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!