If You Swallow Anything For COPD, This Is What Happens
Lung Health Insights
If You Swallow Anything For COPD, This Is What Happens
Respiratory therapist breaks ranks on why the tea and the capsules both failed - and the one change that made the same plant work
Registered Respiratory Therapist | 26 years clinical
Dear friend with COPD,
If you have swallowed every version of this and felt nothing...
If the tea went cold in your hands twice a day all winter for nothing...
If you have decided the whole idea is nonsense and would say so...
Then what follows could save you from throwing out something that was never actually the problem.
But I need to warn you first.
This is going to make you angry.
Because it is not complicated, and it is not new, and it is not hidden.
And before any of it, three things it is not.
It is not that the lungs got worse this year.
It is not age, and nobody on this page is going to say that word to you again.
It is not that you did not try hard enough, because there is a shelf in that bathroom that proves you did.
So why has nobody said it.
Not because anybody is hiding it.
But because nobody can bill for it.
There is no code for sixty seconds in your own kitchen, and the people who actually see it are standing over somebody at two in the morning.
Nobody writes down what they know.
And here is the part that should annoy you.
Three inhalers, taken for life, at the three hundred dollars a month one customer wrote to us about.
That is three thousand six hundred dollars a year, every year, forever.
Nobody has to hide anything to want that to continue.
They only have to keep answering a question you did not ask.
So the shelf grows.
And nothing else does.
My name is Ray Bettinger.
I am a respiratory therapist.
Twenty six years, twenty two of them on nights at a community hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania.
I get called at two in the morning when somebody cannot finish a sentence.
I have looked at what comes out of people in a clear plastic jar under a strip light, most nights, for all of it.
And until it was a woman called Maureen, I believed that mullein does not work, because it did not work.
THE MORNING I RAN OUT OF THINGS TO SAY
It was twenty past six on a Tuesday.
I stood in the bathroom doorway with a mug of coffee going cold in my hand.
Maureen had both hands on the edge of the basin. The tap was running.
She had been there eleven minutes. I know because I looked.
At the end of it she rinsed the basin and wiped it with the corner of the towel so nobody would have to see.
Then she said good morning.
Here is the part I have not got over:
Twenty six years of getting things out of people's lungs for a living.
And I did not know what to tell her.
Three inhalers. Prednisone twice. A shelf of cough medicine in every strength they make.
Every appointment added something. Not one ever took anything away.
I had nothing that was not already on that shelf.
WHAT I FINALLY WORKED OUT, AND HOW LONG IT TOOK ME
I went at it the way you go at something when it is your own family.
And then one night on a shift I was looking at a jar under a strip light, the way I have looked at a few thousand of them.
But this time I actually looked at it.
Because there were two different things sitting in that jar, and there always had been, and in twenty six years not one person had ever drawn me the second one.
And what I landed on was not complicated, and that is the part that still annoys me.
It is not that her lungs had run out of road.
It is that everything she had been given was arriving in the wrong place, and had been for nine years.
Let me show you what I mean.
THE PART NOBODY HAS EVER DRAWN FOR HER
This is the part I wish somebody would draw for every single person with this.
There is a loose wet layer sitting on top.
That is the layer a thinner works on.
And that is the layer she hauls up at the sink every morning, and it is back by the afternoon.
Underneath it there is an older layer that has gone hard and set itself onto the wall of the airway.
Think of a chimney that has not been swept in nine years.
The air still goes up the middle. It always does.
But it never touches the walls, so what is baked onto the walls does not care how much air goes past it.
And underneath both layers there are tiny hairs whose entire job is to sweep the whole business up and out.
Bury those under something that has already set and they stop.
They are not broken and they have not given up. They are pinned.
So fifteen minutes of work produces a teaspoon.
Because the work is going into the top layer, and the part that costs her the morning is welded underneath it.
WHAT ACTUALLY TAKES A LAYER LIKE THAT OFF
Think about the shower head in that same bathroom.
Nine years of hard water and it has crusted up on the inside.
And you can run water through it every morning for another nine years and it will not shift, because the water goes straight down the middle and out the end.
So you take it down and you sit it in something strong, and you leave it overnight.
Not because scrubbing is lazy. Because there is nothing to scrub. It is on the inside of the thing.
And in the morning it comes away in bits, and some of them are darker than you were expecting.
That is the whole of it, and it is three things and not one.
Something strong enough to matter. Sitting against the thing itself and not running past it. And left there long enough to do the work.
Take one of those three away and you have a shower head you have run water through.
THE THREE THINGS THAT HAVE TO BE TRUE AT ONCE
For anything to move what is actually sitting there, three things have to be true at the same time.
One. It has to be strong enough to matter.
