Acupressure Points for Asthma

Video Transcript

"Difficulty breathing? Think you might have asthma or know you have asthma? Hi, my name is Mark Brinson, I'm a Doctor of Oriental Medicine, Human Performance and Physical Medicine Specialists. When people have difficulty breathing or asthma, there are several treatments that you can use with acupressure that will facilitate you maintaining a better balance in your body, especially in the lung system. The lung system in Eastern Medicine doesn't just relate to asthma and the lungs themselves, it relates to the whole respiratory system and the skin so these treatments can also improve that. A couple of the points you can use are just lateral and directly below the clavicles. I usually do these, or have the person do them, with two fingers at the same time and just a circular motion, this can help to increase the overall lung function. Another nonspecific point, more of a channel type stimulation that you can do, is very simply taking your hands and stroking downward on the sternum. I would do this for about one to two minutes and possibly a little bit quicker than I'm doing it now. A third thing that you can do is learning how to breathe through the diaphragm, once again, instead of the chest. Many times people with asthma start to get problems with their scaling muscles, they become a chest breather. You can see mine kind of contract when I try to breathe through my chest. Getting a good massage therapist to work these out can help as well as learning a breathing exercise, where you lay on the floor for a period of about two minutes, practice breathing where you let your stomach rise, then the chest, then the chest goes down and then the stomach goes down. Repeat that for two to three minutes until your body learns neuromuscularly to start diaphragmatically breathing again. My name is Mark Brinson, wishing you balance and good breathing in your life."