WHY ARE MORE PEOPLE GETTING ASTHMA?
By Dr. Lon Jones, D.O.

Asthma is one of the most common illnesses in the world, and the number of sufferers grows continually. Asthma sufferers have trouble breathing and wheeze when they breathe because their immune system triggers the airway to shut down. Modern medicine eliminates this inflammation and allows people with asthma to live fairly normal lives. Medical researchers are excellent at studying how things in the body work and creating drugs to help with those functions. What is examined here is why the immune system makes it so difficult for the body to breathe and why it can cause even cause death.

First of all, let's keep in mind that the immune system is a friend and not an enemy. If it is our friend then it must be protecting us from something it considers dangerous when it causes the bronchial constriction we call an asthma attack.

The coroners office in Miami did a study on people who were observed drowning. I guess that means that they were too far away to save. At least they weren't killed somewhere else and dumped in the water, which was the point of this study. Some people who drown have dry lungs. Previously it was thought these people were killed elsewhere, but the Miami study showed otherwise. The question to consider here is what caused their death. The doctors concluded that water in the nose and throat caused such a spasm of the muscles in the throat and airway that these people could not breath. While they did not make the connection I believe that's what asthma is. These people died of a severe asthma attack. Our immune system sensing pollution in the nose that would be more dangerous in the lungs, just like the water, is perfectly capable of shutting down a polluted stream. 

Fortunately most of the triggers for asthma are not the deadly threats our immune system thinks they are. Of the major triggers most are allergens, viruses, or bacterial infections. One of the more popular explanations for why asthmatics react so to these irritants is what is called the hygiene hypothesis. Noting that children raised in a farm environment are less likely to have allergies and asthma doctors think that giving the developing immune system something really bad to deal with when it is young allows it to be more discriminating and not react so violently to less serious allergens when it is older.

Some of the triggers, however, are serious.  RSV, a virus that attacks some infants, is known to lead to asthma. If infants get RSV pneumonia they often wind up in the hospital. Such infections are triggers for asthma.  These triggers all act in the nose. When a person has an asthma attack, the immune system senses a problem in the nose and tries to keep it out of the lungs. The immune system is protecting us by closing off the airway to the lungs.

Sometimes the immune system is misguided in what it does. The use of chemicals in the industrialized world has presented many new irritants that the immune system has not cataloged. It doesn't know if these chemicals are really dangerous. Over the past ten years, doctors have looked at the number of cases of asthma in many European countries. They discovered that there was a higher rate of asthma among the more "westernized" nations. While I am certain that chemicals in our environment play a part, I believe there must be more to it. Albania, for example, a non-western European country with high levels of pollution, has a very low incidence of asthma.

What Albania doesn't have is the money to invest in western drugs, like antihistamines and decongestants -or, cold medicine. As stated in other articles, these cold medications block the immune system's attempt to wash out the irritants. This results in the irritants remaining in the body longer and the immune system working harder to raise its defenses. When Albanians get sick they let their immune system handle the problem without heavy medication. This hypothesis of over-medication has been studied, but it also seems like common sense.

Remember that the immune system is your friend. In my practice there are many people who are no longer bothered by asthma when they regularly aid their immune system by cleansing the nose of both bacteria and irritants. They do so by using a spray consisting of xylitol and saline. When the triggers that provoke asthma are regularly washed out they're not there to cause problems.