Tea is leaves and hot water. What ends up in the cup is mostly water.
That is not an opinion about the plant. It is arithmetic about the cup.
Two. It cannot go through the stomach.
Anything swallowed meets acid, then the liver takes its cut, and whatever survives gets spread through every drop of blood in the body on its way to everywhere at once.
The airway gets whatever is left of what is left.
Three. It has to be held long enough to go in.
Two seconds and a swallow is the same as swallowing it.
Miss one of the three and you get exactly what she got for years.
Nothing.
That is why the tea did nothing.
That is why the capsules did nothing.
And that is why the cheap dropper squeezed into a glass of water did nothing, and it was never the plant.
SO WHY HAS THE INHALER NOT DONE IT
Because that is the fair question, and she is going to ask it before she gets to the end of this page.
The inhaler already goes into the airway. That is true and it is not a small thing.
And it works. It opens the tube so the air gets through, and every one of them stays exactly as her doctor wrote it, forever.
But a puff is a mist, and a mist settles on the wet layer on top.
And the wet layer is the one she hauls up at the sink, so by the afternoon whatever landed on it has gone up with it.
It never sat against the wall. Not once in nine years.
Same with the syrup. Same with the tablets. Same with the machine and the mask if there is one in that house.
Not one of them was ever aimed at the wall, because every one of them was aimed at the middle, and the middle was never what was costing her the morning.
WHAT SHE TAKES NOW
✓ It is concentrated. Not leaves in hot water. There is something in the dropper worth arriving.
✓ It goes under the tongue. Held there, not tipped down the throat, so it is not starting at the stomach.
✓ It is timed. A full sixty seconds by a clock on the wall, before food and before coffee.
All three. Every morning. That is the whole of it.
So I put a bottle on the window ledge over Maureen's kitchen sink, next to the radio.
And I did not make a speech about it.
I said sixty seconds, before the coffee, and I will ring you Sunday.
She did it because I asked her to, and not because anybody sold her anything.
It is called Veylor.
Wild mullein, which is the one that works on what is set on the wall, and it has to be the wild kind, because the farmed sort is grown fast and comes out thin.
Bromelain, out of pineapple stems, which is in there to break the old stuff up so it has somewhere to go.
Ginger, so the whole business keeps moving instead of sitting in her chest.
Cordyceps, which is for the part she has stopped mentioning to anybody, which is the stairs.
And a little lemon peel, because otherwise nobody keeps anything up for thirty mornings.
It is the only thing I have found that does all three at once.
It is concentrated, so there is something in the dropper worth arriving.
It goes under the tongue, so it does not take the long road through the stomach.
And it is held there for a full sixty seconds by a clock, not counted in her head, because that is how long it takes to go in.
Two full droppers, first thing, before food and before coffee.
Every prescription stays exactly as it was written. Every one of them, forever.
Nothing here replaces anything, and nothing here asks her to stop.
THE SAME DOORWAY, NINE WEEKS LATER
It was twenty past six again and I was standing in the same place with the same mug.
But the tap was not running.
And the coffee in my hand was still hot, which is how I knew before anybody said anything, because that coffee has never once been hot in that doorway.
Maureen was at the basin about four minutes and then she came out.
And she still wiped it round with the corner of the towel, out of nine years of habit, and there was nothing on it to wipe.
She did not mention it. Neither did I.
Then she said good morning, and that was the whole of it, and it was the first morning in nine years that it was.
WHAT HAPPENS, IN ORDER, INCLUDING THE WEEK PEOPLE QUIT
Day one.
Sharp and bitter, nothing like the drops before it, and about halfway through the count a warmth comes up under the jaw.
Days three to seven.
More comes up, not less. Thicker and heavier than it was.
That is the first sign anything down there is moving at all, and it is also where people stop, because nobody tells them what it means.
Days eight to fourteen.
It goes dark. Brown going to nearly black, dense enough to sink in the basin instead of sitting on the water.
That is the week nobody expects and the only one that proves anything is happening.
Weeks three and four.
Fifteen minutes comes down to about eight, and then to about five, and she notices because the coffee is still hot.
Weeks five and six.
She gets her end of a conversation back, and the person on the other end stops asking whether she is alright.
Weeks seven and eight.
She stops working out in advance where she would have to sit.
THEN OTHER PEOPLE IN THE CLASS STARTED ASKING HER
It did not stay quiet.
Somebody noticed she was not at the sink as long and asked her what had changed.
She told one person.
That person told two more, and inside a month I had women I had never treated stopping me in a corridor to ask about a brown bottle.
None of it came from me.
It came from women comparing notes about their own mornings, which is the only way anything actually travels in this.
