EN
IT
Lifestyle
07 July 2014
OSTEOPATHY: BREATHE!

What do we mean with “breathless”, a “breath-taking” beauty or a “sigh of relief”? Doctor Zanier, a precious DDmag contributor and wellness expert, explains that to us.

The cells of our body need oxygen to transform food nutritive resources into essential biochemical elements to life. Carbon dioxide is the waste produced by using oxygen. Mechanisms by which our organism acquire oxygen and eliminate carbon dioxide are called Pulmonary Inhaling and Expiration. In the case of normal inhaling, in a relaxed situation, we contract some muscles – such as the intercostals and the diaphragm – while by exhaling these muscles passively relaxed and the lungs goes back to the basic non-tensed condition.

This happens for instance with a balloon. To inflate we must blow the air into it, but to deflate we don’t need to squeeze it, because the air will come out automatically. During physical activity, when we breathe under a certain stress, the expiration is actively done as well. Particularly, the diaphragm is an important cupola-shaped muscle that - as we can see in the image above - goes down and flatten by inhaling and dish by exhaling. This piston-like movement matches with other bodily diaphragm (pelvic, thoracic, buccal and tentorium) as well as being useful to breathing. It allows to “squeeze” the abdominal organs and simplify digestion, it permits a good cardia operation and it forms one of the abdominal cavity wall and it stabilises the spine.

It’s important to understand those concepts to realise how these mechanisms may in real life cause some diseases. In the worldly wisdom we know some aspects of breathing – expressions like “bite the bullet and hang in there” convey the idea of tension, on the contrary a “sigh of relief” refers to a psychophysical relaxation.

Sometimes some mechanisms which alter breathing processes are bound to habits. It often happens to see the impact of breathing on the posture: from some signals we can even recognize a depression. The two main problems are in fact the tension in the inhaling muscles or, on the contrary, a weak hypofunctioning inhale process.

Whatever the disorder of the breathing mechanisms and the diaphragm it’s fundamental for the psychophysical wellness to reactivate a correct breathing attitude, the capability of relaxing the inhaling muscles, first of all the diaphragm, and to harmonize the inhaling-exhaling rhythms. Aim of the therapist in this field is to identify the breathing dysfunction, understand its kind and modify the wrong mechanisms by teaching to the patient a better way to breathe.



For any information you can contact Doctor Zanier at the following email address: fisioheal@yahoo.it



DD

You may also be interested in ...
Lifestyle
Lifestyle
Lifestyle
Lifestyle
 
Food
Food
Those who follow us on Facebook know that every week we have a "meeting of the heart" in one of the most beautiful squares of Vicenza: is the Flowers and Gardens open market that every Wednesday, in Piazza delle Erbe,...