Your Family Doctor- Asthma (Understanding Asthma, Avoiding Allergies, Proper Use of Inhalers)

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Over the years, a group of environmentalists have been crying hoarse over the degradation of our planet's environment. No wonder the cases of respiratory disorders are on the increase. This small work explains the concepts of allergy and bronchial asthma in concise. This would be handy for asthmatics and their well-wishers.

You can do a thing quite well by yourself but you can do it a lot better with help from others. My acknowledgements to Dr Dietrich Nolte, M.D. whose book, Speaking of Asthma encouraged me to write about asthma. My gratitude to Dr O.P. Jaggi for his inspiring book, Asthma and Allergies.

The term 'asthma' is about 2,500-years old, though the disease itself must be as old as the human race itself. When man started recording events, then his health and disease-related issues came to be understood. The great Greek doctor, Hippocrates, studied this disease which caused coughing, wheezing and breathlessness. He also noted episodes of acute breathlessness and periods when there was no difficulty in breathing. He named this disease as 'asthma'. Asthma today is described as a disease which shows reversible obstruction of the chest passages accompanied by attacks of breathlessness and followed by periods which are symptom-free.

This disease knows no geographical or racial barriers or boundaries. There could be differences in rates of incidence but it has a worldwide distribution, so much so that native races and tribes living in deep forests with almost no contact with the developed world, are also known to suffer from it. Thus, it is neither a new disease nor a disease inflicted upon humans because of urbanisation or industrialisation.