As I said before, it is early days to award asthma treatment a
scientific status, seeing that it has been accompanied by an
unprecedented rise in morbidity.

Asthma treatment is based on the use of drugs which open up airways.
This is in turn tied  to the medical view that the work of breathing
should be minimized. The "obstruction" of air flow by the nose is
the price we pay for the humidifying, warming and filtering action of
that organ, nothing more.  Reducing the work of breathing is a
prominent feature of treating snoring (with CPAP machines and surgery),
sleep apnea, asthma and bronchitis, and also nasal surgery. From a
physiological standpoint - not from a medical one - it might well
be that vigorous breathing activity is needed for the circulation of
the blood by way of the Frank-Starling effect, simply pumping blood out
of the abdomen toward the heart, etc. etc.

Just do this simple test.

Lie on your back.

Stick your tongue out as far as it will go curling it round toward the
chin with your mouth wide open.  Breathing is then hardly possible at
all.  If you loosely place your hand across the opening between your
tongue and the upper lip, breathing is restored owing to the
throttling/suction effect.

In any case the extraordinary medical claim that breathing can/should
be "suctionless" needs extraordinary proof, a basic rule of scientific
discussion.

In addition to the circumstantial evidence about current asthma
treatment with the unexplained increase in the disease, take at look at
the site http://www.bcm.edu/oto/grand/72194.html

"In most regions of the human body, the famous edict of Mies van der
Rohe holds true -- "form follows function." However, the reverse
applies to rhinology: function is almost solely dependent on form. A
troublesome and common complaint in the practice of Otolaryngology is
that of nasal obstruction. We invest significant resources into the
treatment of such complaints. In the United States alone, over 60
billion dollars a year is spent on the surgical treatment of this
complaint. "

(In other words, the writer is not letting his lack of scientific
curiosity about understanding of the internal nose structure bother
him. Any thought of nasal resistance as such serving a useful purpose
is taboo).

See farther on in the same statement: "By far the most common cause
of external valve malfunction is iatrogenic or surgically induced
trauma."

Maybe you will forgive my sarcastic frame of mind when I suggest you as
a psychologist do some field work on the mentality of pharma dominated
pulmonologists and the applicability of the Milgram experiment.

Since it took Europeans 2000 years to realize that Aristotle was wrong
when he said that women had less teeth than men, we may have to wait a
couple of centuries before docs. put their thinking caps on. In the
meantime patients can look elsewhere. Regards, Richard Friedel