Flexible spending accounts (or FSA's) are a great tool to save money on healthcare, especially if you or someone in your family suffers from a chronic medical condition. If you use oxygen therapy, a flexible spending account can be a smart way to cover special equipment and out-of-pocket costs.
Palliative care is a type of treatment designed specifically to provide comfort and support to people with serious chronic diseases. Unfortunately, despite the many benefits it can offer COPD patients, palliative care is extremely under-utilized by people with COPD.
Mask-wearing is uncomfortable for just about everyone, but people with COPD and other breathing disorders have more reason than most to complain. Having a serious respiratory disease can legitimately make breathing through a face mask more difficult, even though face coverings are not actually dangerous for people with COPD (as most doctors agree).
If you've spent much time at all reading about COPD online, you've probably come across articles and advertisements for “natural” therapies and alternative treatments for COPD. These include things like vitamin supplements, lung detox cleanses, and unconventional medical treatments (like stem cell therapy) that claim to relieve COPD symptoms, regenerate lung function, or even cure chronic lung disease.
For many people, it's difficult to imagine a world before modern medicine, even though such a world existed in the not-so-distant past. Even diseases like COPD, which we now know to be very common, were barely understood just a few generations ago.
For people with COPD, life is often filled with uncertainty: uncertainty about health, uncertainty about the future, and uncertainty about how bad your symptoms will be on a given day. That's why it's especially important for people with COPD have a safe, familiar place to retreat to when they need to get away from the stresses and inconveniences of the outside world.
For many people fighting chronic lung diseases like COPD, the hardest battles are not the physical ones, but the ones that happen inside the mind. Coping with a disease that disrupts your breathing—a basic life function—is far from easy, and it takes a major mental toll on many people with the disease.
It's long been known that COPD and heart disease are related, and that heart disease disproportionately affects people with COPD. Researchers estimate that at least one-third of people with COPD suffer from coronary artery disease (the most common type of heart disease) and millions more suffer from other chronic heart conditions.
One of the most difficult parts of living with COPD is coming to terms with the ways it can change your life and limit your activities. This is especially true for working adults, who often have to make difficult decisions about how to continue working—and if they should continue working—while managing their COPD.
Keeping up with healthy habits is not an easy task; for many, it's a lifelong process—and sometimes a lifelong struggle—to stay on track. If you have a chronic health condition like COPD, it can feel downright overwhelming to shoulder the pressure of having to live a healthy lifestyle while also managing your disease.
