Kathryn Shafer - Asthma Free in 21 Days: The Breakthrough Mind-Body Healing Program

Fear is the lock, and laughter the key to your heart.

C ROSBY, S TILLS AND N ASH , S UITE J UDY B LUE E YES

Without breath, life is impossible. With limited breath, its exhausting and frightening. Yet every day more than seventeen million Americans, almost five million of these children, along with millions of other asthmatics throughout the world, struggle to breathe freely. This natural function of breathing in and breathing out is one that most people take for granted. But for asthma sufferers, too often its a complex, mystifying, and unnerving event.

The disease we call asthma knows no boundaries. It affects people from all walks of life. They come from rural areas, small towns and large cities, all climates and cultures. No two are identical. But the one thing they have in commonattacks of asthma that leave them gasping for breathbinds them together in an immediate and meaningful way.

No longer is this illness an oddity. Asthma ranks sixth out of all diseases as the cause for hospitalization and first in hospital admissions and emergency room visits for children. It invades the lives of the young, the middle-aged, and the elderly; male and female; all racial groups; and every social and economic segment of the population. More than one billion dollars are spent annually on this complicated, life-threatening illness. And day by day its threat increases.

Until recently asthmatics depended on conventional Western medicine for treatment. Yet despite decades of research, the medical model can offer only temporary relief and no real solution. To preclude and suppress symptoms, it advocates the use of bronchodilators, steroids, preventive aids, and pulmonary devices. But little interest has been expressed in natural alternatives, which it considers unproven and ineffective. The light at the end of the tunnel has been obscured by this limited point of view, one that encourages the patient to take a submissive role in the healing process. Such an outlook neglects the premise that asthmatics can do a great deal more than medicate themselves to lessen the severity and the frequency of their attacks.

It is not surprising that asthmatics, who in the past saw themselves as victims, have begun turning to alternative approaches. Our current health care system, based on the authoritarian model of expert and patient, has relentlessly furthered a victim mentality. This results in a sense of helplessness and even embarrassment. In plain words, asthmatics are taught to believe that they should:

1. Hand over all important health care decisions to those experts who are medically knowledgeable

2. Depend on prescribed medications to prevent, address, and suppress symptoms

3. Admit no responsibility for or meaningful relationship to their illness

4. Regard anything other than allopathic medicine as suspect and/or unreliable

5. Be compliant patients and accept asthma as a life sentence

The burgeoning interest in natural remedies and mindbody medicine has generated a new model of healing, one that encourages responsibility for our own well-being and fosters an awareness of the true meaning of health and healing. Health means more than freedom from symptoms of disease. It means being whole. While curing may remove physical symptoms, it provides only superficial relief, leaving the roots of disease untouched. But healing goes much deeper. It involves the integration of mind and bodya unification so seamless we have deleted the usual hyphen from the word mindbody throughout the book to reflect its true meaning.

This is essentially different from the conventional medical viewpoint, which sees the body as a machine, focuses on whats wrong with it, and then tries to fix it as quickly as possible. Instead, this process turns you toward the illness and encourages listening nonjudgmentally to what it may be telling you.