Peter Litchfield

The Graduate School of Breathing Sciences announces its new fully webinar-based Master of Science degree program in Applied Breathing Sciences, an interdisciplinary synthesis of the biological and behavioral sciences including physiology, biochemistry, neuroscience, psychology, behavioral science, counseling, and instrumentation technology. The Graduate School opened its door in early September 2013 and now has students from around the world, including countries such as Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Norway, and the USA. It is estimated that 10 to 25 percent of the US population have unwittingly learned breathing habits that compromise physiology and psychology in ways that trigger, perpetuate, and cause serious symptoms and deficits of all kinds. This enormous problem, only superficially addressed by the treatment-oriented professional community,requires a solution that is interdisciplinary, client-centered, and learning-oriented. The new MS program offered by the Graduate School of Breathing Sciences addresses this solution by training practitioners, consultants, and educatorsfrom diverse disciplines to offer breathing learning services to their clients and patients.Student-colleagues are taught the science, the practice, and the business of providing these services. Unfortunately, practitioners from around the world,who make breathing training a part of their profession, are rarely trained to identify dysfunctional breathing habits and their patterns, much less how to help their clients learn new habits consistent with good physical and mental health. All too often focus is on symptoms rather than causes. The MS program seeks to remedy this shortcoming by teaching student-colleagues how to apply the principles of behavior analysis and behavior modification to dysfunctional breathing including its physiology, effects, origins, causes, triggers, motivations, sustaining factors, and self-regulation learning solutions. The MS degree program is a 36-unit program, offered on a trimester rather than on a semester basis. This means that, although students-colleagues may complete the program at their own pace,thosewho attend full time can complete the program in one year. Although all courses and proseminars are conveniently held live on weekends, recordings of them can be listened to at any time. Non-students may also sign-up for the course offerings on a continuing education basis and then apply these credits to the MS degree should they enroll at a future time. The program is comprised of 28 one-unit courses: 8 Physiology courses, 8 Psychology courses, 8 Intervention courses, 2 Measurement courses, and 2 Business courses. It also includes 3 one-unit proseminars (case review), 4 units of service practicums (100 hours) to be completed at student-colleague work locations, and 1 unit of business practicum (50 hours) consisting of the execution of business and marketing plans formulated by students while taking the business courses. The faculty consists of 15 highly experienced experts from the fields of psychology, psychiatry, medicine, physiology, physiotherapy, physics, and business. They teach from their own offices from around the world, stretching from SanFrancisco to Tel Aviv. Students, like the faculty, come from around the world. The Graduate School provides a cyber-library that contains more than 2,700 medical and behavioral science journals which can be accessed 24 X 7. And, their Kindle Library cuts textbook costs by 80 to 90 percent. Their cyber campus makes communication easy among students and faculty. The School maintains its own webinar-broadcasting platform, a customized version of Training Centerprovided by Cisco’s WebEx. Successful completion of the MS program requires that student-colleagues are actually providing learning services to their clients and are doing so as a part of a business plan formulated during the program.