Category: Health

With this year’s entry into the flu season early, we’re already well into the yearly spike in hospitalizations for kids with breathing problems. Reflecting on a friend’s recent experience and our learning curve with our ten-year-old’s asthma, I thought it might be useful for parents who don’t think that their kids have asthma to educate themselves. If you have a child under five, I hope this helps you be alert to the possibility that your child will have breathing problems sometime during this flu and cold season.

What is asthma?

Asthma is when the air pathways from the lungs seize up due to a trigger: an allergen, exercise, or an infection. Asthma looks like the person is having trouble breathing in – it’s actually the case that the air has trouble going out. Asthma comes in many flavors, from an occasional bout with wheezing to a dangerous, persistent problem that follows the person through life. Some children outgrow asthma; others continue to have breathing problems as adults.

People with asthma may or may not have audible wheezing. They may or may not cough as a result of it. As in all things, each person’s body reacts slightly differently.

Recognizing asthma

Our son had a couple of bouts of wheezing when he was little before we recognized it for what it was. My husband had severe childhood asthma, but it just didn’t cross our mind that our healthy little boy had it. Then we ended up in the emergency room and spent the night in the hospital. That was enough to get us educated.

If your small child’s cold or flu always descends into a cough, pay special attention to her breathing. Here are some simple diagnostic techniques:

• Watch your child breathe without a shirt on. The little indentation at the bottom of the neck, where the collarbone comes together, should not suck in visibly when the child is breathing. If it does, this is one possible indication of breathing problems.
• Similarly, look at the spot at the top of the stomach where the ribcage comes together. If this spot sucks in visibly during normal breathing, take note.
• Take note if your child is panting after normal exercise or gasping while talking.
• Have your child take a big breath and blow out hard. Pretend that they’re blowing you over – this always goes over well with little kids. A kid whose lungs are seizing up will probably cough when blowing out hard.
• Listen with the naked ear to your child’s chest. If you can hear noise, call the doctor.
• Buy a cheap stethoscope. Ask your doctor or nurse to show you where to listen. Wheezing sounds like popping, creaking, or sighing noises in the lungs.
• Always call the doctor if you think your child is wheezing, no matter what.

Treating asthma

Asthma is serious: over 4000 Americans die of its complications every year. When we brought our son to the emergency room, we checked in behind a man whose daughter was holding a bloody cloth to her head. She had fallen, lost consciousness, then thrown up upon waking. Who did they take in first? My son.

When a child is wheezing, it needs to be treated immediately. These treatments are therapeutic and stop the wheezing. The medicine is used to stop the reaction immediately so that air can enter the lungs.

Other asthma treatments are preventative. One therapy is to remove the triggers from the environment. When our son was small, we found out about a free asthma home visit program through the state. A wonderful consultant came and helped us set up the best environment for our son’s health. It was great, though at the time the program was being cut and I don’t know if it exists anymore.

The medication that has changed my son’s life is an inhaled steroid that helps his lungs from reacting in the first place. He takes a dose so small that it doesn’t even register on the longterm side effects chart, and it keeps him out of the hospital. I know that parents have reservations about steroids, but these drugs are well documented and are far less risky than rushing to the hospital in the middle of the night. It also changes your child’s life from a child who is sickly to a child that is well most of the time.

Who gets asthma?

When you were a child, asthmatic kids were probably those kids with other illnesses, especially severe allergies, who looked sick. These days, asthma continues to grow due to a large variety of factors. You can’t tell a child with asthma by looking at him. Even if both parents never had asthma, your child could have breathing problems. It’s worth watching and asking your doctor if you have any suspicions at all. It wasn’t until my friend’s daughter was hospitalized that she realized that her daughter had been showing symptoms. In the everyday busy life of a parent, these small indications might easily get overlooked until the situation is dangerous.

Resources

• WebMD
• Asthma and Allergy Foundation

A friend sent me a link to a blog that had a good refutation of some of the major anti-vaccination arguments. In reading it, more ideas occurred to me about how people make health decisions based on misunderstandings of the scientific data.

So far on this subject I wrote about argumentation techniques, and how many of the unscientific arguments I read are based on fallacies. I also wrote about the scientific method, and why it can handle mistakes and new data when philosophies based on tradition or faith rather than method can’t.

The blog entry that my friend sent me is here, and is worth reading if you want to read more about the specific arguments that he makes concerning a particular anti-vaccine flyer he was responding to.

But I think that the bigger ideas he brings up are more interesting. He points out a few ways that people who haven’t studied science and medicine make mistakes, and why those mistakes might not readily be clear to someone else who doesn’t have a scientific background. I think the information below is well worth considering in how you make your decisions about your child’s (and your own) healthcare. If you are comfortable believing things as a matter of faith, then that’s the only answer you need. But if you truly believe that you want to make the best decisions based on the available information, perhaps this might help.

