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Poverty doesn't cause asthma, but... |
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I believe that poverty DOES cause the inability to pay for decent housing that doesn't have poor ventilation, along with the inability to provide adequate treatment for the asthma, due to the high costs of the medications.
My son has had asthma since he was a few months old. My husband and I were, at that time, in a low-income bracket, and relied on Medicaid, Food stamps, and WIC just to survive while my husband worked for $7.00 an hour at a retail salesman. We could not figure out why it showed up so suddenly, and so fiercely (requiring around 3-4 breathing treatments a day with albuterol). After his first bout with pneumonia landed him in the hospital, we started researching the causes of asthma, and how best to treat it. We quickly realized that there were certain things that set us apart from other, more well-off families. The first was the environmental consequences of living in poor conditions. We lived in a trailer that should have been condemned, but we had no money, so we were stuck. there was little to no insulation, and as we found out later, the previous residents had been smoking cigarettes, marijuana, and even meth in there. We moved right after that. To test our theory that the trailer caused a lot of the asthma, we stayed with my grandparents, who are better off financially than us and can afford to buy expensive air purifiers and such and are clean freaks (nary a speck of dust in the house) for only 3 days. By the 3rd morning, his asthma attacks completely resolved.
The other thing that set us apart from the "rich" kids with asthma is the lack of medication choices. It made me angry when I found out that Xopenex, a newer, more pure form of albuterol that has less side-effects, was not covered under medicaid. Also, medicaid would only cover 3 prescriptions a month, which meant that, after my son's allergy prescription, as well as the singulair for the asthma, when he would get yet another ear infection or bronchitis, we had to pay out-of-pocket. |
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Svodak |
7 months, 4 days, 9 hours, 11 minutes ago |
Personal Story |
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All Votes: 3 |
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