Chest Diseases: Exercise for Emphysema

CHEST DISEASES

Long extolled as a tonic for lazy muscles, bicycling is now being boosted as a treatment for a far more serious disability. Using a rigid cycling regimen, says Boston’s Dr. Harry Bass, he has been able to help patients afflicted with emphysema, a respiratory ailment that gradually impairs breathing and kills as many as 20,000 Americans a year.

Bike therapy totally reverses the traditional rest-and-medication treatment for emphysema. “I tell patients to do more, not less,” reports Dr. Bass in Medical World News. Using $20 stationary exercising bicycles, the director of Peter Bent Brigham Hospital’s pulmonary division starts his patients off with three ten-minute stints a day at the pedals. By the end of the 18-week course his cyclers are working out for 30 to 45 minutes at a time.

Fourteen emphysema sufferers took part in Bass’s experiment. When they started, some of them found breathing so difficult that all physical activity was an arduous chore. But during the gradual exercise buildup, they all showed improvement. Their hearts now function more efficiently. Work has become easier, and their bodies require less oxygen for a given task, presumably because their lung tissue has been stimulated to greater efficiency. Bass does not recommend his treatment for all of the 400,000 Americans troubled by emphysema, many of whom have other serious disorders. His patients, however, have no such compunctions. Like 74-year-old Dudley Pell, who was on the verge of quitting his real estate business before undergoing the Bass program, they talk of the benefits of the bicycle to all who care to listen.