Over the years asthma treatments have changed and evolved.

Back in the day would you believe that smoking was actually encouraged as a treatment for asthma? Now we know a lot better! And who remembers the spinhaler, the diskhaler and spacers the size of rugby balls?

One person I was speaking to recently recalls his experience with the now discontinued devices:

“You had to slide the white part out completely and load with the disc then set it to ‘1’ (don’t know why as you could easily see which were punctured and which weren’t) then slide it back in and work your way round the disc and repeat. I remember them being annoying because when you set the disc to one out of the blue housing then loaded it back in to the blue part it would automatically spin the disc so then you had to keep working the lift action to get it back round, but if you happened to lift it slightly too much it would puncture the top of the foil and break the seal. So that one was useless then, as to use the powder you had to do a full lift and puncture right through top and bottom of the little holding bubble as the powder fell into the bottom and then you could inhaler. I had heaps of discs lying around with punctured tops but not used, then I’d get bored and for the heck of it I’d pop the bubbles on the top with my finger.”

Nowadays we have the accuhaler and the tubuhaler and a whole host of other devices. Which ones do you remember?