Paul Dawkins is a respiratory physician providing a responsive, efficient and high quality respiratory service at the New Zealand Respiratory and Sleep Institute (NZRSI) in Greenlane and Pukekohe Family Health Care. He welcomes referrals in any area of respiratory medicine including sleep disordered breathing. He has access to full lung function, sleep investigation laboratories and bronchoscopy facilities.
Paul has particular interest in the areas of:
- lung cancer
- bronchiectasis
- lung infections
- airways disease
- sleep disordered breathing.
Paul also works as a consultant respiratory physician at Middlemore Hospital and is an honorary senior lecturer in medicine at the University of Auckland.
What is Respiratory Medicine?
Respiratory medicine is the branch of medicine that treats people with diseases affecting the lungs and breathing.
The role of our lungs is to deliver oxygen into our bloodstream and remove carbon dioxide. When you breathe in, air passes through the throat into the windpipe (trachea). The base of the windpipe divides into the right and left tubes (bronchi) which divide again and again each time getting smaller and smaller until the smallest airways called the alveoli are reached. The alveoli act like balloons i.e. when you breathe in they inflate and when you breathe out they relax.
Oxygen moves across the walls of the alveoli and enters the bloodstream and is carried to the rest of the body after passing through the heart. Carbon dioxide is passed from the blood into the alveoli and is breathed out of the lungs.
Common symptoms or signs of lung disease include: shortness of breath, wheezing, long-term cough, coughing up blood, and having chest pains.
