Medicine: Frog Breathing

Five years ago Dr. Clarence W. Dail, at Los Angeles’ Rancho Los Amfgos Hospital, noticed that one of his polio patients, a young man whose breathing muscles were almost completely paralyzed, had unconsciously developed a substitute way of breathing. He and Dr. John Affeldt, the physician in charge of the polio respirator center, believed that other patients might be taught to do the same, and began to experiment. Last week the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis announced that their new method will be taught to partially paralyzed patients at all of its centers. Its name: glossopharyngeal, or “frog,” breathing.

The new breathing technique resembles the way in which frogs gulp down air. The patient sucks a small amount into his mouth, then forces it through his voice box and into the lungs by a pushing action of the tongue. While the voice box closes to hold the air in the lungs, the patient gulps again, and the process is repeated until he gets a full breath.

Frog breathing increases the time which patients can spend outside the iron lung. Before learning the technique, one group of eleven patients at Rancho Los Amigos was able to remain outside their respirators for an average of only 4½ minutes. After mastering it, their average time jumped to 4½ hours. Frog breathing gives patients a big psychological boost, also enables them to cough, ending a small but maddening frustration that besets the paralyzed who feel the throat irritation but cannot relieve it, and it allows them to speak audibly.