Asthma Inhalers Central

It’s been quite a while (an understatement) since our last entry — you can attribute that to tons of work. During that period, I feel that my asthma attacks have lessened, thus reducing my need for my asthma inhaler.

Now, that might seem illogical — I just said that I’ve got tons of work, yet my asthma condition has improved. Why so? Isn’t stress supposed to increase the risk of an asthma attack? I’m not so sure myself, but here are a couple of reasons I can think of:

• I am a freelancer, and I work from home. This means I go out less often, and exert physical effort less than I did back in my college days.




• When I commute, I now usually ride a taxi. Back in college, I used to ride open-air jeepneys and often got smothered by the smog and dust of Metro Manila — certainly a no-no for an asthmatic.




• An airconditioner has been recently installed in my room/home office. This has greatly improved the air quality in my otherwise dusty room (we live in a high-density residential neighborhood passed by a lot of cars as a detour route). Like most modern aircon units, ours has a couple of filters that minimize the dust and particles in the air.

In my opinion, the last one provided the greatest help among the three. You can say my living conditions improved with the aircon installation, though I still have to watch the temperature, as the cold can also trigger my asthma and necessitate the use of my inhaler.

Here’s what the Mayo Clinic has to say about asthma and airconditioners (taken from this article):

Use your air conditioner. Air conditioning helps reduce the amount of airborne pollen from trees, grasses and weeds that finds its way indoors. Air conditioning also lowers indoor humidity and can reduce your exposure to dust mites. If you don’t have air conditioning, try to keep your windows closed during pollen season.