I’ve moved most of my posts over to the Footfairy blog now.
The new address is blog.footfairy.co.uk

Hope you’ll continue to check things out every now and then.

Dynamic Breathing - check out the book on Amazon

Breathing is such an automatic process that we’re not usually aware of it unless there is a problem. It comes as a shock when you notice that you’re having difficulty breathing. And it’s easy for panic to set in.

I’ve been an occasional asthmatic for over 20 years.

Initially diagnosed after the birth of my daughter – for two or three years I had quite bad episodes but since that time I’ve been affected less often.

My airways tend to react in late spring / early summer, after a cold or virus and after any kind of exercise. Especially if moving from a cold environment into a heated one.

I guess I would classify myself as having mild symptoms. While I always have puffers with me I only use them when I need them.

The last time I needed to use them I had a virus – my asthma kicked in quite quickly and I started taking my puffers. But instead of relieving the symtoms I felt very shaky, anxious and had slight palpitations.

This was almost more frightening than the tightness, wheezing and breathing difficulty I was experiencing! Although I don’t use them regularly they were my security blanket.

So when I came across the book “Dynamic Breathing – how to manage your asthma” in my local library I borrowed it. I’ve renewed the book thrice now and have reread it as many times.

It appealed to me because it seemed to offer some practical help for asthmatic sufferers.

In all the 20 years that I’ve had asthma I’ve attended asthma clinics and been shown how to use inhalers but I’ve not been given any practical ideas for self help or management of symptoms. So I was hoping to find some helpful information but not really expecting too much.

What a pleasant surprise! Although it is only a slim volume it packs a great deal of information both scientific and practical into it’s 100 pages ( including appendixes and references).

Just to whet your appetite I’ve jotted down just a few of the topics covered in the book. I’ve selected items which I found interested me and which I would like to draw your attention to.

The list could easily have contained another half dozen topics from the book.

There are equally important chapters on the diaphragm and the surrounding muscles, exercises, posture and body mechanics, stretching and movement and of course information on medication and various other aspects.

The main reason I picked these topics from Dynamic Breathing is that I was amazed by what I read. That bad breathing habits could be contributing to the unpleasant symptoms of an asthmatic episode was a complete surprise to me. Also all three topics illustrate different aspects of the book, both the explanations of why your breathing is important and also the practical techniques which are found throughout the book.

Take the first item on my list Why Nose-Belly breathing is best.

• Over the years I’ve been aware that how we breathe is important – I’ve gone to Yoga classes, read books and such but I didn’t know that some of the unpleasant panicky feelings I was experiencing during asthmatic episodes could have been made worse by my breathing patterns.
• Dynamic Breathing explains in great detail just what happens in both good “nose-belly” and bad ‘mouth-chest” breathing patterns. The book explains how bad breathing patterns can disturb your body chemistry. One of the reasons for this is that during mouth-chest breathing carbon dioxide levels can drop too low causing a variety of symptoms which can aggravate the original asthma symptoms.

symptoms caused by a sudden drop in carbon dioxide levels – racing heart or feeling faint, for instance – understandably lead to tension, anxiety or panicky feelings. Page 10 – Dynamic Breathing

mouth breathing flushes out too much carbon dioxide….. mast cells in the tissues…give warning signals to the airways… activating higher histamine levels in the blood and triggering bronchoconstriction…..blood flow to the brain may be reduced….. leads to feelings of suffocation and panic. Page 11 – Dynamic Breathing

• Not only does the book explain why these effects happen it explains why good “nose-belly” breathing helps and how to exercise to make nose-belly breathing a habit.

Next on my list is  Why nasal and sinus health is important

• Think of your nasal passages and sinuses as the bouncers at the club doorway – they  are there to stop the harmful substances getting through to your delicate lungs. They’re protecting you 24 hrs a day if you’re a nose breather. Of course if you’re a mouth breather then you’ve no protection at all – the troublemakers just breeze straight in.

