Optimising Asthma Care

Abstract

The dawn of the new millennium held much promise for medicine – especially for chronic disorders such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus and asthma. Major clinical trials had been published, new therapies developed and the unraveling of pathogenetic mechanisms had opened our minds to a molecular network tantamount to a medical revolution. The next quantum leap that doctors had to make was to embrace this knowledge and transform medical practice: instead of having patients managed sub-optimally such that they remained diseased but rather to optimise treatment to render them “normal"? - through near complete cessation of the pathological processes such that patients are completely asymptomatic and occult target organ damage nullified. This quantum step was not taken.
Why? The chronic disorders mentioned above have one thing in common- they're largely invisible. When, you observe a patient, you can't “see"? these diseases. Because of this, they're treated inadequately and patients remain symptomatic with impairment of lifestyle and on-going disease progression.


South African Family Practice Vol. 49 (5) 2007: pp. 3