WHAT OTHER WOMEN HAVE WRITTEN IN
Carol Estes, 67, North Carolina
“I told my neighbour the whole mullein thing was nonsense, because I had done the tea years ago. I want it on record that I was wrong about the plant and right about the tea.”
Denise Karras, 71, Ohio
“Week two got worse and I nearly put it in the bin. My daughter told me to finish the bottle. Day eleven what came up was dark and it sank.”
Wendy Ashcroft, 74, Adelaide
“The sink used to be fifteen minutes. It was five this morning and the kettle had not boiled.”
Dorothy Ferrante, 79, Michigan
“My great grandson had his birthday at the park and I was there the whole thing. I had picked out a chair beforehand and never used it.”
AND IF YOU ARE READING THIS FOR SOMEBODY ELSE
Because a lot of the people who write to us are not the one standing at the sink.
They are the daughter who already does all the websites, reading this at half past eleven at night with the phone on the arm of the chair.
So two things, and then I will leave it.
It can arrive without a conversation. Nobody has to be talked into anything. She just has to find a small amber bottle on the counter and be told sixty seconds before the coffee.
And the second week is going to look like it is making her worse, and she is going to ring you about it, and that is the week it is actually working.
Do not let her put it in the cabinet. That is the entire job.
NINETY DAYS, AND SHE IS MEANT TO USE THE WHOLE BOTTLE
Ninety days from the day it lands on the mat.
One bottle is thirty mornings.
And thirty mornings is far enough in to know, because the thing people notice first shows up somewhere in the second and third week, well inside one bottle.
So the window is deliberately longer than the bottle.
Nobody is deciding against a clock, and nobody has to commit to anything past the first one to find out.
If she gets to the end of those thirty mornings and nothing deep has moved, the bottle goes back, empty, and she keeps her money.
There is no form to fill out.
Nobody asks her to prove she took it, or to explain what she means by nothing moved, or offers her something else instead.
That is the whole policy and it fits in a paragraph, which is more than most of them manage.
THE PART THAT IS GENUINELY OUT OF OUR HANDS
The mullein in this is wild.
Not farmed, not grown to order.
It is cut by hand in a short window once a year, and when a run is gone it is gone until the next picking.
There is no countdown on this page and I am not going to invent a number to put in front of you.
If the page still takes an order, there is still some of it on the shelf.
WHAT IT IS ACTUALLY BEING WEIGHED AGAINST
Three thousand six hundred dollars a year.
That is the routine she is already on, at the figure one customer put in writing, and it does not stop.
Then there is the shelf. Two winters of cough medicine, the box replaced every fall whether it did anything or not, the syrup bought twice because she forgot she had one.
Nobody adds that up, because it goes out five and ten dollars at a time.
Against all of that, this is one bottle and thirty mornings.
And if it does nothing, the bottle goes back empty and she keeps her money.
So the question is not what it costs.
The question is what another year of the same shelf costs.
TWO WAYS NEXT SPRING GOES
There is a version of March where nothing about the mornings is any different, and there is a version where it is, and the only thing between them is whether anything changes tomorrow at six.
The one where nothing changes
The blanket stays folded over the arm of the recliner because that is where you sit now, and that is where you will be at eleven on a Tuesday in March. The tap runs while you are at the sink so nobody in the kitchen has to listen to it, and it runs about fifteen minutes, and then you rinse it down and come out and say you are fine. The phone goes to the machine when it is your sister, because a call is eleven minutes of talking and you do not have eleven minutes of talking in you, so you tell yourself you will get her after lunch. In November there is another appointment and it adds a fourth thing to the shelf above the sink, and the man says let us see how you do on that, and you drive home. The grandchildren come at Christmas and you stay in the recliner and they come to you one at a time, and somebody brings you a plate.
The one where you did something on a Tuesday
The first two weeks are worse and you nearly stop, and then what comes up goes dark and heavy and you stand there over the sink looking at it. By the end of the first month the fifteen minutes is about five, and you only notice because you got your coffee poured while it was still hot. Somewhere in the second month you finish a sentence and then you finish the one after it, and your sister keeps talking straight through because she has not noticed anything, and that is the whole point of it. You quit figuring out where the benches are between the car and the store, so you quit planning the day around them. Next spring your sister opens her door in Aberdeen and you are standing on the step with a bag, and you carried it up the walk yourself.
