66 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Two Gifted Scientists write a Compassionate Treatise, October 23, 2000
This review is from: The Chronic Bronchitis and Emphysema Handbook (Paperback)
In July, 2000, my MD pointed to my chest XRay and said: "There's your Emphysema." So I needed to learn more about this total surprise: I went to Amazon, and the 1990 Edition of this book was available, and I bought it, and placed a pre-order for this Updated Edition. The 1990 Edition is superb: it gave me a quick Cook's Tour into my own terra incognita. This Revised Edition builds on the 1990's firm foundation, and adds the break-thru's of the last five years: LVRS [Lung Volume Reduction Surgery] and herbal therapy as two specific examples. And the changes in health insurance practices means that COPD [chronic bronchitis and emphysema] patients must now fend for themselves in obtaining quality and quantity treatment. And this book gives the tools to do just that.
"COPD can be an exhausting and overwhelming burden to live with. Patients [and their caregivers] who continually fear running out of air, who watch their capacities dwindle prematurely, struggle with a heightened sense of their fragility. They and those close to them are usually frightened, depressed and angry. Doctors treating COPD patients do the best they know how to do. The problem is that so many were taught only to treat the medical aspects of COPD--and many [doctors] have never learned since to appreciate the importance of rehabilitating their patients. . . . Restoration to a happier, healthier lifestyle should be the goal of any tratment program -- and it is certainly [the aim of this book] in educating you."
This revised edition is the best there is for the trained, scholarly, and lay patient audiences: it is the terra firma when one is innundated with the contrary and steroid fueled anecdotal opinions one encounters in certain EST-like effort-less support groups on the Internet.
This "Chronic Bronchitis and Emphysema Handbook helps COPD patients and their families achieve the kind of realistic perspective about their disease that allows them to live confidently and reasonably calmly with it, and so remove needless limitations from their lives. . ."
With this book, I learned to breathe easily and breathe well.AMDG
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Book on COPD for Lay People, June 22, 2007
This review is from: The Chronic Bronchitis and Emphysema Handbook (Paperback)
Having finally realized early in 2007 that I had COPD after two years of misdiagnoses, I started working my way through both the popularly written and medical literature in an effort to understand what was happening. This is, hands down, the single best book for a newbie to COPD. It lucidly and accurately covers the important medical data on the set of conditions (bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma) that together constitute COPD. There are other books worth having, but this is the one to start with. One does want to get the second edition, since quite a bit was learned about COPD in the decade between the two editions, for example, about the signficance, use, availability of, and third-party payment for, oxygen therapy for COPD patients.
An earlier reviewer has trashed the book as depressing and a downer for people with COPD. His review so attacked the book that it almost discouraged me from buying it. I probably would have skipped it, had I not been dedicated to buying just about everything that seemed as though it might be even remotely useful. I'm glad that I didn't follow his advice, for that's not how I read the book. Instead, I found it empowering. Understanding the disease (or more properly, diseases) and knowing exactly how each works strikes me as the sine qua non for adopting coping strategies. Many of the medical books I've gotten cover the same territory as the Haases in -- as one would expect - a much more thorough and technical manner. But none present the information so readably. In essence the Haases have distilled and abstracted most of the important information to be found in the more recondite medical texts.
One can employ numerous strategies to palliate the symptoms, to retard the disease's degenerative progression, to improve how one feels, most likely to extend one's lifetime, and -- unless one is at the most severe end of the disease -- to achieve a considerably improved quality of life. The (admittedly rather grisly) illustration of a "pink puffer" and a "blue bloater," which so distressed the disgruntled reviewer, let me know that I had the type of COPD in which bronchitis predominated (i.e., I'm a "blue bloater" but without the cyanosis, thank goodness). Useful to know (and subsequently confirmed by my physician), since the long-term course of bronchitis and emphysema are different. Puffers and bloaters also need to adopt different diets: the former (with emphysema dominant) lose weight, while bloaters tend to be overweight. The one needs to eat to gain wait, the other to lose weight. It may depress Disgruntled, but I found this useful to know -- and learned it all from the Haases.
