Getting diagnosed with COPD can seem overwhelming, especially when it catches you by surprise. It's often even more overwhelming to get used to all the new treatments, medications and lifestyle changes required to keep your lungs healthy, especially while you're still trying to come to terms with your diagnosis.

As a chronic disease, COPD requires constant work and careful decision-making to keep the symptoms under control. Because of this, it's no surprise that new COPD patients make a variety of mistakes that can affect their health and well-being.

Between making changes to your diet, exercise routine, medications, and many other activities of daily life, there are a lot of opportunities for error. As you adjust to life with COPD, it's important to avoid making mistakes that could serious consequences for your health, or at least catch and correct them early on.

COPD affects more than 11 million people in the US, both men and women alike. However, there are some noticeable differences between how men and women are affected by the disease.

For example, in recent years, significantly more women than men have been diagnosed with COPD. Men and women can also have different COPD symptoms, and gender can even affect how quickly the disease progresses and gets worse.

Other differences show up in the doctor's office, when doctors give different care to men and women with early symptoms of the disease. This results in many women having to wait longer to get tested and diagnosed for COPD.

Pulmonary nodules—or spots on the lung—are the source of a great deal of worry and stress for the thousands of people who are diagnosed with them every year. Despite the fact that pulmonary nodules are relatively common, the majority of people don't really understand what they are or how they work.

Many people's first thought is that pulmonary nodules are cancer—but this is not always true. In reality, most pulmonary nodules are harmless, and only a very small percentage of them turn out to be cancerous.

If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with lung spots, then you might be worried and you might have a lot of questions. In this guide, we hope to answer these questions and give you all the information you need to better understand pulmonary nodules and the level of risk they pose.

ResMed is one of the top names in respiratory medical equipment. They specialize in portable oxygen concentrators and sleep apnea devices. In fact, the last portable oxygen concentrator they released, the LifeChoice Activox 4L, has been one of the most popular units on the market for the past few years. 

Influenza—also known as the flu—is one of the most common and deadly viruses that spreads throughout the US every year. With the peak of the flu season beginning in January and continuing through March, now is the time to get your flu vaccine if you haven't done so already.

Experts recommend that every person over 6 months old get the flu shot every year, but it is especially important for older adults and people with serious health conditions. This applies particularly to people with chronic respiratory diseases like COPD, who have a much higher risk of experiencing life-threatening complications if they get exposed to the flu.

Because COPD is a breathing disorder, most of the symptoms of the disease are caused by not being able to get enough oxygen when you breathe. However, there is another, equally serious breathing problem that COPD patients face, which is not exhaling enough carbon dioxide (CO2) when they breathe—known as CO2 retention.

Whether you've been recently diagnosed with COPD or have been living with the condition for years, you are bound to have lots of questions. These might include questions about your health, your disease, your medications, your treatment options, and more.

As these questions come up over the course of your COPD treatment, your doctor will be your primary source for answers. But in order to get the right answers and the information you need, you first have to know what questions to ask.

Communication between doctors and patients should never be one-way; it's just as important for you to communicate with your doctor as it is for him to explain information to you. In order to get the best treatment possible, you need to keep track of all your questions, articulate your concerns, and remember to bring them up with your doctor when you have the chance.

Exercise is absolutely vital for healthy living, especially if you have COPD or another respiratory disease. But when you're hooked up to your oxygen tank or concentrator, it can make working out and doing other physical activities a little bit more tricky.

Fortunately, exercising with oxygen isn't too difficult if you know how to do it right. In fact, the extra oxygen you get should make it easier to exercise by improving your endurance and making it easier to breathe. 

In this article, we're going to give you a variety of tips and techniques to help you better manage exercise while you're using supplemental oxygen. That way, you can continue living an active, healthy life without letting your disease or your oxygen therapy get in the way.

One of the things that makes COPD so dangerous is the fact that it makes your body more vulnerable to disease. It not only makes you more likely to get sick, but it makes it harder to recover from illnesses, too.

If you are like most people with COPD, then you probably use an inhaler every day. Inhaled medications like bronchodilators and steroids are some of the most important and effective medications for COPD—that is, as long as you use them correctly.

Unfortunately, studies show that many, if not most, people do not actually use their inhaler correctly. This is a huge problem for all patients who use inhalers, but especially for people with COPD.

Inhaler medications for COPD not only help you feel better, but they help stave off infections, flare-ups, and dangerous exacerbations that can make your disease worse. If you are not using your inhaler correctly, then you don't get the full dose of the medication you need to keep your symptoms under control.