WHAT TO DO NOW
- Open the order page (the button below goes straight there, and it is the same page whether you are reading this on the phone or on the computer)
- Put in the order for thirty mornings (your name and your address and then the card, and it is done, and you can close the laptop and go put the dishes away)
- Watch for the amber bottle (it comes in a padded envelope with the dropper in the cap, so stand it up by the coffee maker or wherever you are first thing, because the people who forget are the ones who put it in a drawer)
- Take it before the coffee (two full droppers, hold it and count sixty seconds off the clock on the stove, then swallow, and it is bitter that first morning so have the coffee sitting ready, and every prescription you are on stays exactly as it is written)
- Do not quit in the second week (right around then it gets thicker and worse before it gets anywhere, and that is the exact spot where most people stop, and if you stop there you sat through the bad half and got none of the rest)
Wild mullein is harvested, not farmed, so stock runs out.
With respect,
Ray Bettinger
Respiratory therapist, 26 years
P.S. - P.S. The woman who wrote me about the three hundred dollars a month sent a second note in July and it was two lines long. She got down to the mailbox and back without stopping at the neighbor's fence halfway, and she said the dog came with her.
P.P.S. - P.P.S. The mullein is wild and it is picked by hand in the plant's second year, so there is only ever so much of it, and when a batch is gone we wait on the next stand coming up. We have run out before and the people who waited went on a list. There is no clock on this screen and no number counting down, and there is not going to be one.
P.P.P.S. - If the second week is worse, that is the week that proves it. Do not put the bottle in the cabinet. Everybody who writes in about their sixth week got through their second one first.
-
Marlene KowalczykOk but has anyone here actually taken this or are we all just reading the article. I did the tea two winters running and bought the capsules too and nothing. Nothing at all. So Im asking honest. -
Dorothy PetersenMarlene I did the tea for years and it did nothing for me either so I hear you. This is not the tea. I'm on week six and I got through a whole phone call with my brother Sunday and stayed on it. -
Sandra McAllisterHow long does it take to come? And do you take it before breakfast or does it not matter. My husband keeps my pills on a schedule and I dont want to mess that up. -
Bev TandySandra mine took just over a week. First thing before anything else, I do it while the coffee is dripping and count to sixty on the stove clock. Everything else stays exactly the same, nothing changed there. -
Nola WhitcombWarning you all now the second week is BAD. Mine got thicker and I was at the sink longer than before and I about poured the bottle down the drain. Week 3 it went dark and that was new. -
Gail PomeroyHeres mine on the windowsill so I dont forget it in the mornings. Second bottle. My daughter says the kitchen looks like a pharmacy now but I dont care what it looks like.
-
Trish BallardIm on day nine and honestly I dont see what everyone is talking about. If anything the mornings are longer than they were. I dont like leaving comments like this but there it is. -
Eileen MarchettiTrish day nine is where I was and I wrote about the same thing on a page like this. Give it to the end of the second week. Day twelve mine came up near black and I called my daughter in to look. -
Karen VossSharon Fenwick read this one. This is the thing I was telling you about at Marions on Thursday, not the tea, the drops. Call me after you read it, Im home all afternoon. -
Colleen RuddickOrdered another one for my sister in Tucson. She has had it worse than me for years and she wont ask anybody for anything, so Im just sending it and she can holler at me later. -
Denise HartiganHas anyone in their seventies taken this? I turn 74 in October and everything I read seems to be younger people. I dont want to start something and then find out its not meant for us. -
Maureen SlatteryDenise Im 78. Started in the spring. The thing that changed for me was the sink, it used to be fifteen minutes with the tap running so nobody heard me and now its about five. -
Amanda FeltzI bought this for my mom in April, she's 81. Sunday she sat at the table for the whole dinner and talked and nobody had to lean in to hear her. I went out to the car after and
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Jim DohertyGot it for my wife Pauline, she wouldnt order anything online herself. Week five now. She did the stairs twice yesterday and then told me about it twice too. -
Pat RenfroJust so people know, they were out last spring and I waited close to two months for mine. Its a wild plant, they cant just make more of it when they feel like it. I wouldnt sit on it. -
Ruth EllingsonI should have got this in the winter. My husbands funeral was in February and I sat at the back of the church because I couldnt manage the walk up front. Thats what I think about. -
Lorraine BeaudrySecond week was rough for me too, my husband thought I had a chest infection. Then it went brown and thick and kept coming for days. I'm three weeks past that now and the mornings are shorter. -
Wendy KirkpatrickWhat I noticed first wasnt the breathing, it was that I answered the phone. My granddaughter called from Wellington and I stayed on the whole time and she told me all about her new place. -
Judy VanceMine came this morning and the bottle is smaller than I pictured. Starting tomorrow before my coffee. Ill come back on here and say what happened, good or bad. -
Barb NystromJudy please come back and say. And dont judge it on the first week, thats all Ill tell you. Have something to eat after, the taste stays with you a while.
Please read this part
This article is for general information and is not medical advice. Keep taking everything your doctor has prescribed. Nothing here is a replacement for it. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Individual experiences vary.