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.....The phrase “fighting to breathe” is often used to describe asthma. The frightening experience of an asthma attack is hard to describe. Someone described it to me best as trying to breathe through a drinking straw, but you can’t take the straw out of your mouth. This “fighting to breathe” is a significant health crisis and leads to many emergency room visits. With proper education and treatment, many people with asthma can lead rewarding lives. Many Olympic athletes have asthma, including Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Donovan Bailey.
The condition known as asthma is often described as a “chronic inflammatory disease of the airways”. This sounds impressive, but what does it really mean? For reasons that are not clear, the lungs become hypersensitive to common allergens in the environment. Usually when we breathe, air travels down to our lungs where oxygen is exchanged for carbon dioxide. Along with this good oxygen we get some impurities: dust, smoke, pollution, cold air, etc. For people who do not have asthma, this does not
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cause a lot of grief. For people with asthma, the body tends to over-react to these allergens. The way your body responds to foreign substances is always the same, inflammation. The lungs constrict and secrete mucus to try and prevent the spread of the allergens. This
 happens to most of us when we get a cold or a flu. The real trouble is that for people who have asthma, this inflammation response is greater and happens more often. For example, sometimes people with severe asthma can simply walk into the same house as a cat and experience rapid lung inflammation.
People of all ages can develop asthma, even children. Recognizing asthma in children can be difficult, primarily because they are not always able to communicate how they feel.
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Sometimes children may cough throughout the night, but are symptom free during the day. Other times, they may cough all the time or seem lethargic. For many children persistent coughing is the only symptom present for asthma. Some of the more severe symptoms of asthma. that should be brought to the attention of a Doctor right away include:
• Pale or bluish looking skin
• wheezing
• little children refusing to lie down
• rapid breathing
• irritability
Allergies are believed to play a role in asthma. It is thought that an over-reaction to common allergens can lead to a constriction of the airways and/or increased inflammation in the lungs. Many non-drug treatments for asthma focus on avoidance of these ‘trigger’ allergens. The most common triggers include; pet dander, dust mites, mold, pollen, air pollution and cigarette smoke. Some natural medicine practitioners also extend this list of allergens to include toxic substances and certain types of foods. They include milk and milk |
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