When the nose is affected by an allergen or congestion this can also trigger bronchoconstriction.

With nose-breathing, air enters the body in a more controlled flow; making acute hyperventilation virtually impossible. Page 15 – Dynamic Breathing

• Because the nasal passages and sinuses filter the air they are often the first to be affected by any irritants. Dynamic Breathing explains why it’s so important to look after your nasal passages and sinuses. There are also recipes for a nasal wash and instruction traction for sinus congestion relief.

Last on my list is How to cough easily and without straining

• Although this sounds gross – Dynamic Breathing explains a technique which will enable you to clear your airways without straining or making your symptoms worse.
• The ACBT technique is explained in detail. It makes use of the nose-belly breathing learned in the earlier part of the book and alternates with mouth breathing to help clear the airways.
• There are also tips and hints to try to overcome the dry irritating cough which can be so exhausting.

This is a book which bears reading and re-reading.

The authors, Dinah Bradley and Tania Clifton-Smith have produced a book which I am certain will be a great help to asthma sufferers and their families.

Further reading: Asthma Statistics in UK

British Lung Foundation

Kick Asthma

I’ve just spent the last 40 minutes restoring my Wordpress blog from backup. Not too sure why this upgrade hasn’t worked as I’ve not had a problem with any previous installations or upgrades. I wonder if it’s because my blog is in a subsite?? Not too sure about that.
Thank goodness I backed everything up first.
If you’ve had any problem upgrading Wordpress from 2.9.2 to 3.0.1 – let me know how you sorted it out.

Did you ever think about doing something which was totally out of your reach. Like be a ballerina, show-jumper, arctic explorer?

Most of us can think of something we’ve always thought about doing but never pursued. Sometimes for reasons we can’t control, sometimes those old Self – inflicted limitations. But often things change and an opportunity comes around again.

Well when I was younger I always fancied taking up photography.

Over the years I’ve had a few compact cameras but I wanted to understand how to take a picture myself.

This was long before the digital revolution. Printing costs were prohibitive. Darkrooms were needed. What with chemical baths, special film for different effects, varying processing times – in short a whole world of expensive complication.

So I put the idea away and forgot about it.

The closest I ever came to the intricacies of film processing was when I worked at a local college many years ago. One of my colleagues used to help in the dark room processing mainly black and white film. Colour printing and processing was a specialised business and best done by busy photo labs.

Yes – Photography was an expensive hobby back then just from the point of view of processing costs alone never mind the camera and lenses.

Over the years I didn’t give it a great deal of thought but then the idea popped back into my mind roughly when I started the website. So I took the plunge and bought a second hand DSLR Canon 20D body from Ebay. I can hear the screams now – but I took my time and eventually bought from a private seller who turned out to be a photographer trading up to a newer model.

So far progress has been slow as with most things I do, I’ve bought two lenses and I’m trying to get to grips with aperture, shutter speed and exposure but I’m having fun with it. I’ve enrolled on a online Photo Course and also onto a fantastic, short summer course on Digital Photography at University of South West Scotland in Dumfries which lasts 12 weeks. I can recommend this to anyone in the area.

Last Tuesday night we drove down to the shore near Glencaple. It was a bit overcast and the light was starting to go. There were some quite dramatic cloud formations which I tried to capture.

Hope you like them.

View across estuary at Glencaple

View of Criffel

Trying to catch the cloud formations - Glencaple

Technology’s a wonderful thing when it works but just when you get used to it – it lets you down. I’m not a gadget’s person. But I do like my old ipod. It’s a hand-me-down which used to belong to one of my children so it must be easily 4 or 5 years old. But out of the blue my trusty old click wheel ipod died a death a couple of weeks ago!

I’ve tried all Apple’s suggestions – reset it, reinstalled iTunes but nothing worked.  The Apple icon displayed for a moment then the sad ipod icon appeared and that was it – nothing – kaput.  I couldn’t restore it because it didn’t show up on iTunes.

