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Mysterious shortness of breath: What has helped you?
Lung Health | Last Active: 6 days ago | Replies (3422)Comment receiving replies
hey so i've been reading so much of this thread. i haven't really seen (other than breathing techniques) any true diagnoses and remedy for this air hunger/sob/having to yawn to get a full breath. to recap its been 6 months for me. just started one morning. struggled to get a full breath in. after a few days i went to ER. lots of heart tests cause i had a cardiac arrest 3 years ago. lidocaine cocktail to rule out acid reflux. EKG. blood work (not sure what) lots of puffs from albuterol inhaler (no effect) and chest xray. as told to follow up with primary. saw him and he just said stop drinking coffee...got referred to an allergist. did breathing test (came back normal) and ordered CT chest scan. saw pulminary doctor. he looked at results of both tests and said everything is normal and there were no more tests he could order. told me to wait and see my cardiologist. saw him last week. didnt put a lot off attention towards my breathing issues. ordered a echocardiogram at the end of may. i have another pulminary doctor appt in two weeks (2nd opinion i guess). not sure what to say to make her understand the severity of this. oh i even talked ith my psychologist (im on psych meds) about my OCD and anxiety over this but he didnt seem to care. what is this? is there a true name for having to fight/yawn to get hat feels like a full breath. ive heard all the names used but is there an actual clinical name. e shouldn't be constantly thinking about our breathing like this. has anyone gotten info on what causes this? ive read a lot about managing it but what about the cause and the cure? thanks so much
Replies to "hey so i've been reading so much of this thread. i haven't really seen (other than..."
Hi @meattruck, I'm glad you're able to do these various tests to rule things out and give yourself a picture of your overall health. As you said, there are various names for it, and I'm not sure if there's an "official" name for it but dyspnea and pseudo dyspnea come to mind as common medical type names for this issue.
I certainly wish there was a cause that we could point to. But since there's not, at least that we know of right now, we're down to basically managing symptoms as much as possible. There could indeed be a psychological cause rather than a physical one, which why it's good that you're going these tests done, so that you at least rule out physical causes.
Over the years, I've basically done a mixture of Buteyko breathing exercises, moderate weight lifting, distraction, and general stress management and all of these have helped me. Let me know if I can explain anything in more detail.
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My dr. says it’s anxiety. When my dr. put me on Zoloft, it went away completely. However, over a period of many years the sob would show back up so my dr. just increased the dosage and that would help. The sob came back again and my dr. decided to add klonopin. It has really helped. Still get sob some but it has significantly improved. Hope you find help as I know how awful this sob can be.