Asthma can be a severe disease if left untreated; however, with treatment the symptoms can be controlled, or in some cases eliminated. This requires a partnership between patient and physician, with the patient letting the physician know what is going on and being well-educated on asthma.
When I look at asthma, I am looking at your symptoms and how often they occur, what times of the day (or especially night) the symptoms occur, what triggers them, how often the short-acting inhaler was needed, and whether there were any instances where the symptoms were so severe avisit to the Emergency Room or similar was required.
It helps us to have logs of these. In patients with moderate or severe asthma, it is also useful to have some hard and fast data to show impairment in breathing. This data can be obtained with a “Peak flow meter”. The patient breathes out as hard as he or she can (obtaining the peak expiratory flow rate) when healthy, so that there is something to compare it to when symptoms worsen.
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Your physician can “step up” or “step down” the medication regimen depending on how you are doing. I encourage all of my patients to be active participants in their care: you are in my office such a short amount of time compared to the amount of time you spend outside of there!