Tracking The Performance Of Your Asthma Treatment Plan
Having asthma can be quite a difficult condition to live with, but as long as you are willing to put in the time and effort you should find ways to live a pretty normal life with your condition. The key is sticking with it and finding a way to determine when you are making progress or taking a step back. If you want to learn about what it takes to accurately track your treatment you should read the article the follows below.
Keep a daily asthma diary. In your diary you will want to summarize your day. Include the activities that you participated in and their affect on your asthma. You should also note anything that was out of the ordinary, such as an asthma attack while not doing anything at all. Take note of anything that you think may be of interest to you at a later date, even if it seems rather insignificant at the time. Try to be as specific as possible, noting times and even the weather conditions throughout the day. Having all of this information at hand in the future may lead you to your specific asthma triggers, which, if known, can be avoided in the future to help reduce the symptoms of your condition.
Create a chart that monitors your treatment plan. List all of your medications, the time that you take them and leave a space to mark when you take them on time. If you did not take them on time make a note of that, as it can explain an incident that you might have later on or an incident that occurred shortly after you were supposed to take them. If any of your medications or times are changed, make a new chart but also save your old one. You can use this information to compare the performance of medications and different time schedules. You may find that a new plan is worse than an old one, which will give you hard evidence to show your doctor in case you decide that you would rather go back to an old plan.
Keep a separate diary detailing any life changes that you are making. For instance, if you have pledged to keep your living space allergen free you can journal the specific changes you have made in conjunction with any symptom changes that you have noticed. This will allow you to see how these changes have affected you and will likely inspire you to keep up on them so that you can live as symptom free as you possibly can be.
Asthma is a serious condition, no matter how minor your condition may seem to be. It is important to do whatever it is that you can do to limit your risk of attacks, and this can be easy to do if you properly track your progress along the way. Now that you have read the article above, however, you have the tools you need to learn the most you can about your condition and what does or does not work to treat it.
