Doctor Buteyko's Discovery Volume 1 extract

Volume 1:

Part of Chapter 1: The Accident

This jeep will be the death of me, thought Dr Buteyko, and he tried to shake off his companion’s hand.

“Get in, Dr Buteyko, for goodness’ sake!” Mutin, his assistant, nudged him awkwardly towards the vehicle. Short and thickset, he barely reached the other man’s shoulder. The Doctor was boyishly fit, despite his 38 years.

“But where is there to sit?” Buteyko nodded at the driver, whose stooped figure could just be made out emerging from the vehicle in the darkness of the quiet May midnight. “And perhaps he doesn’t want to give us a lift to the hospital.”

“I told you I’d take you.” Stifling a cough, the driver turned his face to one side, obscuring what was already barely visible in the deepening gloom. The Doctor cast a helpless glance over the poorly-lit station forecourt - perhaps for the last time, who could tell? It seemed the jeep had deliberately been parked beyond the feeble pool of light that fell on the tarmac, still gleaming from the last spring downpour. Suddenly Buteyko remembered: he had predicted that he would be assassinated today, 15 May 1961, and that it would probably happen in Novosibirsk, a place he had disliked from the word go and never taken to since. Both presentiments had come together and there could be no mistaking their portent.

On 14 April, at a morning planning meeting with his staff in the Laboratory of Functional Diagnostics, he had told them he would not be around much longer, and added, to his colleagues’ distress, his hair unkempt after a sleepless night:

“… I may have less than a month. I know the medical establishment - or at least its elite - will not forgive me for my Discovery.”

He had delivered a whole speech, with his staff listening intently - and how they had listened! After the initial two or three gasps from the women, scarcely anyone interrupted. His fifty or so white-coated colleagues listening that morning knew how the medical mafia got even with outsiders - and, with Buteyko, it had some scores to settle! His Discovery reduced the influence of surgery so dramatically and consigned so many rare medicines to the chemists’ shelves that the mafia would consider eliminating him a small price to pay. Naturally, his speech would not published anywhere: you don’t put those sort of things into print. On paper you say you are fighting to improve public health, but the staff at the planning meeting knew how the heads of genuine crusaders would roll from time to time.

“I beg you,” Buteyko raised his clenched fist, “write down, in as much detail as you can, what each of you must do in the event of my death.”

His colleagues wrote everything down with heavy hearts, very seriously, very professionally. Love or hate Buteyko as a man, there was no denying that his Discovery of the Diseases of Deep Breathing was turning contemporary medicine completely on its head. Until now, no-one anywhere had devised a genuine cure for asthma, but Buteyko had conquered not only asthma, but dozens of other equally complex conditions, some of them far more serious - like hypertension, ischaemic heart disease, TB and diabetes.

Just why he had announced that his life would be at risk in the month to come Buteyko himself could not explain: he had the gift of second sight and that was all. Many of his predictions and prognoses frightened the people in his circle because they were so often correct. But this one-month threat of assassination seemed different - although there were real reasons for thinking he had little time left, no doubt about that. He had twice suffered massive vomiting after eating at the hospital canteen with his assistant Mutin. As a medical man, Buteyko knew that for anyone else the dinner would have meant one thing: sudden death from food poisoning. At least that’s what would be written under “Cause of Death” in the clinic - nothing else. Professor Pomekhin, his boss, would not allow any other explanation, even if a potassium cyanide capsule had been found in his soup bowl.

Dr Buteyko’s food had clearly been doctored with something more subtle, not immediately amenable to forensic examination. And what sort of post mortem would he get? They’d discover what they liked! But Mutin and his other poisoners had failed to realise one thing: someone on Buteyko therapy does not succumb to poison so easily. A body trained in the Volitional Elimination of Deep Breathing develops exceptional immunity to poison among other things - but Pomekhin did not know that! Even so, before resorting to poison, the Boss had tried the time-honoured ‘soft’ option of locking Buteyko in a loony bin with all the other recalcitrants. How many daring, creative, people had perished like that! Ignaz Semmelweis for one - a gynaecologist and obstetrician tragically poisoned by surgeons in the 19th century. Pomekhin, incidentally, was also a surgeon and only too aware of how scalpel merchants could get even with someone they didn’t like. Semmelweis had been locked away in a psychiatric hospital then destroyed with ‘tranquillising’ injections, far from prying eyes. Easy-peasy! There was once a man named Semmelweis. And then, ‘unfortunately’, there wasn’t.

The poor sod had not stepped very far out of line,...

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You can read the rest of this chapter for free at www.doctorbuteykodiscoverytrilogy.com

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