Chronic-Bronchitis Books

Reviewed by Mary Durfor for RebeccasReads (8/08)


This book, "The Comfort of Home for Chronic Lung Disease - A Guide for Caregivers" is part of a series of excellent caregiving guides for providing supportive care to family members or others who are experiencing chronic diseases and living in a home environment. The book is divided into three major parts: Getting Ready, Day by Day and Additional Resources. Part One: Getting Ready first provides a discussion of the actual diseases that make up Chronic Lung Disease. The authors provide a comprehensive description of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, both characterized by shortness of breath, and excessive coughing. Interstitial Lung Disease is characterized also by a dry cough and shortness of breath. Non-Tuberculosis Mycobacterial Disease (NTM) is not contagious, but is a chronic infection of the lungs that causes coughing (possibly bloody) and lack of appetite and stamina. A great list of resources is at the end of the chapter. The common treatments for lung disease are described, with medications, oxygen therapy, rehabilitation programs, and tips for preventing complications and for relieving stress. Surgical options are explored and more resources are presented. There is a candid discussion of the appropriateness and ability of the lung patient to live at home, with helpful checklists for deciding if the reader has the characteristics of an ideal caregiver, and for ruling in or out facility placement. Additional related resources are listed.

The healthcare team is explained very well, and a helpful checklist of symptoms to report to the physician is outlined. A complete checklist of coming home from the hospital must-do's are given, and even more resources are listed. A good and thorough overview of the different types of home care agencies and the various ways of getting outside home care paid for and of paying for it privately is provided as well. A well-informed list of the process to follow before selecting a home care agency, an explanation of the steps to follow and the employment rules if you hire someone yourself, and some excellent resources and books to guide these choices is provided. Preparations for end-of-life care are discussed as well as a thorough review of the entire myriad of equipment and medical supplies that might be needed to provide competent care at home, with additional listing of resources provided.










Part Two: Day by Day is another section that addresses the actual nitty-gritty of providing care to someone at home. A sample care plan is provided, which can be adapted for use with any patient, with a medication schedule to follow, emergency information which should be recorded, and a really good explanation of how to keep these forms updated to ensure excellent care with minimal disruptions. An excellent guide for minimizing caregiver burnout, stress, and depression is outlined, with an exhaustive list of resources and publications that would be helpful to the caregiver. A hands-on guide for assisting with all the normal activities of daily living (bathing, grooming, feeding, etc.) and a description of all the possible types of rehab therapists that might be involved in care is given. Some compensation techniques to encourage continued intimacy, tips for traveling with a disabled person, a nutritional assessment, a very good and basic discussion of dietary needs and ways to meet those needs, a review of exercise as part of chronic lung disease, and the use of some complementary therapies (yoga, tai chi, massage) are all presented for consideration. There is a thorough review of possible emergencies and appropriate responses. The final part of the book is full of common medical abbreviations, common healthcare specialists and what they do, a comprehensive listing of caregiver support organizations, and a glossary of terms the caregiver is likely to encounter on this journey.

As a veteran of the home care industry, with thirty-plus years experience as a home care nurse myself, I would definitely recommend this book (and all the books in "The Comfort of Home" series) as wonderful guides for all who find themselves in the role of caregiver for a chronically ill person. The authors provide accurate medical information, but maybe even more important, they talk about the actual nuts and bolts of providing care with examples to guide the reader in the process. The checklists are very helpful, and the resource listings at the end of each chapter and in the final part of the book are exhaustive and bring it all together in one place so the reader can easily obtain information on any subject needed.

Comfort of Home for Chronic Lung Disease is a great resource. Large type makes it easy to read.Long lists of web sites and other resources. This book is a must for the beginning caregiver and a valuable referance for all others. I,m my wifes caregiver for over five years and have learned alot from this book and it resources.

Check page 242. In some cases this page is page 342 of the index. You can call them and download this page.

The Comfort of Home for Chronic Lung Disease: A Guide for Caregivers (Comfort of Home, The)
This is the best source for understanding the effects and realities of lung disease for both the patient and the caregiver I have ever read. It is an awesome addition to the Comfort of Home series. We have a copy and have sent three to dear friends. Highly recommended.


