The Author
Sergey Altukhov
Twice certified trainer in the Buteyko Method
Training Inspector
Director of the Centre for the Effective Study of Dr K.P. Buteykos Method
How I Came to Buteyko
People gravitate towards teachers of genius in any number of ways. I discovered Buteyko in November 1987, when I was 35 years old.
I myself was born in Novosibirsk in 1952 and finished school in 1967 with straight As. At that point I had no preference for which university I went to: with my grades I would get in anywhere including the medical institute.
But at that time, the medical profession seemed to me to be the height of tedium an all-out fight with interminable epidemics; if not flu, then the common cold.
And so in 1969 I enrolled in the Construction Faculty of the Novosibirsk Institute of Railway Transport Engineering and in 1974 I graduated with a distinction. In passing I might say that even a genius like Buteyko did not immediately choose to become a doctor. First, he enrolled in a road transport institute in Ukraine, completing two years of the course. It was only then, in the post-war years, that he entered a medical institute, so that he could study the human body as closely as he had previously studied the automobile
This is probably why I found Dr Buteykos first, engineering-based, calculations so very accessible.
Work on a building site was fairly evidently not to be my vocation, but I did love writing books about outstanding people and that is what I did from 1978. By 1987 I had two published books under my belt: one about Siberian partisans, and the other about a Hero of Labour who worked in an aircraft factory. A third book, about a woman from the same factory who was also a Hero of Labour, had reached the proofing stage.
1987 was also the year that I met my future wife, Ludmila Sokolskaya. She was an extremely gifted woman, a physicist by training, who worked in a research institute of the university complex just outside Novosibirsk. Unfortunately, she had been tormented by illness from early childhood and in 1984 was literally dying from the terrible pain in her spine. Her life had been saved by Konstantin Buteyko, and it was Ludmila who gave me the idea of writing a book about him and his technique for the volitional elimination of deep breathing
I didnt immediately take to the idea. My fourth book was about police work and about to hit the shelves, and I was interested in trying my hand at crime writing too
In November 1987, Ludmila introduced me to Boris Mitrofanov not to Dr Buteyko himself, but to the disciple who had been directly responsible for curing her terrible back pain, under Buteykos tutelage. Nevertheless, this is the date that I consider I joined the Buteyko camp.
Ludmila brought me into contact with Dr Buteyko personally in June 1988. My third book, about the outstanding aircraft designer woman had just come out. Dr Buteyko had all three of my books in his hands and said something along the lines of just look at the drivel new writers churn out today - but they havent the guts to write about an alternative way of healing that is saving hundreds of people from asthma and hypertension!
I told him I was prepared to write about his technique.
Dr Buteyko narrowed his eyes, then said that only a teacher of the Volitional Elimination of Deep Breathing could write about it, so I should study with him -- to learn the finer points of the technique -- to heal a patient or two -- and to write a book as I did so.
And that is what we decided to do!
I shall not forget that morning of 14 June 1988, when I came to Dr Buteykos Centre for 8 oclock, in the handful of offices it then occupied in the District Hospital of Novosibirsk university complex on Arbuzov St. I was met by Boris Mitrofanov, whom I knew already, and who was one of Dr Buteykos deputies. Neither he nor I thought then that literally six months later I should take up the post of Deputy Director for Media and Information, in the same centre.
I told him that Dr Buteyko wanted me sent round a number of trainers for instruction. Boris looked round. Next to him there was a woman of about fifty in a black beret. She had a rather pleasing, nice face, and he said: "Well right now you can go with Clara Lagunova. Shes just about to take her group over to the Academy cinema".
Clara greeted me with her bewitching smile. This was fate! From my very first moment with the Novosibirsk Centre for Breathing in the Buteyko Way, I had fallen under the mentorship of the Best Teacher in the Soviet Union, as it was then!! That was the award that Dr Buteyko would give our Clara later, in 1989.
Some time later I got to know many of the teachers at the Novosibirsk Centre for Breathing in the Buteyko Way, as well as teachers from other towns, attending classes with the most famous of them. But Clara Lagunova has remained my MAIN teacher in the Buteyko technique, throughout my life!
I had more than one two-week training session with her -- I must have had about 20, at least. I never ceased to admire the depth she brought to teaching the practical aspects of the Buteyko Technique, nor the selfless way she taught them! She used to give her whole soul to people who were ill. Most of Dr Buteykos practitioners were not doctors by profession. Professional doctors find it hard to let go of the idea that highly complex diseases like asthma, hypertonia and stenocardia can be cured by non-MEDICINAL means
Just the thought of that could nearly kill them. They were unable to cure illnesses like these using even the most expensive pharmaceuticals at their disposal. Then blow me down! Some sort of normal breathing would clear it all up! Professional doctors found it awfully hard to overcome this psychological barrier, and extremely few of them completely succeeded. If Clara Lagunova had no compunction about cutting out part of her patients normal drug intake within the first two weeks of teaching them, (and sometimes all of it), doctorswould not always let their patients make a clean break from their drug treatments after six months! They preferred to combine the non-toxic Buteyko Technique, with dosages of their conventional pesticides.
Clara Lagunova did not merely teach the Buteyko Method. She would also tell her patients how she personally used the method when diagnosed with cancer. That was an amazing story! and is told in part in Volume 2 of my trilogy.
These days so much is said and written about cancer that it is simply mind-bending. You have the impression this illness cuts through the population in swathes and that conventional medicine is powerless to stop it. People are urged to have it diagnosed it early, because otherwise - its a death knell. But where are people supposed to acquire these early diagnoses, when doctors still cannot identify or prognosticate far simpler diseases with any accuracy?
Clara Lagunova came to see Dr Buteyko when she had a malignant tumour in her right breast that was already the size of an egg! In her case there was no talk of an early diagnosis whatsoever The cancer was at a final stage, and it was very clear she did not have much longer to live. But the reason Clara Lagunova went on to become a first class Buteyko Therapist was that she had a first class brain in her head. Her grasp of the theory behind Dr Buteykos Method was so clear, and so profound.
She would get up at six every morning then sit for thirty minutes, scrupulously practising the Buteyko Method. Then she would walk around in accordance with the Method etc.
Ignaz Semmelweis lived and worked as a gynaecologist and obstetrician about 100 years before the Discovery of Illnesses Associated with Deep Breathing. You would think that he could have no connection to this revolution in medicine, but his life is extremely instructive. Through it you can see 19th century quite clearly leave its mark upon the 20th .