As one of the authors of the Australian Asthma Handbook who better than Professor Adam Jaffe to make things a little clearer for us.
It can be hard enough to agree with a universal definition of what asthma actually is. All too often patients present to the emergency department with a diagnosis of ‘so-called’ asthma only for it to turn out to be something very different. There is power in a name. It also leads to presumption and bias on the part of the clinician and the parent. In a PubMed search one group found 122 papers and 60 different definitions of what it is. Even parents and doctors can’t even agree on what a wheeze is!