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This is a really good book, i bought this for my sister who was diagnosed with copd. Very easy to read and to understand. I read the entire book also so i could better understand the disease. Would recommend this to anyone who is suffering from copd or who has a loved one who is suffering. Nikki stewart

THANK YOU!!! THANK YOU!!! THANK YOU!!!

To all who contributed to this fine book, my undying gratitude!

When first diagnosed with COPD, all I wanted to do was research, research, research! The more I read, the more frustrated I became - that is until I located Courage and Information. This book is so down-to-earth! And it is filled with prospectives of not only a physician (with no medical "jargon"), a psychiatrist (without all the normal "stuff") and...can you believe it?...A PATIENT. How unusual to find a book written, at least in part, from the patient's prospective. What a great idea! Like I said earlier, just good, practical, common-sense information.

Even my pulmonologist agrees that it is the best resource material he has seen! And as far as I'm concerned, that's the best recommendation of all!

It really WILL help me to live a better, more fulfilling life. It will help you too. But you've got to read it first. You'll be glad you did.

I KNOW I AM.

If you or someone you love has been given the diagnosis of COPD, you may be asking, What now? Is there anything that can be done? Is there hope? The answer is, Yes! Life can be good with COPD and this book is a most valuable resource for the COPD patient, caregiver, and health care professional.

As a respiratory therapist working in Pulmonary Rehab I see that patients who learn about their disease and how to cope with the changes it brings live healthier, happier lives. They know that education, exercise, and support as well as a positive attitude are so important.

Courage and Information for Life with COPD is not only your map to learning, among other things, about finding a great specialist, taking breathing medications, using supplemental oxygen if needed, and finding help and support in your community. It is the story of a lady who has experienced the devastation of the diagnosis and not only lives, but thrives with COPD! Jo-Von Tucker's search for knowledge has helped her to move from the role of patient / victim to that of person / survivor. You must know that you do not have to face COPD alone! When reading Courage and Information you will surely say, That's me. Jo-Von's been through some of the same things that I'm going through.

There are so many things you can do to help yourself. Changed as it may be, you can live a rich and full life, even with COPD. Courage and Information willl help you find the way.

this book has made it possible for me to understand my illness and be able to undestand what is happening to my body and to be able to care for myself in a more energy efficient way.tina dorsey

My Dad has emphysema and I got him this book, which of course, being the hard head he is, he refused to read it. My Mom, however, read it through and through and it just so happens it saved my Dad's life on more than one occasions. If you have any kind of COPD problem this is a great book to learn how to cope. Don't be like my Dad and wait for someone to do it for you. Life short...this book may help you to make it much longer and much easier to deal with if you are suffering with this disease or you know or love someone who is. My Dad just had his 73rd birthday. He is on oxygen 24/7. He play golf everyday. Before this book...he was a couch potato. My hearts and prayers are with all of you out there dealing with this. I hope this book helps you like it has helped my family.

I writing this review with the thought that I owe the authors a BIG thank you and it's my hope to do a little payback for their huge contribution to the health of my Father. Ten plus years ago, my father was diagnosed with severe Emphysema which was causing heart failure. The Doctor's managed to get his heart out of fibulation by putting him on an oxygen tank. They said he would always have to be on oxygen. My father did the breathing excercises in this book and was off the oxygen with in a few months and went on to live a much better life for the next 10 years. He always attributed his health to me for buying him this book. He amazed his doctors. He bought this book for other patients Doctors told him they wouldn't read and follow the excercises. I don't know if they did or not. At any rate I'm now purchasing this for my Father-in-law whom has just had a quadrople bypass yesterday and it was found that he has severe empysema. So, hopefully I can pursade him to follow in my Dad's foot steps and take charge of his healing by doing the breathing excercises in this book religiously!

Having finally realized early in 2007 that I had COPD after two years of misdiagnoses, I started working my way through both the popularly written and medical literature in an effort to understand what was happening. This is, hands down, the single best book for a newbie to COPD. It lucidly and accurately covers the important medical data on the set of conditions (bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma) that together constitute COPD. There are other books worth having, but this is the one to start with. One does want to get the second edition, since quite a bit was learned about COPD in the decade between the two editions, for example, about the signficance, use, availability of, and third-party payment for, oxygen therapy for COPD patients.

