Question:
new NIH study sez many of us can take steroids only as needed ?
Answer:
[I read this and then thought I must have missed something. So I read
it again. I remember 12 years ago, thinking I could just stop taking my
inhaled corticosteroid and I'd be okay...and nearly died. No doctor has
ever said I had a "severe" form of asthma; all I know is that ever
since I started taking inhaled corticosteroids I've been able to have a
"normal life" of exercizing, not waking up two or three times a night
to take a shot of albuterol...I now sometimes go 3 or 4 months w/o ever
taking a single puff of albuterol!..What worries me a little here is
that there seems to be a semantic problem: how precise and uniform are
the terms "moderate" and "more severe" when it comes to asthma
diagnoses? I fear some of my brothers and sisters who wd do better
staying on inhaled corticosteroids will try to go off them, with very
unhappy results...And yes, maybe I do have a "more severe" asthmatic
syndrome and just haven't come to terms with it. Maybe. And how can one
dose on inhaled corticosteroids "intermittently"? Don't you need a few
days for them to kick in? And if they're working, shouldn't they be
tapered off? Maybe I'm just not "up" on the latest asthma
meds...Pulmicort has been a miracle drug for me, and I've always taken
it at half the recommended dose.-michael] The recommendations are based on decent evidence and they
are still the best advice according to what we know.
Granted, there ares till some large holes in uour knopwledge
base. I would say that the best data available caused inhaled
steroids to be recommended even for many mild asthmatics but
now there is some doubt about whether a subset of very mild
persistant asthmatics really need them all the time.
