Professor Konstantine Buteyko was born in 1923 near Kiev, Ukraine. After World War 2 he began his medical studies.

During his 3rd year of medicine Buteyko was given a practical assignment which involved monitoring dying patients. He noticed that the closer to death they came the deeper and heavier the breathing.

After graduating with honours Buteyko continued his studies with breathing. Healthy subjects were asked to deep breathe for a period of time - as they did so they became dizzy and nauseated, continuing to deep breathe wheezing and coughing developed and eventually they fainted. The medical interpretation was because the brain was saturated with O2.

This made Buteyko ponder upon the relationship of disease and deep breathing. He looked at CO2 as well as O2. Buteyko suffered with hypertension - high blood pressure - and when he measured his own CO2 level he discovered that it was below the recommended norm. It was known that overbreathing lowered CO2. Buteyko began to experiment on himself by reducing the size of each breath. By doing this his constant headache and rapid heart rate began to reduce. When he increased the size of his breath the symptoms returned. From this he set out to devise a programme to measure a persons breathing and if needed, be retrained in healthy breathing.

Buteyko studied the breathing patterns of people with asthma, angina and other diseases and discovered that many were hyperventilating and by retraining their breathing their health began to improve.

His hypothesis was that hyperventilation caused a lowering of CO2 and that low levels of CO2 caused blood vessels to spasm and O2 starvation of tissues. Thoughout the West most people are taught deep breathing exercises which encourages overbreathing during exertion. It seemed that no one had thought to reduce the size of breathing.

Some research had been carried out - Vertigo, Bohr, Priestly, Henderson and De Kosta - which supported his theory.

In 1871 the Dutch doctor De Kosta discovered the "Hyperventilation Syndrome" where deep breathing in a relaxed state causes dizziness and if continued, fainting. At the end of the 1800's Russian physiologist Vertigo and Dutch Scientist Bohr independently discovered that it is the ratio of CO2 to O2 which permits the release or retention of O2 from the blood. Low CO2 leads to O2 deficiency in the tissues of the body and a raising of blood pressure, called the Bohr effect.

Buteyko shared his ideas with his medical teachers but did not have their support. Buteyko remembered the work of Zemelweisse in 1846 and Lister in 1856 who both disinfected their hands with chloride of lime solution before operating and the number of deaths fell dramatically. Other doctors did not follow until forced to wash their hands by the general public.

In 1958/59 Buteyko conducted clinical trials on nearly 200 people, both healthy and sick, and his original hypothesis of the relationship between low CO2 and sickness was confirmed. In 1960 he presented his work to the Scientific Forum - doctors thought they were being made to look foolish.

At the Institute of Experimental Biology and Medicine in Siberia, Buteyko continued for another 10 years obtaining extensive information about the human being in relation to breathing - healthy and diseased. Many of the researchers who worked with Buteyko had become healthy by following his regime of reduced breathing.

In 1968 a trial was carried out in Leningrad using people with serious illnesses not treatable by conventional methods of medicine. Of the 46 patients, 44 were cured and the other 2 partially relieved. The results of the trial were sent to the Ministry of Health but the results were falsified and Buteyko's laboratory was closed. The originally trained team of medical practitioners continued to treat patients using the method. Although not any official medical establishment was using the Method, many places in the USSR were.

With a high success rate, in 1980 another trial was carried out by the First Moscow Institute of Paediatric Diseases by the direction of the Ministry of Science. The results were the same as those of Leningrad. This time they were officially recognised. While the trials focused on asthma Buteyko's method worked well with other forms of breathing problems such as emphysema, rhinitis, bronchitis, snoring and chronic anxiety etc.

Buteyko's extensive studies and the research undertaken by the Queensland Asthma Foundation in 1994, in Brisbane, Australia, showed that, regardless of the type of asthma or the severity, all asthmatics had one thing in common - a dysfunctional breathing pattern. At the time of publishing the study in the Australian Medical Journal in December 1999, it was found that the participants use of bronchodilators was consistently down by 96% and the use of preventative medication had fallen by 45%.