An earlier reviewer has trashed the book as depressing and a downer for people with COPD. His review so attacked the book that it almost discouraged me from buying it. I probably would have skipped it, had I not been dedicated to buying just about everything that seemed as though it might be even remotely useful. I'm glad that I didn't follow his advice, for that's not how I read the book. Instead, I found it empowering. Understanding the disease (or more properly, diseases) and knowing exactly how each works strikes me as the sine qua non for adopting coping strategies. Many of the medical books I've gotten cover the same territory as the Haases in -- as one would expect - a much more thorough and technical manner. But none present the information so readably. In essence the Haases have distilled and abstracted most of the important information to be found in the more recondite medical texts.

One can employ numerous strategies to palliate the symptoms, to retard the disease's degenerative progression, to improve how one fells, most likely to extend one's lifetime, and -- unless one is at the most severe end of the disease -- to achieve a considerably improved quality of life. The (admittedly rather grisly) illustration of a "pink puffer" and a "blue bloater," which so distressed the disgruntled reviewer, let me know that I had the type of COPD in which bronchitis predominated (i.e., I'm a "blue bloater" but without the cyanosis, thank goodness). Useful to know (and subsequently confirmed by my physician), since the long-term course of bronchitis and emphysema are different. Puffers and bloaters also need to adopt different diets: the former (with emphysema dominant) lose weight, while bloaters tend to be overweight. The one needs to eat to gain wait, the other to lose weight. It may depress Disgruntled, but I found this useful to know -- and learned it all from the Haases.

The book has myriad useful tips. Many of these can be found elsewhere, but here they are all together in one handbook. To cite just a few: the importance and utility: of breathing exercises; of (for some patients) pulmonary rehabilitation therapy, which dislodges mucous from the bronchii so that it can be expelled; of diet (emphasize anti-oxidants like fruits & vegetables); of the right meds; of natural pharmacological agents that over a long term tend benignly to influence lung functioning (such as megadoses of Vitamins A, C, and E, a discussion of which probably is not in the first edition, since most of the studies have been done after 1990); of the counterintuitive importance of exercise for patients who sometimes feel so fatigued that they can't get out of bed; of the organizations, newsletters, and support groups for COPD that exist; of the importance for many patients of using oxygen 24/7 (statistically it extends the lifetime of moderately to severely afflicted COPD patients by a year and a half: a good guess, though, is that oxygen therapy + diet + exercise + meds + not smoking again, ever, + avoiding situations likely to cause bronchial infections and irritation = the strong likelihood of a significantly longer and productive lifetime).

One will, then, learn from the Haas's book not only that one will probably die from the disease but also the many things that one can do before then to improve one's breathing and one's quality of life. So far as dying goes, I might add that I personally found it quite comforting to learn that my hitherto fantasied end of dying while gasping for breath -- is a fantasy. Most COPD patients will lapse into an irrecoverable coma when they reach the point where their lungs can't put enough oxygen into their blood stream even to maintain consciousness. Which is to say that we usually die painlessly in our sleep.

