4
Benefits
- Lower blood pressure and heart rate
- Improves stability in the core muscles
- Boosts blood oxygenation
- Strengthens the immune system
- Lowers stress hormones
Precautions
- Never enable a patient to firmly push the air. Exhalation should be natural or gently controlled. Exhaling forcefully just adds to the turbulence in the airways.
- To minimise hyperventilation, limit the patient’s deep breathing to three or four inspirations and expirations at a time.
- Do not allow a patient to exhale for an extended period of time. This causes the patient to take short breathe because of pain with the next inhalation, resulting in irregular and inadequate breathing pattern.