For most of human healthcare, we assumed that our symptoms were the problem. 

We have moved past that now to a large extent. For example: we know that the virus is the problem, not the green snot. Mucus is just a byproduct of essential immune function.

Prior to the microscope, we naturally assumed the redness and swelling of an infection was ‘the problem’. But since microscopes, we know our swelling is the body’s vital inflammatory response and the actual problem was an invasion of hostile microbes. Through this deepening of scientific understanding, we’ve moved past ‘symptom blaming’. Somewhat. Because we still very much do it with pain.

Many modern non-infectious health conditions are hard to quantify in the way we have been able to quantify infectious diseases. There is no ‘blood test’ or scan for migraines, fibromyalgia, neck pain, epilepsy, dementia, asthma, lower back pain, IBS, eczema, and virtually all chronic pains. 

Faced with all this uncertainty, Western medicine tends to revert to ‘symptom blaming’ in order to diagnose and account for these modern disorders. Asthma is an excellent example of this. And understanding the truth about asthma offers a window into a better understanding of pain as a symptom.

Asthma is ‘constriction of the airways in the bronchi’. The constriction is caused by smooth muscle spasms. A smooth muscle spasm is a symptom. So when the family doctor says asthma is the diagnosis, they might as well be diagnosing their patient with ‘sneeze’. 

If you search ‘asthma causes’ in the Google sphere, you’ll note that 99% of what you read is about triggers. Because the awkward truth is that asthma’s real causes are scarcely known to medical science. Sometimes it’s possible to blame smoking, yet most smokers don’t have asthma. 

So as it stands, asthma is a set of symptoms. 

The average family doctor may or may not truly believe asthma is a real diagnosis. But respiratory medicine professors don’t, I can assure you. They think of asthma as a largely mysterious cluster of symptoms. 

The Asthma Predictive Index (API) offers a few tiny clues to asthma’s true causes. According to the index, having a parent with asthma, other allergies, eczema and elevated white blood cell counts are all predictors of asthma. This loosely points to genetics and immune system dysfunction. 

Another clue to what asthma might actually be can be found in the pages of the ‘Journal Of The European Respiratory Society’. They published a literature review in 2015 that concluded the following…