Which brings me to my last point, which neither the Haases nor anyone other than a handful of people working in the field discuss much, though one sees it often mentioned en passant: COPD can hinder one's ability to think. By diminishing the blood supply (and thus the quantity of oxygen) available for the frontal lobes to use, it can drastically reduce one's ability to think abstractly, to problem-solve. It also interferes with one's psychomotor skills (e.g., hand-eye coordination), but for most COPD patients that probably matters less. Pretty useful to know that you're not necessarily getting more stupid by the day, but instead that your brain is suffering from hypoxia (oxygen deprivation). Interestingly, the disease does not affect one's memory or language skills in the same way, which definitely suggests that the primary oxygen deficit is in the frontal lobes. [See Sean B. Rourke, Julie D. Rippeth, and Igor Grant "Neuropsychiatric Aspects of Hypoxemia and the Treatment Effects of Long-Term Oxygen Therapy" in Walter J. Odonohue, ed., Long-Term Oxygen Therapy: Scientific Basis and Clinical Application. Informa Healthcare, 1995 - available through Amazon.] This also means that dextro-methamphetamine (such as Adderall) can be useful for counteracting the diminished cognitive functioning by dint of increasing blood flow (and thus the quantity of oxygen) to the frontal lobes. So far as I have been able to ascertain, there is no experimental literature on this, despite the obvious logic of the hypothesis. Thus, not the Haases, nor the authors of the paper I cited, nor anyone else that I have read even suggests as a wild hypothesis that moderate doses of d-methamphetamine might provide considerable relief for cognitive disturbances in COPD patients, especially those with bronchitis dominant, since d-meth automatically also works as an appetite suppressant. For that very reason, however, it might be dangerous for emphysema-dominant COPD patients, since they already tend to be underweight and suffering from malnutrition. So how might a bronchitis-dominant COPD patient get Adderall or a generic for it prescribed? One way would be also to get diagnosed for adult attention deficit disorder, the symptoms of which closely resemble those caused by frontal lobe hypoxia in adults.

One needs to know the kinds of things I've discussed when one talks to one's physician, so that together you can plan a feasible strategy for stabilizing the disease. The damage already done can't be reversed, but there is much one can do to slow the disease's progression to a crawl. One can't count on the docs knowing everything. The COPD patient her- or himself needs to know as much as possible about the disease. For the physicians, even pulmonologists, your disease is one of many that they need to treat. For you it is -- or should be -- the main thing you need to know about. So buy the Haas's book and start acquiring the necessary information.

This handbook is a Godsend. Every website I went to gave mostly explanations of what COPD is. Those of us who suffer with COPD usually know what it is. This book is like a "COPD For Dummy's". It gives information on an enormous amount of topics in plain lay English. I can't thank the authors enough for this important tool.

I absolutely found this book repugnant. The illustractions are frightening and grim. In fact Figure 3.1 a wicked line drawing of a "pink puffer and a blue bloater" looks like a dark ages depiction of hell. Everyone with COPD knows we are going to die and that we are going to die younger than our cohorts. At fifty-five and having been diagnosed at forty, this book temporarily robbed me of any hope to lead an even worthwhile life. This was all compounded by the once again grotesque illustrations by Kenneth Axen. Far better and more hopeful is the "Courage" book that offers a story of hope, dignity, and the ability to cope. As a licensed psychotherapist I actually think the "Handbook" could be psychologically damaging to some patients. Since depression and anxiety go hand in hand with COPD, the "in your face" approach to this book is best to be avoided

This book started the Self-Management approach to chronic illness. I trained in the Self-Management program and have led groups for years, and have seen people make wonderful changes. This experience and knowledge inspired me to write my book, The Art of Getting Well.

Drs Lorig, Holman, Sobel and the other authors lay out all you need to know to develop your programs of exercise, relaxation, emotional support, and healthy eating. They also teach how to deal successfully with medical systems and treatments.

The book stresses living the best possible life, not just following medical orders or watching everything you eat. It's an excellent complement to my book, which will provide some inspiration to attempt the behavior changes that "Living a Healthy Life" explains so well.

This book, written in a very simple, "self-help" style, seems to be geared to the senior citizen suffering from chronic illness and emphasizes developing and implementing management plans for exercise, diet, and medical care. While much of it is common sense, it does offer bulleted, structured outlines for communicating with medical professionals, managing medicines, planning for the future (and possibly greater physical degeneration), and most of all acknowledges the feelings and depression that often accompany chronic illness.

This book does an excellent job of presenting how chronic illness patients are overwhelmed and how they can aggressively
confront the debilitating cycle and successfully manage the lifestyles they must lead. Everyone with a chronic illness is forced to live differently than all others, no matter their age.
The book analyzes and describes the depleting cycle that anyone with a chronic, dibilitating illness encounters, and offers proven solutions on how to break the debilitating cycle and progress outward inspite of the illness.

sir i have'nt readd your book.i am an undergraduate student.could you please help me how to read your book.please mail me abot it,i will be highly obliged.thank u

This "CD-Rom" is not a real program. It's only an advertisement for the VHS video program by the same name. Look for the VHS instead.