I have no idea, but if I don't play, I don't eat.

My guess is that wind players have healthier lungs, but I could be wrong about that.

I had acute bronchitis when I was a child, the saxophone cured that. Whether it works with COVID is anyone's guess.

Insights and incites by Notes

 

We are all different, and with viruses mutating everywhichway I would say you have a better chance, but not an ironclad one.

I got pneumonia in my 20s and after that, I was subject to acute bronchitis every few years. Then in 2017 walking pneumonia was epidemic and I got a case that would just not go away. It developed into congestive heart failure.

 

I am no doctor, but I would venture to say that if wind playing brings you joy and relieves stress, that would be very beneficial to your mental and physical health. Remember that stress is a significant risk factor in many illnesses, and please do what you can to keep your stress level under control.

 

...if wind playing brings you joy and relieves stress, that would be very beneficial to your mental and physical health. Remember that stress is a significant risk factor in many illnesses...

Agreed!

 

I'm more concerned about some idiot crossing the center line on the highway and hitting me head-on, but I digress....

 

Sax and flute playing saved my life. Play, just stay clean. If you aren't familiar with me I suggest you google "Tufts Heart Sax"

 

It depends, if you play for 20hours a day you are imune to everything, even death. Sounds stupid right? Right

 

Do some light cardio.

 

I’m another not a dr, sorry, but my work required me to do an annual lung function test, and mine was always astoundingly great. Never failed to get a wow comment from the tech. The only thing I can attribute that to is playing wind instruments, but it just measures the volume you can process. My guess is that playing a wind instrument has little to do with viral lung infection, positive or negative, but just a guess.

 

I'm another not a dr, sorry, but my work required me to do an annual lung function test, and mine was always astoundingly great. Never failed to get a wow comment from the tech. The only thing I can attribute that to is playing wind instruments, but it just measures the volume you can process. My guess is that playing a wind instrument has little to do with viral lung infection, positive or negative, but just a guess.

X2

I had a comprehensive work up years ago for an allergy. My pulmonary function test was off the charts and the techs attributed it to playing wind instruments.

I do not think my real job was listed as a factor but in Sales and Marketing voluminous hot air is helpful at times.

 

I don't know, but if you are going to go out and play in public, especially indoors I suggest gargling with vodka during the gig. You don't necessarily have to swallow it, just rinse your mouth with it. Alcohol kills this virus they say and a good high proof vodka is about as close to that as you can get.....although pure grain alcohol would be even better I guess. Okay, revision, get a bottle of Everclear at your neighborhood booze store and use that. Ain't no Covid gonna survive that barrier to your trachea. You can use it to sanitize your hands with it too.

 

...get a bottle of Everclear at your neighborhood booze store and use that. Ain't no Covid gonna survive that barrier to your trachea. You can use it to sanitize your hands with it too.

Lol! Love it!

 

I'm going with the vodka treatment.....don't swallow? ha

 

As of right now, my Tuesday gig is still on. I may swish but not spit. That's a waste of perfectly good disinfectant.

 

Sadly I do although I don't remember the spinning and the pain of the hangover just the waking up with a technicolor nightmare on my pillow. We always would go to The Pad which was a club/restaurant with music and poetry readings and great red pepper and meat ball subs. Then pass out from all the wine or booze and wake up with the sub and wine all over the pillow. Once I reached 20 I no longer did that too much, mainly because passing out in the snow in a Wisconsin winter was not conducive to continuing to live.

 

I remember Everclear — my Mom used to mix it with brandy to make flaming deserts that were popular in the 70s. You got the taste of the brandy, and the spectacular multicolored light show from the Everclear. Otherwise I know nothing at all about it

 

I hate to tell you but Everclear is an industrial solvent, not a drink.

My story:

I was in college and someone got the idea of making Everclear punch for a party. So they made it up, you know, the Kool-Aid, the Everclear, etc. Now I don't drink horrible concoctions when there's a couple cases of nice cold beer nearby, so I had no intention of sampling the "jungle juice". But, I got curious. You know how when you pour out a bottle of booze, there's always quite a bit left on the walls, and it flows back down to the bottom after a bit? Well, I guess there was maybe a half teaspoon of Everclear still in the bottom of that bottle. So out of curiosity, I tipped the bottle up and swallowed that half teaspoon of 95% ethanol. It made me instantly drunk, just due to the instantaneous absorption through the mucous membranes of the mouth. So I will never treat that stuff casually, and I strongly urge you all NOT to do things like gargling with ethanol.