1. Similarly named chemical compounds are not necessarily similar

We are used to thinking that things with similar-sounding names are actually similar in their characteristics. So we know that Grape Nuts and Grape Nuts Flakes are two cereals that have some similarities. We know that no creator of a poisonous substance would give it the name Grape Nuts Powder, because that would be misleading, right?

In chemical names, however, very different things can have very similar names. Carbon dioxide is a gas that is in the air we breathe in, and we breathe it out in greater quantities. We can sit and breathe in a closed room with no problem. Carbon monoxide sounds similar, but is not at all, when it comes to human tolerance of it. A very small amount of carbon monoxide in a closed room will kill you.

Common misunderstanding: The “mercury” found as a preservative in vaccines. This is ethyl-mercury, and it is present in very small concentrations in vaccines designed to be given to multiple recipients. The mercury that we hear about as a toxin in our foods, specifically some seafoods, is methyl-mercury, and it enters your body through your digestive tract. The two are not comparable — though they have similar names, they are as different as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

2. The same compound will have different effects depending on how it enters your body

A tiny amount of iron oxide (rust) in your food won’t hurt you. A tiny amount of iron oxide entering your bloodstream when you step on a rusty nail will kill you. Water is necessary to life when you drink it. When you inhale it, it can kill you. It’s clear that how you take a substance into your body makes a huge difference.

Common misunderstanding: See the mercury discussion above. Just because eating a substance in large concentrations in our food can be bad for you doesn’t mean that its presence in an injection is bad for you. There’s no relationship between the two (and in the case of “mercury,” it’s actually two different substances).

3. Something that’s good for you at one amount can kill you at another

Here’s a short list of things that we take into our body every day that are good for us, but could easily kill us if we eat it in enormous quantities: water, broccoli, peanut butter, wine… The list could get very, very long. Many of the things we eat have small amounts of toxins in them. Our bodies deal with that. But too much of anything can kill you. Take the well-publicized deaths of college students who drank gallons of water during hazing. Water, the stuff of life, is toxic in large amounts.

It’s true that many medications, household products, and tools of our everyday lives do have toxic elements to them. You can probably find something toxic about almost everything having to do with modern life. But is that a reason to reject it? And does that mean modern life is more dangerous than a pre-industrial life? Definitely not: Just look at our life expectancy vs. 200 years ago to see that the small amounts of toxic chemicals we get are a much better alternative to,  for example, entire villages being killed off by a viral infection. If they’d had vaccines in 1918, would it have been rational to say, “Well, I don’t know about that mercury in the vaccine, so I’m just going to let half of my family die a horrible, agonizing death instead”? The answer is obvious.

Common misunderstanding: The presence of a toxin in a food will always negatively affect human health. It’s much, much more complicated than that.

4. Natural is better than artificial

In many ways this is true, so this is a subtle one to catch. It is definitely true that research is finding that some artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives are more likely to cause behavioral problems in children. It is true that eating a piece of fruit without pesticide residue on it is healthier. But past that, there’s no proof that the natural version of something is better just because it wasn’t formulated out of its distinct chemical parts. It’s dangerous to assume that a chemical made through natural processes is safe whereas the same chemical made by combining other chemicals is not.

It’s instructive to remember many of the natural toxins in our environment: arsenic, lead, mercury. Also, the number of very natural plants and organisms that can kill us: mushrooms, venoms, etc. This is a good page that explains natural toxicity of certain substances. When I was looking for a soy sauce for our family that doesn’t contain the preservative sodium benzoate, which is suspected of causing behavioral problems in children, I found “all natural” Bragg’s Liquid Amino Acids, which tastes a lot like soy sauce. Note that on their page, they say that their product contains “no chemicals,” which is a ridiculous assertion. Cooking is all about chemicals and how they interact.

What they meant to say is that the chemicals released during the process they use were not cooked up together in a laboratory. What they didn’t say is that the result of the chemical processes they use is monosodium glutamate. The initials for that are MSG — in other words, the active ingredient in Bragg’s is the same stuff you find in Asian grocery stores as a white powder. Now, I will point out that no one really knows whether MSG has any effects that are worse than the sodium that we use more commonly, table salt. But food scientist Marion Nestle points out that “the research on MSG is so inconsistent that I can’t make head or tail of it,” and in any case, using Bragg’s is probably no different than sprinkling your food with the powdery stuff. You might know that it comes from fermented soybeans, but your body doesn’t care!

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The cool thing about the scientific method is that all the questions that were raised above can be answered someday. Making blind assumptions like “things that are similar will behave similarly in my body” and “natural is better” don’t lead us anywhere. Always questioning and searching does, in fact, lead us somewhere. To date, it has led us to the longest, healthiest lives that humans have ever lived. It has also led us to quandaries like choosing between small amounts of toxins and other health risks.

But if we continue to question and to demand the analysis of all possible alternatives, we’ll be better off than resting on any idea as a matter of faith.