Doctor Buteyko's Discovery Volume 1 extract

Volume 1:

Part of Chapter 1: The Accident

“This minibus will be the death of me…”, and for the last time, Dr Buteyko 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 thirty-eight years.

“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. “Perhaps he’s not going to the hospital at all.…”

“I told you, I’d take you”. Muffling a cough, the driver turned his face to one side, obscuring what was already barely visible in the deepening dark. The doctor cast a helpless glance over the poorly-lit station forecourt –(perhaps for the last time, who could tell?) It seemed the minibus 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: today -15 May 1961 - was the date he’d predicted he would be assassinated, and it would probably happen in Novosibirsk, a place he had disliked from the word go and never taken to since. Both presentiments came together and there was no mistaking them.

On 14 April, at a morning planning meeting with his staff in the Laboratory for Functional Diagnosis, 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. The fifty or so white-coated colleagues listening to him that morning knew how the Medical Mafia got even with outsiders – and, with Buteyko, it had some scores to settle! His discovery reduced surgical influence 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 say those sort of things in print. On paper you say you are fighting to improve public health, but 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 Identification of Deep Respiratory Diseases was turning contemporary medicine completely on its head. Until now, no one anywhere had devised a genuine cure for asthma, but Buteyko had mastered not only it, but dozens of other equally complex conditions, some of them far more serious - like hypertonia, ischemic heart disease, TB and sugar 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. The 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 Deliberate Elimination of Deep Breathing develops exceptional immunity to poison and other things -- but the Boss did not know that! Even so, before resorting to poison, the Boss had tried using the time-honoured ‘soft’ option to eliminate Buteyko, by locking him in a loony bin, with all the other recalcitrants. How many daring, creative, people had perished like that! Ignats Zimmelweiss for one. He was the gynaecologist and obstetrician, tragically poisoned by surgeons in the 19th century. The Boss, incidentally, was a surgeon too and only too aware of how scalpel merchants could get even with someone they didn’t like. Zimmelweiss 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 Zimmelweiss. And now, “unfortunately,” there isn’t. Poor thing…

And the poor sod had not stepped very far out of line, at least not by modern medical standards. He had only asked surgeons to wash their hands before they operated, preferably with chlorine. Nothing too heinous about that, you’d think; washing your hands before diving into a patient’s abdomen…but no! The closed-shop artists with the scalpels paid no heed to the voice crying in the wilderness. For thirteen years, nasty pieces of work like Academician Braun hounded him for his good idea, then went for broke...

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

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