Russian medical scientist, Dr. K.P. Buteyko, theorised there was a profound relationship between our breathing pattern and our level of health. Many of the founding fathers of modern medicine, such as Bohr, Henderson, Holden, Priestley and Lavosier had previously reached a similar conclusion. He devised a program that retrained the involuntary breathing mechanism. No drugs or surgery were employed. Instead, a supervised training program of tailored breathing manoeuvres. Dr. Buteyko found that when patients improved their breathing, an immense variety of chronic conditions diminished in proportion.

When he formally presented his findings and a detailed theoretical explanation to the medical elite in 1960, they were outraged at the proposal of a non-medical treatment which claimed superior results. By 1967, official statistics cited over 1000 people "cured" of asthma, hypertension and other related conditions through respiratory reconditioning. The response from the medical establishment was to prohibit publication, or even lectures on the phenomenon. To this day, the vested interests of drug and surgical intervention have invariably opposed the principle of the drug-free respiratory reconditioning approach.