Well I couldn’t sleep tonight – so it’s 4.30am and I’ve just made a cuppa and thought hey-ho let’s have another try. If nothing works this time then it’s straight round to Curry’s in the morning for a new ipod.

So I started looking on the internet again – this time I didn’t look at the Apple site just googled sad ipod. There were loads of tips on the user forums. Mainly just rehashing the advice on the Apple support pages. I did find  a good video on youtube which showed how to replace the battery and was thinking I might give that a go if all else failed. It looked simple enough.

But just as I was about to give up and go back to sleep I found a site called Zolved.com. The official information on the page follows the same pattern as all the other sites I’d been to – try disk mode, try ipod updater….. Which of course I’d already tried many times before. But don’t despair – scroll to the bottom to see the comments. And this is the funny bit – I was reading through the comments when I came to one by “Ray the Freak” who’d dropped his sad ipod and this had cured it. At least half of the rest of the comments were also saying that they’d banged the sad ipod and it had worked.

Now my ipod is well out of warranty so I tried it – I banged it on the side a couple of times, dropped it on the carpet from a height, dropped it on a hard surface, banged it on the back. Tried switching it back on a few times during all of this but no joy. Tried it again with a couple of sharp taps on the end, switched it back on and lo and behold my playlists appeared. It shows up on ITunes and is charging up as I write. I’ve played a couple of tunes and everything seems to be fine.

So it may seem drastic but it has worked for me. Thank you Ray!!

August’s Book of the Month is “Dynamic Breathing – How to manage your asthma” by Dinah Bradley and Tania Clifton-Smith. It’s a slim volume, just 105 pages, in the Overcoming Common Problems Series by Sheldon Press.

The book is written by two practising respiratory physiotherapists with a wealth of experience in breathing pattern disorders.

In the introduction the authors say this:

We want to show those with asthma the value of physical coping skills – i.e. learning what’s happening on the outside of the chest wall and including this as a vital part of asthma self-management.

This book should definitely be on every asthma sufferers bookshelf.  It explains the importance of correct breathing. Gives exercises to help develop good breathing habits and explains the adverse effect bad breathing habits can have during an asthmatic episode.

Link to Amazon to buy

When I ordered James Wong’s book I must have been thinking of the days when we were kids and made our own scent from rose petals.

Well – that was the idea – but after the petals had soaked for a few days no-one was daft enough to try out the resulting gunge. I’m pretty sure we didn’t produce anything remotely resembling perfume.

But of course we were just making it up as we went along – we had no idea about making infusions, decoctions, infused oils, tinctures, salves, balms or creams. In the book James briefly explains all the different ways of preparing plants but the bulk of the book is taken up with the remedy recipes – there are over 100 recipes – so plenty to choose from.

James suggests that if you want to make a start and try out some of the remedies you should begin by working on your personal ailments first.

It is possible to buy all the ingredients – you don’t have to be green fingered. But if you want to try to grow your own he lists which plants you should grow and which ingredients you should buy from health food or herbal suppliers for each particular ailment.

In the recipes section the remedies are grouped by ailment which makes it easy to find just what you’re looking for. Many of the ingredients are exotic e.g eucalyptus leaves but there are loads of everyday plants there as well such as nettle, fennel and peppermint.

If you are looking for detailed growing tips then you won’t find them in this book but there are loads of recipes for all sorts of ailments and also cosmetic and beauty preparations.

