There were many remarkable individual stories within the Asthma project. One of them is “David’s”. A typical 42 year old “Aussie battler”, he had suffered asthma since infancy, which had greatly frustrated both his career and his sporting ambitions. When we assessed him prior to his entry to the trial his asthma was in the severest of categories. Simply blowing into the spirometer, a machine used to test lung capacity, caused his asthma to worsen! After sixteen weeks of meditation, which he took to like fish to water, he returned for reassessment.
At the lung function laboratory we saw a changed man. David’s lung function had increased, his symptoms reduced massively and the standard tests that initially placed him in the severest of asthma categories now indicated that his asthma was one of the mildest! David told us that his asthma had improved so much that he was sleeping through the night rather than being woken with symptoms; that he was playing sport; and that he had saved more than $1,500 in medication expenses since he started the program!