Comments and/or your experience with copd and drinking coffee

You are not supposed to snort the coffee

I miss the good ole days with my morning coffee and a fag.

Sadly those days are long gone. I think the caffine in strong coffees might not be such a good thing but what did your doctor say?

I'm late to this discussion, came to it while googling "what makes my copd lungs sound like a coffee percolator?" I'm in Texas, which if course means that many of my meds aren't available across the pond/northern border, & vice versa.

Many lung meds in USA cause heart palpitations &/or atrial fibrillations. The newer combivent does this to me where the older system didn't. Duoneb also, and some but not all rescue inhalers, i.e., plain albuterol. Prednisone also causes me the same problem but with many other worse side effects, so no matter how bad my respiratory problems are, I can't turn to steroids (often solumedrol in U.S.). For some reason, i can inhale steroids and apply them to my itchy skin but can not have them in shot and pill form. I can't use combivent & albuterol as much as I'm supposed to and try to get by just on advair. Can't use spiriva due to muscle side effects.

So, many American lung treatments can be stimulants. This is definitely the case for theofilin/theodur. With some of the other meds, it may be that when they combine with systems like mine, the result is a stimulant. My body turns many prescription & OTC "downers" into speed analogs, so things that make others drowsy send me climbing the walls. My reaction isn't rare but seems to be more common in women & seniors ... And who has traditionally been excluded from stateside drug trials?

Coffee is also a stimulant and can cause palpitations and exacerbate atrial fibrillations in people who aren't using any U.S. lung meds. Because my heart rate has gotten stuck at 188-220 beats/minute on several occasions, i have an electrophysiologist who insists that folks with active afib stop caffeine. For me, that means stopping coffee/tea for 6-12 months whenever my heart decides to go wonky. Not a big deal for me as at most i drink 2 or 3 cups of caffeinated hot stuff per week.

So when we consume caffeine and American lung meds, we consume 2 stimulants. Causing the heart to beat a whole lot faster isn't good for the lungs, especially if the heart gets stuck at really high rates when it becomes almost impossible to breathe. I have learned to guage my heart rate just by the sensations in my body so i can tell when i need to stop all caffeine and start doing certain exercises to slow my heart. Not everyone -- my ex for example -- can learn to sense increases in their heart rates. Not all electrophysiologists tell their clients to lay off caffeine. I take a very cynical view of such electrophysiologists, but maybe they figure there's no point in talking about caffeine to, say, my ex since he won't stop consuming fatty foods and other bad things.

The Mayo Clinic is absolutely the best medical care in the U.S. 2d is Johns Hopkins in Baltimore; Columbia and Harvard come next. I imagine but don't know that they work mostly with U.S.-approved drugs or drugs that are in U.S. drug trials. If so, that means that they are referring to all these stateside meds which can act as stimulants in m@ny but nit all users. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Canadian/European manufacturers have figured out how to treat lungs without sending the heart into afib, but no one wants me to hop onto my soapbox about all the idiocies of the Federal Drug Administration.

As to ads that pop up on the Mayo med info site, this is the U.S.! Med care costs a fortune and nobody pays to access the site. Mayo probably pays someone to manage the site, allowing them to pop whatever legal ads they can get. That's how things are done here. If enough people complained, Mayo might force their webmasters to drop certain ads, but the site might shut down.

Caffeine does also dilate respiratory passages. I have terrible sinus problems & that's where i notice improved breathing, literally through the nasal passages. Back in the '50s one of my aunts had pleurisy. Her doctor told her that when she woke up with breathing problems at 3 a.m., she shoukd drink black coffee. For the rest of her life , she took a thermis of coffee to bed with her. She luved 30 more yrs., going back to sleep after a cup or two of coffee.

People's reactions to stimulants are not the same. Look at ritalin: it is a stimulant, pure and simple. But for kids with ADD, it acts to calm them down. When Mayo Clinic says caaffeune may cause a problem for people on copd drugs, they mean it depends on the individual's reactiona to both the.drugs and the coffee. I know families here in the States who have successfully treated their kids' ADD with a cup of black coffee in the mirning and after lunch. It just depends on the person.

6-8 cups of water daily is a guideline which depends in part on body size but also upon how much wet food & other drinks are consumed daily. Caffeinated and alcoholic drinks don't count since they're diuretic. But if you have 3 cups of water plus 1 or two herbal teas, a glass of milk (cow or plant) alone or on cereal, some fruit & veg, you're pribably fine. Yogurt, kefir, tofu all add a lot of liquid, ditto hot cereals. But if you're like me, between Sjogren's and beginning to show bad effect on liver and kidneys from decades of Rx and OTC meds, nothing less than 6 glasses of water or herbal teas daily keeps me out of trouble. It's just a guideline. My docs would like me at 7 or 8 cups of luquid plus whatever wet foods, but ... If i get up to go to the bathroom at night i may not get back to sleep despite my sleeping pill. Two weeks of that and I'm in treatment for clinical sleep deprivation again, so 6 cups daily it is.

Anybody got a treatment for longwindedness?