How I heard about Everclear was that my high school biology teacher would regularly prepare biological specimens for inspection under the microscope; progressive infusion with increasing concentrations of ethanol is the standard technique. He told us that while he could theoretically order ethanol from an industrial supply house and not pay the liquor tax, his usage was so small that he just went to the liquor store and bought a pint of Everclear every couple years.

Now that I'm middle aged, I just can't imagine any school teacher these days letting loose with that kind of information. Never mind turning us loose with bottles of ether (for the fruit fly genetics experiments) or showing the VD slides in biology class.

 

I hate to tell you but Everclear is an industrial solvent, not a drink.

My story:

I was in college and someone got the idea of making Everclear punch for a party. So they made it up, you know, the Kool-Aid, the Everclear, etc. Now I don't drink horrible concoctions when there's a couple cases of nice cold beer nearby, so I had no intention of sampling the "jungle juice". But, I got curious. You know how when you pour out a bottle of booze, there's always quite a bit left on the walls, and it flows back down to the bottom after a bit? Well, I guess there was maybe a half teaspoon of Everclear still in the bottom of that bottle. So out of curiosity, I tipped the bottle up and swallowed that half teaspoon of 95% ethanol. It made me instantly drunk, just due to the instantaneous absorption through the mucous membranes of the mouth. So I will never treat that stuff casually, and I strongly urge you all NOT to do things like gargling with ethanol.

How I heard about Everclear was that my high school biology teacher would regularly prepare biological specimens for inspection under the microscope; progressive infusion with increasing concentrations of ethanol is the standard technique. He told us that while he could theoretically order ethanol from an industrial supply house and not pay the liquor tax, his usage was so small that he just went to the liquor store and bought a pint of Everclear every couple years.

Now that I'm middle aged, I just can't imagine any school teacher these days letting loose with that kind of information. Never mind turning us loose with bottles of ether (for the fruit fly genetics experiments) or showing the VD slides in biology class.

Education was different back then as was the world. Hell, cars didn't have seatbelts until I was already in my 20's but as a kid we all sat in the back and front seats and there weren't baby seats either. Then again 1940's cars were built like tanks compared to the pieces of plastic foil on the roads now. I had a 1950 Dodge 4 door sedan in 1970. It had belonged to my buddy's grandmother and actually only had 13,000 real miles. I drove it from Wisconsin to New York and Mass and it was my ride. One day on our narrow country road in Putnam Valley N.Y. I had to stop for a schoolbus that was turning around to go back the way it had come. So I backed up suddenly. What I failed to see was that someone in a WV bug had come around the blind curve and suddenly appeared right behind me. The distance was maybe 10 feet and I couldn't have attained more than 5 mph accelerating in reverse with that heavy car. I totalled the entire front end of the beetle and there wasn't even a scratch on my car. It had just crumpled the VW up like a piece of aluminum foil.

The lesson is that if you want to be safe on the road these days, get a 1940s car, retrofit seatbelts and you won't need airbags because anything you hit, other than a concrete or steel wall will be destroyed and your car won't have even a scratch.

 

I know wind playing is generally very good for lungs. My ex played bagpipe and bassoon most of his life. He was told much later in life that he has asthma but that his instrumental habits kept it asymptomatic. He was surprised to learn this. He never had any breathing problems. But lung capacity is different from lung...strength of resistance.

 

AS a child I had asthma. During my elementary school years (early 1960's) the Dr's advice to my mother was that I play a wind instrument and that I take swimming lessons. Both were to strengthen my lungs.So I have played my horn for about 55 years and swam competitively during my jr and sr high school years. I certainly think it helped.

 

I agree, i had constant lung issues when i was young. Dr suggested try playing an instrument you blow into, like a saxophone. I swim laps 3x/week & play sax regularly. I have not had lung issues at all in my adult years, and I do think the swimming and sax helps build/maintain healthy lungs.

 

Today's cars crush like aluminum for a very good reason. If you hit a tree, or another car at speed, the car stops in milliseconds and you, still traveling in the vehicle, stop with a hell of a lot of G-forces. If the modern car crushes it allows the car to scrub off the impact and you now have a survivable crash. Then engine dives underneath you, the steering wheel doesn't crush your ribs, bag or not. There are test crash videos showing that old, vs new cars head-on, the old car drive is dead. All based on Physics.

