??? for those with asthma

[TahoeDirtGirl]

Oak- how funny, the asthma topic came up when I was out to dinner with some people from work. The wife of one of the managers is a respitory therapist and was telling me how everyone in the hospital gets albuterol (she was making a joke about a doctor that just knew one inhaler- albuterol) and I told her about my asthma. She said "well you know, it's not that you can't breathe in, it's that you can't get the air OUT that is the problem..." I guess I never thought of it that way...I guess I never thought of it at all because when it happens all I can think about is sucking that nasty gas in to get everything to relax.

I think that is one thing that helps me too is I don't panic. I think tensing up you hold your breath in and then that can't be too good....

As for allergies, I just couldn't do the immunotherapy thing. When the doc said I had to wait in case I went into anaphalaxis (I can't spell) I said "no thanks". I have a diverse group of friends, one of which is very into natural medicine and she told me to start eating honey made from sage (I was allergic to sage). After two weeks, it worked. I thought it was just I got used to sage, but after many years of doing this, if I miss that first week in April when it gets bad, as soon as I start the honey, two weeks, it's gone. I did it out here, finally found "local honey" and yep, allergies gone. I had to find cranberry and wildflower honey as well, there are alot of cranberry bogs here. I didn't think they would be flowering then but hey, it tasted pretty good. I usually tune up every Sunday by eating honey or when I feel a little congested. It's very hard to find local honey so stock up when you find it.

[Crankin]

I've had allergy shots 3 times in my life and 3 times I quit. In high school, I would get a mild asthma attack and generally feel awful afterwards. I tried again in my thirties when all of a sudden I developed food intolerances and asthma. Same thing. Eventually, when I calmed down a bit and moved from AZ (can you say dust and mold spores?) to MA I became much healthier.
The shots did help my son when he was small. He had awful allergies in AZ. The poor kid would start sneezing and wheezing from the Bermuda grass on the pre school playground and at home. And, we had his tonsils taken out, which although it's not a common thing to do today, totally cured him of the allergies, ear infections, bronchitis. He's really a healthy adult.
But, I agree, if you treat the allergies, the asthma often goes away.