I need advice/help with my asthma.?

I've had adult-onset asthma ever since I was 23, at least that's when it was first diagnosed, and it's been up/down, since then, but seems to almost get worse to a degree.





I'm on lots of meds, herbals, take great care of myself, yet nothing seems to really be wworking.





It's not controlled.





I'm on singulair/zyrtec/atrovent/symbicort, and i take xopenex/prednisone for emergencies, and yet





I STILL sometimes dont' get relief.





Needless to say my life is nonexistant, as the asthma makes it hard to do just about anything , but I do get days/weeks when it's not there, and I feel alot better and feel like I can take on the world.





But when it strikes, it strikes hard, and takes a few days to subside. EVEN WHEN i take the meds.





How can I beat this? I'm literally on everything, eat healthy, everything you can do, i'm doing it,





and I still have it.





I know it's not curable but, my god, must it interfere with my life this much?I need advice/help with my asthma.?
Have you looked into what's causing your asthma? It could be an allergy. Either food/animal/fragrance etc. I had some bad asthma attacks for a while that I had to take a lot of my preventer inhaler to control. I realised after some time that it only happened when I was around strongly fragranced things. Now I avoid those things and my asthma is so much more managable. I would look into allergy testing. You should also do your best to keep your house as dust free as possible. Dust aggravates most asthmatics.





Here's some tips for controlling dust, some are quite extreme but some may be useful for you:





TOP TIPS:





* Use dust-proof bedding covers: it is essential to cover the mattress, pillows and duvet (comforter) and to launder regularly all uncovered items, preferably at 60 degrees C. Without this, it seems, you will not succeed. The ideal is to get a new bed or at least matress, pillow and duvet (comforter) and cover these with the special covers before they are ever used. Then they will not merely stop dust moving from matress to lungs, but will prevent harmful dust buildup in the first place.





* Vacuum or wipe the dust-proof bedding covers regularly, i.e. follow the manufacturer's instructions. Wash according to manufacturer's instructions.





* Launder other bedclothes (e.g. sheets, pillowcases, bedspread) at 56 degrees centigrade or higher. Lower temperatures do not kill mites. Many bedclothes will not stand up to this, so choose bedclothes which will. For example, cotton duvets (comforters) washable at 60 degrees C are available: in the UK a single duvet cost about 106 pounds sterling in May 1998 (155 double duvet) from 'The Healthy House', Cold Harbour, Rushcombe, Stroud, GL6 6DA, UK, TEL. 01453 752216, FAX 01453 753533. If you cannot afford this, washing any duvet at a lower temperature will not kill mites but still helps by removing dust.





If washing at 60 degrees centigrade would damage a washable item, another suggestion is to freeze the item for 24 hours to kill the mites and then to wash at a lower temperature. This sounds as if it should work. If you have the space and money you could get a small freezer for the purpose. This idea comes from staff of the National Asthma Campaign in the UK.





If you do not remove the carpet from the bedroom, take care to avoid contact between bedding and carpet.





* Do not give furry toys to children to take to bed. An excellent substitute is a little cotton blanket which can be washed regulary at 60 degrees centigrade or higher. Persevere to achieve this.





Many people recommend putting furry toys into the freezer for 24 hours to kill the mites. There is no evidence that this works, and I would not expect it to. Freezing leaves the harmful dust unchanged, and new mites will walk into the furry toy as soon as it touches the bedclothes again. It might perhaps help if you also wash the furry toy in the washing machine to remove the dust which the mites have made inside it. But we have no idea how effective such washing would be and how often you would have to do it. At the very best all this will be less effective than not having the furry toy in the bed.





* Mite dust takes about 2 hours to settle from the air onto surfaces in an undisturbed room. Airing a room by opening windows is probably faster. But draughts may raise dust from the floor into the air.





* Get rid of carpets.





Every time someone walks over a carpet, mite dust is spread into the air, and will take 2 hours to settle. Babies and young children crawling on the carpet are surely especially at risk.





For practical purposes wall-to-wall carpets cannot be cleaned adequately, though steaming carpets thoroughly may help.





Replace carpets with sanded and varnished floorboards, or a vinyl, linoleum, tiled or purpose-made wooden floor. Use a minimum of scatter rugs and wash these several times a year. In cold climates, hanging the rugs outdoors in freezing weather helps.





