exactly the opposite of what you showed in that hospital scene well i can i can only i can only say that there’s more money to be made in selling vitamin uh selling zinc and all those sorts of things and there isn’t telling people to have sensible sun exposure without getting sunburned as protecting you against a number of diseases and conditions and there is an interesting relationship you can show this was published in american servicemen those servicemen who had a high risk of skin high incidence of skin cancer had a lower risk of all the all the other cancers combined and so the measures to protect yourself against the sun is actually probably promoting all the other cancers as opposed to protecting against skin cancer yeah so it’s about really finding that balance rather than throwing the whole baby out with the bath water and that’s just showing the vitamin d levels in average vitamin d levels in new zealand and as we get older our skin doesn’t make vitamin d so well um below below hamilton which in the upper half of the north island over the winter you just can’t make any vitamin d as well and you can see that depends on what your criteria are but the dark skin races are far more likely to have low vitamin d levels and it depends on your criteria but you’re looking at 50 percent of the new zealand population if we lose a safe criteria of 75 having inadequate vitamin d levels i think that would not be that different in australia and what it’s worth this we’re going into some other graphs here and this is the thing there on the on the left is nasal resistance and at the bottom is expired carbon dioxide levels and if you consider that 0.4.04 is a normal expired carbon dioxide level and then if you look at 0.07 you can show that if you’re blowing off your if you’re you’re slowing your breathing down and i’m going to get this wrong but basically there’s a direct relationship between your expired carbon dioxide levels and nasal resistance and once again these are papers and i can only say that barodi was one of the top rhinologists in the in the in the states and the lower your the higher your expired level of carbon dioxide the less allergy you’re likely to have which means slowing it bring it down yeah this is once again showing a baby in the uterus there’s the ribs there’s the liver all babies come into the world breathing in a relaxed diaphragmatic fashion wow and for what it’s worth again this is our lungs jb west respiratory physiology you’ve taken four ml of oxygen permitted up the top of your lungs and you’ve taken 60 mils per minute down the bottom of your lungs so for maximal respiratory efficiency we’re designed to use the bases of our lungs yeah hopefully that’s okay that’s that that’s it for the moment we’ll just leave it at that thanks ron yep that’s that’s great to jim thank you that that was finishing off this is jb rest respiratory physiology then classic textbook saying that if you breathe relaxed diaphragmatic fashion has three percent of the oxygen in your body whereas if you’re hyperventilating it takes up to 30 percent of the oxygen that’s an amazing statistic and i mean it seems so obvious doesn’t it that if you have got a set of lungs that are there to exchange gases to deliver energy around the body why not use all of it i mean it’s just so simple but um it’s often overlooked now listen we just want to finish up one last question uh because we are all on a health journey in this modern world as individuals and so taking a step back from your role as a medical specialist as an author as a teacher um you know what what do you think the biggest challenge is for us as individuals on that journey yeah i’ve got to i’ve got to stop and say it’s a very good question because i have to i have i have to stop and think about it and i think one of the the big challenge is that when you start talking about vitamin d and you start talking about breathing even to your friends people will look at you as if you’ve gone completely mad and what i do is if i say to a patient that i have discussed say vitamin d supplementation or i’ve discussed breathing and relaxation work with the patient i will actually often put the specific references down at the bottom of my little to the gp so the gp can’t turn around and say well you’re not practicing scientific based medicine so when i tell people that it might be useful for their reflux i then put the reference at the bottom of the list if i say vitamin d might be useful for eczema then i put the reference at the at the bottom of the list and the problem is that many of the your gps or many of you even your hospital specialists aren’t aware of the up they’re not up to date with a conventional scientific literature because the thing that gets taught at medical school is drugs and operations and nutrition and other issues like that aren’t don’t receive a lot a lot of time yeah well jim that is exactly why i was so looking forward to having you on here today and and we’ve learned so much and i want to thank you for joining us and sharing your knowledge and your wisdom with us thank you so much thanks very much for the invitation ron it’s a pleasure talking to you and hopefully we’ll stay in communication every time i speak to somebody about breathing i learned something new and i’ve been interested in it for a long time i hope you find it interesting as well because as the world we live in becomes increasingly more complex a theme of this podcast is that many of the solutions to enjoying good health are remarkably simple cheap accessible and most importantly effective and what can be more accessible than focusing on breathing and and it’s why sleeping and breathing we can see all right consider on this unstressed podcast in my unstressed health program to be foundational pillars and jim kind of reinforced that also vitamin d here it comes again vitamin d vitamin d we’ve spoken of before we’re going to do a whole program on vitamin d it keeps cropping up in every element of health because like a thyroid hormone vitamin d receptors and thyroid hormone receptors are in every cell in your body and that is why vitamin d is critical to reducing physical and mental health problems so jim kind of reinforced that in spades and uh reinforced the power of good breathing now i’ll have links to jim’s uh some of jim’s books breathing matters and healing headaches um and uh we’ll be following up on these themes in coming podcasts so i hope this finds you well until next time this is dr ron erlick this podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine health and related subjects the content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner if you or any other person has a medical concern he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions experiences and conclusions
