Breaking the inhaler habit: one woman breathes easier after finding ways to control her asthma naturally

Better Nutrition, April, 2006 by Lola Augustine Brown

I'd always had, but it was mostly dormant and never really caused any problems; in fact, sometimes it was even an advantage. When I was young, my inhalers won me sympathy from demonic phys ed teachers. But at age 26, asthma took over my life for real--clenching my lungs so tightly that I could barely walk 100 feet.

I managed to keep working but frequent bouts of pneumonia meant repeated absences. What was once just an inhaler became a collection of so many different drugs I couldn't keep up with their names; my purse rattled with medications. Worst of all, I became completely reliant on oral steroids, which were destroying me. On them, I was always hungry. My constant nibbling made me gain 20 pounds and develop cheeks a chipmunk would envy. When I went for a bone-density scan, I learned that my bones were not as dense as they should be--according to my doctors, prolonged oral steroid use had weakened them. Just another side effect to add to the growing list, including my erratic moods--I cried over the slightest thing and my temper flared instantly.

I became a regular in the emergency room, like frequenting your favorite restaurant, except my usual was getting hooked up to the hospital's nebulizer (a device that delivers medication by spraying a fine mist into a breathing mask) until my breathing was steady enough to go home. However, on a visit last April, I wasn't allowed to go home; the hospital admitted me instead.

For starters, I had double pneumonia. I was put on an antibiotic drip and given asthma medication through a nebulizer every three hours. I coughed up "lung casts," which looked like huge gray worms. My stressed airways filled with mucus repeatedly, which made it harder and harder to breathe, I was tested for various conditions. The teams of doctors that surrounded me muttered scary words like tuberculosis and cystic fibrosis. I was frightened, no matter how much the nurses tried to reassure me.

Eventually, the docs concluded that, aside from the pneumonia, I had nothing except asthma--terrible out-of-control asthma. Five days later they let me go home but it was another three weeks before I could return to work. In the end, I was glad I had been hospitalized because I realized how serious nay condition could be. In addition, I met an amazing specialist--one with a long wait list--whom I would never have been able to see had I not been so ill. He made me realize I could help nay condition by identifying and controlling its triggers rather than constantly treating the symptoms. It was this education that helped me get a grip on the disease.

Allergies and infections are a blight for many asthmatics; for me, severe intolerances to preservatives and MSG were also triggers. To confirm all this, I suffered through three months of eating bland foods on the elimination diet (suspect foods are eliminated and integrated back into a diet one by one to determine the culprit), but it was so worthwhile. Avoiding preservatives was a major drag at first, as just about every prepackaged food--soda, breads, fast-food meals, cookies, chips--contains something that would set my wheezing off.

Cutting preservatives from my diet was a revelatory experience. Not only did my asthma improve, but other health problems that had plagued me since childhood, such as canker sores (which I blamed on genetics), menstrual migraines and bad breakouts, disappeared.

Learning to control what triggered my asthma forced me to change eating habits that I'd had since childhood; good behavior was rewarded with a bag of chips and dinner came from either a can or a box in the freezer As an adult, I made an effort to be healthy but the majority of what I ate was still processed, with an added serving of fresh vegetables or the occasional side salad.

I began to change my entire way of eating. I read every label and discovered that life was a lot easier if I shopped at health food stores and prepared meals from scratch--starting with organic ingredients. Now, I even bake my own bread. At first it seemed I was never out of the kitchen, but then I developed a passion for cooking. Meanwhile, my newly cleansed body became so sensitive that I could tell whether food contained preservatives or MSG from the first bite. My favorite local Thai restaurant denied that they used the stuff, but after my wheezing started, they checked the labels on their stock and found out that I was right.

The next challenge was to ditch or at least minimize some of the horrid medications I was on. So I took my quest for health further and researched what else might help. I took suggestions from a naturopath, my asthma specialist and my mom. I read that new research proved that large doses of omega-3s were helpful so I stocked up. My mom's suggestion of pink grapefruit juice wasn't the miracle cure she hoped it would be, but I really felt that anything was worth trying--who knew what would work?

Although I knew that I wasn't dairy intolerant from doing the elimination diet, I decided to try giving up dairy products anyway. I changed to soymilk and cut out cheese, and was happy to see a drop in the copious amounts of mucus I produced. I tried cutting out wheat as well but found it too hard, and I'm not sure it's really a problem for me anyway.