Richard Friedel and breathing exercises for asthma, part 2

To recap, Richard Friedel is the handle of a person who commented on my blog, pushing breathing exercises as an asthma “cure.” In my first entry on this, I revealed my unfavorable opinion of CAM in the interest of full disclosure. I then tackled his first comment, Mystery Science Theatre -style, with my comments put into his text.

After his first comment, I responded to him, as can be seen here. He then responded with the comment I’ll be tackling here.

As before, my comments are in normal font, his are in red italics.

Well I guess we have to take tanden breathing seriously.

Tanden breathing? You mean the breathing technique that claims to tap into the seat of human spiritual power? Why not ask me to take faith healing seriously?

See “TANDEN BREATHING TECHNIQUE

I would think this would be a link, but it wasn’t.
I think Tanden is the greatest wisdom of the body ever discovered in the East. Those who discovered this and named it Tanden realized that collecting Ki into the place below the belly button, deep inside of the body,” http://www.lrz.de/~s3e0101/webserver/webdata/T3.pdf page 98.

This is a quote, from url listed. It is a pdf describing tanden breathing, with a bit of discussion on the spirituality surrounding it. No evidence is given for its putative health benefits. The above is an exerpt from a book called Deep Breath Changes Your Body and Mind/Spirit by one Osamu Tatsumura, who among other things claims to be the director of a yoga research institute (although from said organization’s website, using Google Translate, I couldn’t find any evidence that they actually do research), founder of the International Holistic Life Yoga Study Association (which I couldn’t find a website for), and the president of the Oki Yoga association (which I also could not find a website for). I think it’s safe to say that Mr Tatsumura isn’t exactly an objective, scientific authority on the subject.

Asthma experts in the west[sic] claim to leave no stone unturned,

No, they don’t. If they’d left no stone unturned, there wouldn’t be any more need to do research. I forget who said it (and I can’t seem to find the original video on Youtube anymore, which is a shame), but, “If Science had all the answers, it would stop!”

but turn a blind eye to breathing in the martial arts or are content with seeing it through western[sic] eyes,

Meaning…? Using Eastern mysticism as opposed to Western religion doesn’t make it any more legitamate. Your support comes from a freaking yoga instructor who didn’t cite any sources or provide any testable mechanism of how this stuff could work.

i.e just cargo-culting

That word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

or thinking that because some eastern treatment systems like acupuncture are superstitions tanden breathing falls into the same category.

Or maybe they think it’s a superstition because there’s no evidence to support the claims made of it.

In view of the enormous increase in asthma with symptomatics as the asthma paradox, I personally would stick to tanden breathing as potentially better for westerners.[sic]

On the basis of… what, exactly?

After finding over the years that various forms of abdominal breathing tended to make asthma worse, I was quite surprised to find that during a stiff walk in pollen-laden air ramming the air into my lower tensed abdomen.though[sic] requiring more effort did in fact turn off the airway constriction and kept the airways out of harm’s way..[sic]

This is anecdotal evidence. As I mentioned in my last post on this subject, there are many reasons why anedotal evidence is unreliable.  This particular piece of anecdotal evidence also contains a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy where one assumes that because one thing happened before another, it caused the second thing to happen. An example would be if I were to stand up and then someone hit me in the head with a baseball. If I conclude that standing up caused me to be hit in the head (not, say, the person not making sure their area was clear for throwing the baseball), I’m committing a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. In this case, he’s assuming that because his lungs didn’t tighten up after he chose to walk out with tightened abs, his tightened abs caused the improvement in his exercise-induced bronchospasm. It could just be that his asthma wasn’t particularly bad that day, that there wasn’t as much pollen in the air as he’d thought, or any number of other things.

In science, we determine causation by eliminating or controlling for all other compounding factors. An anecdote cannot do that.

I’ll tackle his next comment later. As I say elsewhere on my blog, I am not a medical expert. I’m not qualified to dispense medical advice (and neither, I suspect, is this guy). If you have any questions about your health or treatment, speak to a medical professional such as a doctor or a pharmacist.

As a final note, I just noticed:

 

:D! Thanks, everyone! 🙂