If you live in a flat, you may be forced to have carpets to reduce noise affecting your neighbours. Your lease or purchase contract may even specify the thickness. The best you can then do is to have an excellent vacuum cleaner, and you could apply mite-killing chemicals from time to time (but tests don't show they work in practice) or use other special mite-killing processes, do everything you can to reduce humidity in the flat, and cover the most walked-on parts of the carpeting with rugs which can be washed or cleaned outside the flat. Give a higher financial priority to replacing the carpet more frequently, and indeed consider getting a lower quality of carpet and replacing more frequently rather than going for high quality carpet at great expense. See if you can get away with or negotiate a deal to remove carpets from bedrooms in the flat, using washable rugs on the main areas you walk on and always walking in socks, or really soft slippers such as mocassins, or even on bare feet when walking on the smooth floor rather than wearing any kind of shoes, however soft. Your good neighbourliness may persuade your neighbours to be merciful to your lungs. Despite our misgivings about air filters, they may be worth a try in this difficult situation.





(The above is the majority view among experts, but there is another view. Dust on smooth floors blows up into the air more easily than dust from carpets. It is dust in the air which does the harm; dust in the carpet is harmless as long as it stays there. A minority of specialists argues that carpets are therefore better than smooth floors. We disagree, but there is no published research to prove which approach works best for patients.)





* Damp-dust instead of vacuuming, but dampen the cloth as little as is necessary to stop the dust from flying about; very little dampness is needed.





* Replace soft cloth-upholstered furniture with dust-proof furniture. In practice this means wood, plastic or leather furniture. Expensive. But you may be fighting a lost cause without such action.





* Consider moving house if your house is old, damp, or unavoidably dusty because for example you share it with people who don't share your concern. If moving, consider a modern house with excellent damp-proofing, not near a stream or other water source. If your asthma is terrible, consider moving to another country if this is practicable. There are parts of the world where your asthma may be much milder.





* Ventilate your house. Experts agree that inadequate air turnover in a house creates high humidity which favours mites.





But there's a catch. You have central heating, and you probably don't want to have a cold house. So you are not going to want to open windows more than you have to. The obvious answer is to dress more warmly and to allow your house to be colder, but you and your family may not want to do that. There is however an advantage to this; at lower temperatures the mites are less active and breed less fast. Keeping your house cooler will reduce mites, especially if ventilation keeps the humidity down.





But what if you want to be warm and to ventilate your house at the same time without paying the earth in heating bills?





Heat exchangers are claimed to be a way of doing this.





* Dehumidifiers. In principle, we approve of them. In practice we have been disappointed by the small change in measurable humidity in house air on installing dehumidifiers. But a good one does remove impressive amounts of water from the air; a gallon a day is possible. This must surely be a good thing. Perhaps the important thing is the extent to which they affect the dampness of surfaces and furnishings. Our guess is that heat exchangers may prove to be a more efficient way of keeping the mites down by humidity control, and that getting rid of mite habitats such as carpets and uncovered bedding will make humidity control much more effective.





For dehumidifiers to work well for house dust mite control in the UK climate, more powerful models than those commonly on sale for domestic use will be necessary. In the USA, Therma-Stor Products (in the USA, Tel. 1-800-533-7533) promotes this idea and has the equipment to match. They would probably supply in the UK as well, as they do have a related company here.





* It is likely that clothes, including sweaters and dressing gowns, are significant sources of mite dust. Wash or clean clothes more frequently than you otherwise would.





* University students with mite-allergic asthma should have special consideration regarding accommodation. For example, they should be permitted to live in main college accommodation rather than be forced to share low standard shared student housing. They could have new mattresses every year, these being covered with dust-proof mite control covers. They could have plastic-covered furniture or new. Mattresses and furniture could then be moved on to the rooms of non-asthmatic students and used for their normal life-span. Smoking should be banned from such accommodation. Doing this without 'ghettoising' the asthmatic students will require some skill.I need advice/help with my asthma.?
Well first you might ask your Primary Care Provider to switch you to Advair. Speaking from personal experience, I have found more relief from it than Symbicort. Alternatively, you may ask to have the dosage of the steroide component in Symbicort increased.
I have asthma and what you can do is have a humidifier, exercise, eat healthy, and use your inhaler when you have an asthma attack. Don't be around smokers. I hate having asthma too.
You have SARS.