First it was OTC and prescription inhalers and tablets. Chemicals, if not delivery systems, familiar to the Victorians, even the ancient Egyptians. Then it was inhaled steroids, All manner of meds, most of which I’ve used, most of which helped if I kept on it.
A couple of years ago I got slack and treated my asthma with just my albuterol inhaler. Things went well until I caught a cold or flu that proved too much for my wimpy inhaler. I landed in the hospital without any asthma meds and no explanation why, and have stumbled from one bronchial sucking to the next.
I was a functional adult before all this but I can’t get any explanation. Any guesses?
Are you asking us why you stopped taking your asthma maintenance meds? That’s hard to answer. I do know that after nearly a decade on Flovent, I do get occasionally lazy if (say) I change doctors and my supply expires.
Still, after a month or so off the Flovent I really start to feel it, so I haven’t gone much longer than that. Hope you can get back on the maintenance inhaler train soon.
{around 1870} For Theodore Roosevelt as a child, it was strong coffee and smoking cigars. These mostly didn’t help. His father set him on a course of Physical Fitness that did seem to help, a lot.
They found a papyrus scroll in Egypt recommending heating herbs over bricks and inhaling the fumes for noisy breathing.
No. Epiphrene is the earliest-known somewhat effective treatment for asthma and that’s post-Victorian. And it wasn’t great. The one we’ve (asthmatics diagnosed in childhood) all been taking for most of our lives is salbutamol (albuterol), but that didn’t exist till the 1960s. Caffeine does help a little as a bronchodilator (which is why asthmatics feel better after a morning coffee) but not the extent those medications do.
Before those meds were available people just died. But it was far less common before the industrial age anyway.
Dropzone, you need to keep taking the inhaled steroids. You stopped taking them, and you asthma got worse. If you were in hospital with an asthma attack you’d usually be given a short course of oral steroids and a reminder to take your steroid inhaler. I don’t have any idea what else you’re asking about, sorry.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to reduce the amount of medication you’re taking, and with asthma it can be a good idea because sometimes it does improve. But you should talk to your doctor about it, and do it carefully, never to the point that you end up in hospital.
A couple of years ago my doctor put me on a Breo (maintenance) inhaler. I have had maybe had two puffs of albuterol since then. Before, I would average maybe 2 a day.
Here’s a reference to something that wasn’t on the list: stramonium cigarettes, to be smoked 4 times a day as an asthma remedy. It DID open the bronchioles, but at what other costs?
My asthma has gone up and down in severity my whole life. In childhood I had a few debilitating attacks (this was in the 50’s and early 60’s, and my inhaler had to be kept in the refrigerator, and it tended to form a kind of dark gunk in the corners of the inhaler piece; I don’t know what the medicine was, but it did work). When I hit puberty and through my 30’s I didn’t have any problem at all (except once when I was in Hong Kong and the air was very close and I felt uncomfortable, so I went to a steam bath and inhaled some very hot steam for a few minutes, and I was all better). Some time in my 40’s it started to become noticeable as a fairly chronic problem, but I was able to control it for years with a pill containing Montelukast once a day, with an albuterol inhaler for emergencies. Finally in my 60’s that seemed to lose effectiveness and I went on a twice-a-day inhaler with two medicines in it, Wixela 250/50, and still the albuterol for emergencies. I haven’t had to use the albuterol since I went on the Wixela. I was never given inhaled steroids, I don’t know why. I guess my asthma wasn’t serious enough.
tl;dr version: Your asthma can get more or less serious over time, and the effectiveness of any given medication can change over time. You really need to work with your doctor and keep up your meds, this is nothing to fool around with. Also, aerobic exercise can and does help me not to run out of breath so fast, I’m not sure how much that has to do with asthma though.
According to several on-line sites I just looked up, you have too been given inhaled steroids. Wixela is a combination of two drugs, one of which is fluticasone, which is a corticosteroid. Corticosteroids serve to reduce inflammation. The other drug, I presume, is a long-acting bronchodilator.
My dad, who was born in 1911, had asthma as a boy and remembered having to use a little pipe when he had an attack… He said some substance was placed in the bowl and lit. He had to draw in the smoke. Years after he passed, I got to thinking about that and wondering if it was burning sulphur, which I’d read was used to treat diphtheria back in the day. (No idea if that’s true.) Nope, but stramonium sounded likely. Dad didn’t recall tobacco being in the pipe, so I’m guessing it was just the stramonium. Not sure, though.
He said he stopped everything BUT the albuterol inhaler. If I understand correctly, he’s wondering why he hasn’t been given any asthma meds since landing in the hospital. I’m not sure, though, because of the line “have stumbled from one bronchial sucking to the next.” Not sure if the “bronchial sucking” is an asthma attack or an inhaler.
Come back when you can and set us straight, dropzone! Hope you’re feeling better.
Albuterol isn’t a preventative steroid and isn’t how you control your asthma - it’s to help when you’re having an attack, but you need to take a steroid to control it.
I took @dropzone to be saying that since landing in the hospital the meds have not been made available. Generally, when one’s in a hospital or a nursing home, one can only get the medications they’ll approve; and they’ll usually only approve what the doctors in charge will authorize.
It’s not clear to me whether dropzone has been asking assorted physicians at assorted places to prescribe asthma meds and has been refused without clear explanation; or whether they have been prescribed but are still not available, also without explanation; or hasn’t been able to get ahold of whoever’s authorized to prescribe them. But it doesn’t read to me as if the meds are offered but dropzone refuses to take them.
Current “state of the art” treatment for asthma involves a maintenance inhaler (involving a steroid, sometimes combined with a long-acting bronchodilator) daily, with albuterol or similar as a “rescue” inhaler. This is for all but the very mildest, most intermittent cases.
If you were using the albuterol on a daily basis, your breathing passages were basically ticking time bombs - one “insult” would push you over the edge into something requiring much more serious treatment. That “insult” could be nearly anything - exposure to an allergen, or to something you’re sensitive to, or a bad cold (about the only time I personally have a flare is when I get an upper respiratory infection that hits me harder than usual).
I don’t know the details of why you’ve wound up in the hospital (update: I saw you mentioned cold / flu), or how they are treating your breathing issues - but my suspicion is that your airways were already inflamed, and something pushed you over the edge into full-on bronchitis / pneumonia / something else nasty.
In general, if someone DOES have mild-enough asthma that the occasional rescue inhaler is enough to manage it (and I think the guidelines there are “more than once or twice a week” or something like that), it’s a really, REALLY good idea to have a plan in place for what to do if you start getting worse - e.g. starting back on the steroid inhaler as soon as things start to look bad, call the doctor if you have a decrease in peak flow readings, or whatever. In fact, ANYONE with asthma should have a plan like that. I’ve never had a formal plan written down, but my docs know that if I start hitting the inhaler too much, I’ll a) pull out the nebulizer, b) increase the inhaled steroids a little bit, and c) get my ass (and my lungs) to somebody with a medical degree ASAP.
Anyway: addressing “without meds”: yeah, it’s not clear whether you are simply not being prescribed the meds, or they are not administering them, or what’s going on - but you absolutely have the right to ask. Maybe someone saw that you weren’t on a steroid before and so it literally never occurred to them to prescribe something. That surprises me though - if you were on albuterol, adding some kind of steroid is sort of the obvious thing to do, whether it’s an inhaled or an oral one.