“Breathe” by @MrJamesNestor has a fascinating story of how in 1958, a choir trainer who had worked with Grammy-winning opera singers, was asked by a hospital in NJ to work with emphysema patients to improve breathing.
He came to the emphysema ward and was shocked at the lack of appreciation of the physiology of breathing and that the nurses were keeping the patient’s backs arched with pillows, which hurt the depth of their exhalations.
He had them lie flat on their back, did manual work to loosen rigid muscles in their chest, trained them to hold their breath, and taught them to inhale and exhale very slowly.
Patients spoke full sentences in one breath for the first time in years. One patient who couldn’t walk at all started walking up stairs. One who could only go 15 minutes without supplemental O2 started going eight hours. One left the hospital to captain a boat down to Florida.
The doctors told him it was medically impossible to train the patients to use their diaphragm’s more effectively. But then they proved he did this with x-ray.
“I told Carl in no uncertain words that he was mildly demented to say that he could effect a rise in the diaphragm and a descent in the ribs, but then in one patient we got rather spectacular results showing that he did do this,” said Dr. Robert Nims …
… “the chief of pulmonary medicine at the West Haven VA Hospital in Connecticut. “We have shown that he’s able to decrease the volume of the lungs [via deep exhalations] more than any pulmonary man would say it was possible.””
Nestor concludes, “Stough hadn’t found a way to reverse emphysema. Lung damage from the disease is permanent. What he’d done is find a way to access the rest of the lungs, the areas that were still functioning, and engage them on a larger level.”
What the chief of pulmonary medicine can learn from a choir director shows the importance of multidisciplinary anti-credentialist collaboration.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