The book has myriad useful tips. Many of these can be found elsewhere, but here they are all together in one handbook. To cite just a few: the importance and utility: of breathing exercises; of pulmonary rehabilitation therapy, which conditions one's muscles to require less oxygen; of techniques for dislodging mucous from the bronchii so that it can be expelled; of diet (emphasize anti-oxidants like fruits & vegetables, especially the fruits); of the right meds; of natural pharmacological agents that over a long term tend benignly to influence lung functioning (such as megadoses of Vitamins A, C, and E, a discussion of which probably is not in the first edition, since most of the studies have been done after 1990) and powerful nonprescription meds like Quercetin and N-acetyl-cysteine, antioxidants and anti-inflammatories that, especially if taken together with Bromelain and Vitamin C eliminate many free oxygen radicals in the lungs and respiratory tissue; of the counterintuitive importance of exercise for patients who sometimes feel so fatigued that they can't get out of bed; of the organizations, newsletters, and support groups for COPD that exist; of the importance for many patients of using oxygen 24/7 (statistically it extends the lifetime of moderately to severely afflicted COPD patients by a year and a half: a good guess, though, is that oxygen therapy + diet + exercise + meds + not smoking again, ever, + avoiding situations likely to cause bronchial infections and irritation = the strong likelihood of a significantly longer and productive lifetime).
One will, then, learn from the Haas's book not only that one will probably die from the disease but also the many things that one can do before then to improve one's breathing and one's quality of life. So far as dying goes, I might add that I personally found it quite comforting to learn that my hitherto fantasied end of dying while gasping for breath -- is a fantasy. Most COPD patients will lapse into an irrecoverable coma when they reach the point where their lungs can't put enough oxygen into their blood stream even to maintain consciousness. Which is to say that we usually die painlessly in our sleep.
Which brings me to my last point, which neither the Haases nor anyone other than a handful of people working in the field discuss much, though one sees it often mentioned en passant: COPD can hinder one's ability to think. By diminishing the quantity of oxygen available for the frontal lobes to use, it can drastically reduce one's ability to think abstractly, to problem-solve. It also interferes with one's psychomotor skills (e.g., hand-eye coordination), but for most COPD patients that probably matters less. Pretty useful to know that you're not necessarily getting more stupid by the day, but instead that your brain is suffering from hypoxia (oxygen deprivation). Interestingly, the disease does not affect one's memory or language skills in the same way, which definitely suggests that the primary oxygen deficit is in the frontal lobes. [See Sean B. Rourke, Julie D. Rippeth, and Igor Grant "Neuropsychiatric Aspects of Hypoxemia and the Treatment Effects of Long-Term Oxygen Therapy" in Walter J. Odonohue, ed., Long-Term Oxygen Therapy: Scientific Basis and Clinical Application. Informa Healthcare, 1995 - available through Amazon.] This also means that dextro-methamphetamine (such as Adderall) can be useful for counteracting the diminished cognitive functioning by dint of increasing blood flow (and thus the quantity of oxygen) to the frontal lobes. So far as I have been able to ascertain, there is no experimental literature on this, despite the obvious logic of the hypothesis. Thus, not the Haases, nor the authors of the paper I cited, nor anyone else that I have read even suggests as a wild hypothesis that moderate doses of d-methamphetamine (10-30mg range, depending on the patient) might provide considerable relief for cognitive disturbances in COPD patients, especially those with bronchitis dominant, since d-meth automatically also works as an appetite suppressant. For that very reason, however, it might be dangerous for emphysema-dominant COPD patients, since they already tend to be underweight and suffering from malnutrition. So how might a bronchitis-dominant COPD patient get Adderall or a generic for it prescribed? One way would be also to get diagnosed for adult attention deficit disorder, the symptoms of which closely resemble those caused by frontal lobe hypoxia in adults.
One needs to know the kinds of things I've discussed when one talks to one's physician, so that together you can plan a feasible strategy for stabilizing the disease. The damage already done can't be reversed, but there is much one can do to slow the disease's progression to a crawl. One can't count on the docs knowing everything. The COPD patient her- or himself needs to know as much as possible about the disease. For the physicians, even pulmonologists, your disease is one of many that they need to treat. For you it is -- or should be -- the main thing you need to know about. So buy the Haas's book and start acquiring the necessary information. [Review slightly revised & updated 12/02/2009. So far as I know, though I haven't been scouting the lay literature recently, the book by the Haases remains the best book for lay people.]
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