Asthma is a chronic disease that affects the airways of the lungs. The airways are the tubes that carry air in and out of your lungs and if you have asthma, the inside walls of your airways can be inflamed (swollen) and very sensitive. The airways tend to react strongly to things that are irritating to your body as well as things that you are allergic to. When the airways react, they get narrower, and less air flows through into your lung tissue. This causes symptoms like wheezing (a whistling sound when you breathe), coughing, chest tightness, and trouble breathing, especially at night and in the early morning.
From a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) perspective, TCM practitioners do not focus on treating the symptoms of diseases such as asthma, but rather, they work to promote healthy detoxification while restoring balance and harmony within the body and key organs. They try and achieve this goal by encouraging healthy lifestyle changes like supporting a person’s body with diet modifications, herbal supplementation & stress reduction. In TCM, the goal is to provide maximum health support so that the body may better heal itself and maintain optimum health.*
