Inhalers are best to cure asthma: Experts

MUMBAI: What do you do when a puppet called Guppidas, who seems peskier than Pinochio, gets an asthmatic attack? You should give him his pills, right? “Wrong,’’ says Mumbai-based puppeteer and ventroloquist Ramdas Padhye. “Give him an inhaler instead. That’s the cornerstone of successful asthma management today.’’
Padhye should know. He and his colourful three-foothigh Guppidas feature in a pioneering film released on May 6 to mark World Asthma Day at a function outside CST railway station.
The film features the travails of Guppidas, who, despite choking and wheezing like a bagful of mosquitoes, refuses inhaler therapy because of prejudice and misconceptions.
However, with the help of loquacious characters called Changu and Mangu, Padhye manages to persuade Guppidas to change during the course of the seven-and-half-minute film, which was commissioned by the Asthma and Bronchitis Association of India (ABAI) to spread vital health messages.
“Mumbai alone has 12 lakh asthmatics,’’ says ABAI honorary secretary Pramod Niphadkar. “The rest of Maharashtra is estimated to have an asthmatic population exceeding one crore, 60 per cent of which is in the age bracket below 40 years and in the most productive phase of life. What is more poignant, many of them suffer needlessly because asthma today is easily treatable.
Advances like inhalation therapy enable relief-causing medicines mixed with preventive compounds to reach the lungs directly without causing any significant sideeffects.’’
Experts say modern inhalers are so efficacious that they scarcely leave a trace of the medicines in the patient’s blood sample because of the microgram quantities employed in the inhaler.
However, the majority of Indian patients, especially women, are reluctant to adopt superior forms of therapy because of outmoded attitudes and fears and fallacies.
“Women asthmatics especially find it hard to get bridegrooms because of the many taboos and stigma attached to asthma, which is nothing but hyper-reactive airways triggered by a number of factors and allergens,’’ says S.R. Kamat, a retired professor of thoracic medicine from K.E.M. Hospital.