There are over 100 remedies but here are a couple which caught my eye:-

• for  dermatitis or eczema sufferers  - he suggests trying an oat and chamomile bath bag made very simply from oats and chamomile flowers contained in a muslin bag. Run the bath, soak the bag in the bath for a few moments, use it as a gentle exfoliator on your skin and then leave in the bath while you soak for 10 minutes or so. Repeat twice a week.
• for digestive problems – there’s Angelica and Mint Cocktail for Indigestion and Fennel Sugar Mice for Flatulence

And there are some really lovely recipes for cosmetic potions such as

• Yoghurt, Lime and Strawberry Face Pack which exfoliates and nourishes the skin
• Oats and Almond Moisturizing Body Cream
• Roman Chamomile and Lavender Acne Steam

If like me you are pretty useless in the garden you’ll find the calendar useful with it’s pointers on which tasks to do in spring, summer, autumn and winter.  Things like little snippets on how to grow berries, how to plant up pots, how to dry leaves, when to pick. There are also features on how to Plant a chamomile seat which I really fancy trying and how to grow your own citrus fruit.

He’s also included a list of links to online plant suppliers for some of the more specialist items.

The publisher also provides an online resource for the book with additional audio and video information at http://www.harperplus.com/jameswong/ – I checked out a couple of the videos which were brief at only 2 minutes or so  - but I haven’t checked them all out.

I’m not sure that I have the green fingers to grow my own – but the chamomile seat appealed to me as did growing my own citrus tree.

Wasn’t there a children’s nursery rhyme about growing your own citrus trees? or was it a nut tree?

Pity there wasn’t a section for Memory problems!

Strike that – just checked the index and there are 5 listings for Mental Performance.

Link to Amazon to buy

Hippocrates often labelled the father of modern medicine was a herbalist and is widely quoted as saying “Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food”.

There’s scarcely a culture worldwide which doesn’t have a tradition of using herbal medicine. So it’s important to make sure that the knowledge of the power of plants isn’t just forgotten or dismissed as folk medicine. Unfortunately the current financial climate means it is harder for institutions especially in complementary or non-mainstream medicine or therapies to stay afloat. The latest casualty is The Scottish School of Herbal Medicine which has had to close down it’s degree programme and now only offers a Correspondence course. Hopefully it will be able to restart operations when the financial climate improves.
So I’m looking forward to learning something new with James Wong’s book. Who knows I might even get out into the garden and try my hand.

I hope to have the new logo / site header in place soon. Keep coming back and let me know what you think of it.

Linda

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I knew nothing about the ideas in The Holographic Universe. It’s almost 20 years since this book was published in 1991. How did I manage to miss this!!
In his book Michael Talbot looks at the possibility that all of reality is holographic in nature. He starts from the work of David Bohm, physicist and Karl Pribram, neurophysiologist who both considered the holographic model might be relevant in their very different areas of study.
Both scientists were working on very different fields: Bohm was trying to understand the phenomena of quantum physics while Pribram was trying to explain various neurophysiological effects using the standard theories of how the brain worked at the time. Both of them came to consider that a holographic model would provide a framework to understand many of the effects they were seeing in their work.
One of the strengths of the book by Michael Talbot is that he takes the proposed theory and looks at the wood not the trees. Where the scientists were shining a laser through the holograph to see how the theory could explain the fine detail of their particular speciality Talbot takes a panoramic look at life and creation through the lens of the holographic model and this book is the result.
Looking at mind and body, quantum physics and the cosmos Talbot takes you on a journey through such topics as remote viewing, paranormal phenomena, energy healing, ESP, the potential of the mind/body connection. The book is full of fascinating stories to illustrate ideas and is a thought provoking read. One idea which particularly interests me and which may also have been an important topic to Michael Talbot is that the holographic framework provides an explanation of how the mind-body connection may work and the potential for this to improve our health. So topics which may have been ignored in the past might now be legitimate targets for scientific study.

According to the holographic model, the mind/body ultimately cannot distinguish the difference between the neural holograms the brain uses to experience reality and the ones it conjures up while imagining reality. … each of us possesses the ability, at least at some level, to influence our health… Quote from The Holographic Universe

Some of these ideas already have mainstream acceptance – look at sports science and the importance of techniques such as visualisation in elite sports.

I’ve enjoyed reading the book and I’m sure I’ll go back and reread it. But more importantly I’d like to find out what’s happened in the intervening 19 years with this theory? Who’s working on it now??