no, you must take less drugzzz

[baratron]

WHY are my doctors permanently obsessed with trying to reduce my asthma meds? My asthma is good BECAUSE I'm on the dose I'm on. It's not a shockingly high dose for a person of my age and size - in fact, it's quite a low dose for an adult.

I'm annoyed because a) I went swimming on Friday for the first time in ages, and for possibly the first time since I was at school I could swim into the deep end of a chlorinated pool and not run out of air and panic, which impressed me greatly; and b) the dose I'm on is still not quite enough for me to cycle up Kingston Hill without almost dying of a snot attack. I'm especially annoyed because my doctor decided to change the drug without consulting me, so I now have an inhaler containing a drug which stopped working for me when I was 19. My asthma is very much worse than it was when I was 19, so there's no way it's going to work. Gah!

Comments

[ludy]

there's no way they should cahnge your meds without consulting you.
I'm all for finding the minimum effective dose and once had the opposite probelem of a gp not understanding why i wanted to see if i could manage on a lower dose of my inhalers (to reduce side effects and so i wouln't have to go straight to steroid tablets if i got just a litle worse) but just semi-randomly changeing meds to something that hasn't helped before seems bizzare.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I've decided that I'm going to attack this by asking my doctor how much exercise he would prefer me to do. On the old meds, I couldn't spontaneously go out on a cycle ride, or cycle uphill, or swim - and even walking up the hill in Brighton was challenging. I could swim in ozonated pools but not in chlorinated - as I'd have to take my inhaler before swimming and after swimming and possibly randomly in the middle, and I couldn't go into the deep end in any kind of pool because I'd run out of air and panic. Now I can spontaneously do exercise when I want to without having to consider 21 billion factors about how bad my allergies are today, and it seems that I'm able to swim again. I regard that as the minimum effective dose. And, honestly, 200mg of Flixotide twice a day is not a high dose!

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Grrr!

You need meds that *work*.

Doctor should try suffocating a bit. For hours.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is that my asthma attacks only very rarely manifest as the wheezing that most people get. Instead, I have massive overproduction of snot - to the extent that after, say, 5 minutes in smoky air, I'm coughing up so much phlegm that I feel violently nauseated and want to puke. Because of this unusual response, I find it difficult to get doctors to take my asthma seriously. It's true that I rarely get the airways closing up problem, but dying of snot is disgusting and the right dose of inhalers stop it, so clearly they are the right way to go about treating it.

I just want to know why the hell the "asthma" nurse practitioner is so convinced that 200mg of Flixotide twice a day is an enormous dose of a very powerful steroid. I have friends on 400mg and 800mg twice a day!

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Nurses can be prone to fantasy, drama and power trips around probls like asthma, I've found.

I don't take them particularly seriously.

You can of curse get a lung function test to verify your asthma.

I understand astham is taken even less seriously there than here.

We saw a slight change here when the death rate exceeded the road toll at one stage, but...

And...asthma comes in wet and dry forms (I have dry, and am in the ten percent for which most meds Do Not Work).

[barakta]

Go back and ask for the old meds back at the old dose. Your ability to function has deteriorated and "if it wasn't broke, don't fix it".

I won't stand for meds being changed without my agreement. By all means if a doc says "I think X is a better alternative" or "There's drug Y, would you consider it" I'll think about it, try it and if it doesn't work go back and get my original meds damnit.

*sporks them for you!*

[baratron.livejournal.com]

My ability to function hasn't deteriorated yet, because I still have 20 doses of the old stuff left. But yeah, it's the principle of the thing. I don't know if Flixotide is ridiculously expensive, or if it's just the stupid "asthma specialist" nurse claiming that it's hideously dangerous. She was really unhappy with me being on 200mg twice a day. I don't get it. At all.

See also comment to artremis above. Bah.