 

Three years ago I had a severe pneumonia. After recovery I asked my pulmonologist about restarting clarinet and soprano sax. He said said I should restart as soon as I feel comfortable. His argument was that wind instrument playing ventilates all parts of the lung thoroughly, therefore accelerating recovery.

 

I had the same experience four year ago. I got a heavy bronchitis and stayed in hospital 10 days. My right lung got totally black. When I was about to leave hospital my doctor prescribed me to blow at home the spirometer and I told him that I spend several hours a day blowing my saxes. Long story short, in a few weeks by just sax playing the x-ray showed that both lungs had gone back to normal. If that helps...

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About 10-years ago I was diagnosed with Asthma. At the time, I was speaking regularly to Doc Tenney (who was called "Doc" because he was a medical doctor) and the impact on lung function is something we discussed pretty extensively. He was strongly convinced that playing the sax (or really any wind instrument) on a consistent basis improved one's lung function. On a personal level, I have found this to be true.

Please note that this is not to say that playing the sax provides some sort of immunity to a viral or bacterial infection, it doesn't. But I have found that it helps me to better "weather the storm" than I would be able to otherwise. Hope that helps.

Keep calm and wash your hands

 

About 10-years ago I was diagnosed with Asthma. At the time, I was speaking regularly to Doc Tenney (who was called "Doc" because he was a medical doctor) and the impact on lung function is something we discussed pretty extensively. He was strongly convinced that playing the sax (or really any wind instrument) on a consistent basis improved one's lung function. On a personal level, I have found this to be true.

Please note that this is not to say that playing the sax provides some sort of immunity to a viral or bacterial infection, it doesn't. But I have found that it helps me to better "weather the storm" than I would be able to otherwise. Hope that helps.

Keep calm and wash your hands

Of course, playing baritone is much more beneficial than playing the little toy versions.

 

This question is for the doctors out there. With COVID-19 going around, does playing a wind instrument help avoid the complications, or does it open up the lungs enabling viruses and other microbes to have easier access to your lungs? I did a google search and a search here and didn't come up with anything except mentions of bagpipe/saxophone lung. Thanks for any thoughts on the matter?

Actually, you may have lungs that are worse off, due to playing a brass instrument:

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20160823/wind-instruments-bagpipe-lung#1

 

Your lungs may be worse off if you practice abhorently bad hygeine. That's the message there.

 

Nothing to do with lungs, but just in case anyone has doubts:

 

I have seen these before and they are great!
A lot of work went into the design of energy absorbing structures.
And cars a lot safer because of it.

Thanks for posting.

"They don't make 'em like they did in the old days!"
"Yup. And thank goodness for the improvements."

 

I don't know about wind playing, but I just came across some interesting research indicating that smoking tobacco MAY make you MORE susceptible to infection and MAY make it more likely that your case becomes serious if you do become infected. This is very preliminary, and it will take some time to establish a firm connection, if indeed this turns out to be true. But let me go ahead and make the suggestion: if you smoke tobacco, this might be a really good time to quit, or at least take a break.

 

I play my horns for a good breathing exercise. Gets rid of congestion. Horns and mouthpieces should be swabbed and kept clean as possible.

 

Im not a doctor but Im convinced that all my wind work on flute/sax is why my cardio is so easy in the gym. Its much harder for me to be "out of breath" than if I didn't do al the wind work with flute /sax K

 

The health benefits are not from what you play, but how you breathe. If you breathe deeply, using your full lung volume, you expose more alveoli to fresh air. If you don’t breathe fully, stale air (with elevated carbon dioxide concentrations) occupies the extreme regions of the lungs.

 

The health benefits are not from what you play, but how you breathe. If you breathe deeply, using your full lung volume, you expose more alveoli to fresh air. If you don't breathe fully, stale air (with elevated carbon dioxide concentrations) occupies the extreme regions of the lungs.

And I always thought it was long tones ...

 

This thread caught my attention. I have unfortunately had asthma most of my life. I know, it is curious that I would play any kind of wind instrument. I find that I control my asthma much better when regularly playing. I do think that an aspect of the long term disease is shallower breathing; playing sax helps with conscious deep breathing. As you all know, good tone is impossible without solid gut support and controlled wind. Consequently, saxophone is not only enjoyable, but therapeutic. (Others claim to enjoy the sound, so that is a plus as well)