WHEN DINAH BRADLEY DECIDED to write down her methods for overcoming chronic hyperventilation syndrome she had little idea of the world-wide impact her book would have. For decades hyperventilation had been dismissed as an "acute" physical event. Now, with her "Stop, Drop, Flop" technique, Bradley could help hyperventilators escape from the tyranny of chronic hyperventilation, which triggers symptoms from nightmares to panic attacks, chest pains, dizzy spells, tingling, palpitations and more.

For Bradley, this book idea was a breakthrough. She had already published two others: Grandma's Teeth, a children's picture book with illustrations by Sally Hollis McLeod (1979) and Becoming Single, written with Hamish Keith, which dealt with the stresses of separation and divorce (1988). But Hyperventilation Syndrome: A Handbook For Bad Breathers was the first to combine her two great skills - first as a respiratory physiotherapist, and second as a writer.

The youngest of three children, Dinah Bradley was born at Maoribank, on the foothills of the Rimutaka Ranges, 40 kilometres out of Wellington. There were acres of rolling hillside to gallop on her pony Toffee, a marvellous swing bridge over the Hutt river to the family farm and exciting parents who both acted for the Upper Hutt drama society and sang around the piano at parties.

Bradley's mother, Julia, was especially talented. After giving up a promising career as an opera singer to marry the handsome and gentlemanly Dick, she turned her talent towards poetry, light musicals, copywriting and editing the local newspaper, the Upper Hutt Leader, in an era when most other mothers stayed home and bottled golden queen peaches.

Educated at Queen Margaret College in Wellington, Bradley showed talent in several areas including singing, writing and science. As she says, these were the days when girls had about four career choices: teaching, nursing, working in a bank or, if you were bright, very brave and fancied three years studying in Dunedin well away from your parents, doing physiotherapy. She chose the latter.

Her subsequent career, at which she became greatly skilled although she found it oppressive at times, helped support the family while her husband, Robin Morrison pursued his work as a freelance photographer - a calling which earned him wide international acclaim and inspired some marvellous overseas trips for the family, but didn't, especially in the early days, always keep that steady, boring but indispensable money flowing in. Physiotherapy, on the other hand, did.

Robin and Dinah married in 1966. Robin was already in London, well settled in the swinging 60s, and Dinah followed two weeks after she graduated, ready for marriage and adventure. Her subsequent 25 year career as a physiotherapist became international as she doggedly practised from Auckland to London and Sydney, while Robin pursued his photographic passions.

Over the years she gradually moved from specialising in childbirth physiotherapy, which coincided with the birth of their two sons Jake and Keir (named after James K Baxter), to respiratory work. But her experience in childbirth has had an important impact on her subsequent research. "We were teaching women not to hyperventilate during labour because it made pain perception worse, so I became very aware of the effects of acute hyperventilation."

By the time Robin died at the age of 48 in March last year, Bradley had forged herself a dual reputation - first as a respiratory physiotherapist of international standing and second as a writer, especially on health issues. In 1988 she edited the New Zealand edition of Women's Health by Sandra Cabot and has written on health issues for More magazine.

On the very day in 1991 when Robin had the operation which stunned the entire family by revealing cancer of the colon, Hyperventilation Syndrome was published by Tandem Press. It went straight onto the New Zealand bestseller list and stayed there for 10 weeks - something of a coup for a non-fiction book dealing with an unspectacular subject like breathing problems.

But that was just the beginning. Over the next year, as the book's ideas began to circulate round the world, it became apparent that Bradley had done the near-impossible that is, caught a health trend just before it got going. After a modest first print-run of 3500 Tandem reprinted the New Zealand edition a year later. Tandem have also sold the book to Australia, the US, Holland and the UK; a revised edition has just been published on both sides of the Tasman. As Tandem's Bob Ross says, "It's phenomenal. The book just continues to sell and sell and sell in this country. Here people recognise the significance of what Dinah is saying."

As Bradley points out, probably the reason why her book is so successful is because the syndrome has been ignored for almost 20 years. And as she explains it, hyperventilation is, without doubt, a chronic, 20th century, stress-based disorder. But why do people breathe so badly?

"If people go on living at the pace they're living they'll exhaust their own resources," she says. "When you start over-breathing and huffing out too much, which happens when you become stressed and carbon dioxide levels fall, one of the many effects of this (which is actually hyperventilation) is that you produce more adrenalin so your autonomic nervous system is on red alert. It's just like a mad dog chasing its tail. The outpouring of adrenalin and anxiety makes you breathe faster - and so it becomes a chronic vicious circle."

Not that hyperventilation is all bad. "Everyone hyperventilates for short spells, and that's quite normal. For instance, we all hyperventilate when we're making love. What usually happens is that, when the excitement is over, breathing returns to normal. But if it doesn't, blood gases stay out of synch and the side effects - palpitations, sweaty palms, light-headedness, even visual disturbances, can set in."

With Hyperventilation Syndrome Bradley has become the first person in the world to have written her methods into a clear easy to-read book that teaches people how to overcome hyperventilation.

"One woman had such good results she clutched me by the collar and said: 'Why hasn't someone explained this to me before! I've learned more in the last hour than I discovered in 30 bloody years of going to the doctor - being fobbed off with pills, sent for tests for this and that, treated like a silly nuisance. Give me something I can read about!' It's a really rewarding area to work in because when people get the message the effects can be astounding."

As Bradley points out, pharmaceutical research has been the big issue over the last two decades or so: "Why would drug companies fund research into a disorder that requires no drugs?" At the same time using the control of breathing patterns as a way to combat stress and promote better health is out of fashion, among the counselling/therapy set who are largely unaware of the complexity of breathing dysfunction and believe that mind control is the answer to stress and anxiety. "What I'm promoting is physical coping skills," she says.

And how did she stumble onto the fact that hyperventilation was a chronic disorder - and more importantly, that it could be effectively treated by a series of exercises and breathing retraining?

"When I was researching Becoming Single, I noticed how people changed when they retold their distressing stories," she says. "Some would get dizzy, breathing rates changed - nothing was physically wrong, they were just experiencing terrifying physical symptoms brought on simply by thinking about painful events. Later on they'd tell me how they were having panic attacks -and palpitations and I thought, there must be more in this.

"Since working at Green Lane Hospital, with access to asthma clinic patients, I've had real support with this work and plenty of patients happy to give it a go," she says. And as her methods became more successful she began writing them down into a simply-followed series of exercises and explanations. As she explains it, "In the end I got so sick of people saying, 'Would you write this out for me?', that my ideas grew into a pamphlet, then a leaflet called The Hazards of Heavy Breathing', then the book."

When she leaves for London next month to launch Hyperventilation Syndrome in Britain, Bradley will be greeted as something of a hero by international respiratory physiologists who have fought public apathy towards chronic hyperventilation for two decades now. After the launch she will speak at the inaugural conference of the International Society for the Advancement of Respiratory Physiology in France. As the internationally respected Dr Claude Lum, a former president of the Royal Society of Medicine, says in the introduction of the English edition, "Dinah Bradley's timely book will bring relief and hope to the many people who find their illnesses baffle, and often irritate, their physicians... Its blend of knowledge, clinical experience and readability not only tells patients what is wrong with them, but also shows that something can be done about it."

QUOTE UNQUOTE 21 July 1994

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