My Life as an Asthma Mom

Every time I hear someone say (or act like) they know everything there is to know about asthma, I just want to do a face palm. This isn't a competition to see who knows more about asthma! NO ONE knows everything there is to know about asthma. There are a myriad of people who work with asthma - researchers, doctors, asthma specialists, health educators, parents of kids with asthma, people with asthma.  We all come from different backgrounds and have different experiences. I LOVE the work researchers do! They find new medications, develop new asthma tracking apps, experiment with environmental interventions. etc. Do they know everything about asthma? No - because many of them don't actually LIVE with the disease! But some researchers ask patients to help guide their research based on their experiences (with asthma, diabetes, cancer, etc.) PCORI is one example of an organization that funds research guided by the patients!   I love my doctors too - ...

Allergy & Asthma Network recently shared a story on their Facebook page from The Daily Mail.  (I found it rather funny because a newspaper from England was reporting about asthma in America!) How expensive is asthma? Well, it ranks right up there with cancer, which costs $87 billion in healthcare. Asthma costs $80 billion. Wow! How much does that mean for the average person with asthma? The Daily Mail article says: $3,266 for the average person That breaks down to: $640 for doctor appointments $1,830 for prescriptions $105 for ER visits $176 for outpatient hospital visits $529 for hospital care Where does The Daily Mail get that data?  "The research is based on a six-year survey on more than 200,000 people from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, the most comprehensive source of data on health care use in the US." You may be thinking, "We don't spend that much!"   Or you may think, "We spend WAY ...

I was at a family party over the holidays and was talking with a family member who is a respiratory therapist.  Since I work in Public Health, I see things very differently from those who work in the medical field. I wanted to know what the respiratory therapist saw in the hospital every day. Here are his biggest frustrations/thoughts: Don’t buy cigarettes, buy Advair or Dulera instead (they are controller inhalers ). If you stay on your controller, you may not need to go to the ER. (Controller inhalers work to control the swelling in the lungs that happen when you have asthma. If you can keep the swelling down in your lungs, you will breathe much easier.)  Don’t run out of your inhaler! Gotta do those refills! (I am guilty of running out of my controller inhaler - twice! I love that my inhaler has a counter on the back....but you actually have to LOOK at the counter. Oops!)   Don’t smoke (Easier said than done, right? I have 2 family membe...