I didn’t care about inhalers because I knew they were for asthma but I didn’t know they worked for dry cough too. How do they work?
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Are you asking about how the inhaler itself actually works (like how it delivers the medicine), or the medication’s mechanism of action?
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Okay so the inhaler like is pressurized similar to a air freshener can. You press it and it releases the medication in an aerosol. Like millions of tiny droplets.
Now the design of the inhaler pulls air from on top of the inhaler. In through the mouth piece. So you squish the inhaler as you take a breath and you bring the aerosol into your lungs. Where it starts to work.
I am not a doctor but use an inhaler due to asthma so I’ll try my best to explain it as I understand it.
So your lungs are basically like roads that get smaller and smaller as you go deeper. These are airways and they lead to avioli.not pasta but thin membranes that oxygen can get to your blood and exchange the oxygen for carbon dioxide which is basically cell poop.
Now when you have Asthma your airways can become inflamed and this causes them to squish making it harder to get air to the avioli. This inflammation also make mucus much harder for your body to get out of your lungs. Mucus is normally good as it helps keep your lungs safe.
What Ventolin or sabutamol does is help the air ways to become not inflamed and swollen and return to normal which helps mucus go out and air go in.
Ventolin is a fast acting medicine it’s like the emergency crew for your lungs helping when you’re in danger. Where as other inhalers like flovent or symbicorte are like maintenance crews for your airways and help to keep it from becoming inflamed in the first place.
For a dry cough your lungs can be a bit inflamed and swollen when you get sick and it’s trapping bacteria and mucus. So you get prescribed a blue inhaler(Ventolin) to help with that when you’re having a dry coughing fit. This helps get the mucus and bacteria out of your lungs.
The medication in the puffers relaxes and therefore helps ‘open up’ parts of your lungs. Particularly the parts associated with improving your ability exhale air.
This is important, because the body relies on large open airways to create the exhalation force to clear things like pollen or dust etc. by coughing.
Without the puffer opening up the airways, these sorts of pollutants get trapped and eventually start to become inflamed. This in turn causes irritation and the triggers the body to respond by doing one of the only things it knows how to do – coughing again (despite how useless and worsening it may be).
an inhaler is just a device to deliver medication to your lungs. mechanically, it works the same way hairspray does.
inhalers are associated with asthmatics because asthma is treated with “bronchodilators”. medications that open up the little tubes in your lungs. these medications can also help non asthmatics who may have bronchospasms (the tubes tense up kinda randomly) caused by some illness.
but many medications can be put into inhalers. the other common one is steroids, which are used to treat inflammation. this can be the result of illness, allergies, etc.
The medicines Ventolin out Sulbutamol are bronchodilators. Think of how your pupils dilate. These medicines open up your constricted bronchial passages and let your breathe without constriction or wheezing.
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